Don Juan syndrome acquires clinical significance through the repetition of the same configuration of object relations. Each new seduction may temporarily restore narcissistic equilibrium, whereas the stability of a relationship may activate conflicts involving dependency, aggression, and Oedipal rivalry. Outwardly similar promiscuous behavior may reflect different psychodynamic processes and varying degrees of severity of personality pathology.

In his book Love Relations: Normality and Pathology (1998), Otto Kernberg, M.D., examines the psychodynamics of Don Juan syndrome and its relationship to pregenital and Oedipal conflicts. He writes:

“The Don Juan syndrome reflects a broad spectrum of male narcissistic pathology. 

At one end, Don Juan might be a man who desperately needs to seduce women and is driven to a sexual relationship that results in frustrating or humiliating the woman of his momentary choice; the seduction is almost consciously, manipulatively aggressive, and abandoning her is a pleasurable relief. 

Or Don Juan's intense compulsive search for new adventures stems from an idealization of women and the wish to find one who will not disappoint him.

At the healthier end of this spectrum, Don Juan has a mixture of narcissistic and infantile traits, a man-child with effeminate qualities who seduces women precisely on the basis that he lacks threatening masculinity. He unconsciously denies the envy of, fear of, and rivalry with the powerful father by asserting that his "little penis" is fully satisfactory to mother (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1984), and his sexual adventures with women gratify the fantasy that he, the little boy, is mother's favorite and all mother needs. 

The male narcissistic personality's defensive idealization of women, expressed in intense if transitory infatuations, often exerts a powerful attraction for women, particularly those who have significant masochistic potential or who are insecure about their attractiveness as women. Narcissistic women may also be attracted by men whose sense of superiority and grandiosity gratifies their own need for narcissistic completion with what we might call a heterosexual twin. The genitality without paternity offered by narcissistic men who unconsciously cannot identify with the protective, concerned, procreative aspects of a paternal identity may be reassuring to narcissistic women for whom parental functions may also represent an important unconscious threat”.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy