Promiscuity, sexual inhibition, and instability in men's love relationships require a differentiated psychodynamic understanding. Otto Kernberg, M.D., drawing on the concepts of French psychoanalysts, particularly Braunschweig and Fain, examines how early relationships with the mother, identification with the father, and the resolution of Oedipal conflicts influence the development of adult male sexuality and the capacity to sustain stable love relationships. In his book Internal World and External Reality: Object Relations Theory Applied (1980), he writes:

“ The little boy thus have to pass through various developmental stages as part of their road to identifying with adult genitality. For the boy, the identification with father implies that he has overcome his pregenital envy of women, the projection of this envy in the form of primitive fears of women, and his fears of inadequacy regarding the feminine genitals. 

The French writers quoted consider Don Juan halfway between the inhibition of sexual drive in men toward women who represent the oedipal mother, on the one hand, and the adult identification of a man with father and the paternal penis in an adult sexual relation with a woman, on the other: Don Juan, Braunschweig and Fain suggest, affirms genitality without paternity.

I do not think there is a unitary etiology of the Don Juan syndrome in men. In ways similar to promiscuity in women, the cause of which may range from severely narcissistic character pathology to relatively mild, masochistically or hysterically determined pathology, male promiscuity exists along a continuum. The promiscuous narcissistic personality is a much more severe type of Don Juan than the infantile, dependent, rebellious but effeminate type of Don Juan the French authors described.

I think that the next step toward normal sexual identification with father on the part of boys is the conflict-ridden identification with the primitive, controlling, and sadistic male who represents the fantasied, jealous and restrictive father of the early oedipal period. The final overcoming of the oedipal complex in men is characterized by a man’s identification with a “generous father” who no longer operates by means of repressive laws against the sons. The capacity to enjoy the growth of a son without having to submit him to punishing initiation rites reflecting unconscious envy of him is a landmark of the definite overcoming of oedipal inhibitions in the father. 

The practical implication of these formulations is that one important source of instability of love relations of adult men derives from incomplete identification with the paternal function, with various fixations along these developmental stages”.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy