“All my relationships end in catastrophe.
It is impossible to find a normal partner.
I will remain alone for the rest of my life...” —

this narrative is familiar to every clinician.

At first glance, it sounds like sincere disappointment.

However, from Otto Kernberg’s perspective, such statements are often a form of chronic enactment of a deep structural conflict. The patient brings into the consulting room not merely a history of failed relationships, but their identity diffusion, splitting, and other manifestations of underlying personality pathology. 

What do we see behind the façade of these words?

According to Otto Kernberg, behind the impossibility of finding an object there often lies an unconscious fear of symbiotic fusion or the threat of destroying the “good internal object” through one’s own unintegrated aggression. The person longs for love, yet on a deeper level experiences intimacy as a territory of humiliation, control, or engulfment.

As a result, each new relationship ceases to become a space for life and instead turns into an arena for the repetition of pathogenic internalized object relations. Through the mechanism of splitting, the partner is no longer perceived as a separate person. Instead, they become a function:

• either an “ideal savior” onto whom the ego ideal is projected;
• or a “persecutory object” meant to confirm the patient’s worst expectations.
• or both may alternate within the same relationship or across a series of relationships. 

All of this reflects an insufficient integration of love and aggression. Where libidinal affect cannot tolerate ambivalence, any frustration coming from the partner instantly activates narcissistic devaluation. Ordinary human imperfection in the other becomes experienced by the patient as proof either of their own “unlovability” or of the world’s absolute hostility.

For Kernberg, mature sexual love is a complex psychic achievement that requires:

• Object constancy: the capacity to perceive the other as whole, integrating both “good” and “bad” aspects.
• Integration of aggression in the service of eroticism: the ability to tolerate conflict and tension without destroying the relationship.
• Mature dependency: the capacity to need another person without losing one’s own identity.

The true tragedy of many of our patients lies not in the absence of a partner, but in the fact that the integration of affects feels to them like too dangerous a price to pay for intimacy.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy