One of the most challenging issues in clinical practice is the repeated selection of the same types of partners and relationship patterns.

This is particularly evident in cases where a woman repeatedly falls in love with emotionally unavailable men, quickly becomes disappointed once a relationship is reciprocated, or commits herself to men whose power, fame, or exceptional achievements become central not only to their own identity but also to her own.

Otto Kernberg understands such patterns not as mere character traits or accidental life choices, but as one possible manifestation of narcissistic personality organization. In his book Love Relations: Normality and Pathology, he writes:

“ Narcissistic women with some frequency accept a stable relationship with a man whom they consider "the very best," searching in an unconscious heterosexual twinship relation for a compromise solution to unconscious envy of men. 

This may lead to what appears to be a masochistic relationship, in the sense that these women tend to devalue a man as soon as he responds to them; they remain fixated on unavailable men whose very unavailability permits their idealization to remain unchallenged and protects them from being devalued.

Some severely narcissistic women may maintain long-term self-destructive allegiances to extremely narcissistic men whose power, fame, or unusual talents give them the appearance of an ideal male figure. 

Other narcissistic women, socially more successful, may actually identify fully with such idealized men, unconsciously experience themselves as the true inspiration of these men, and may end up running their lives.”

Some narcissistic women combine the search for an ideal man with an equally intense devaluation of their partner, which leads them to gravitate from one famous man to another; others, however, find that to be the power behind the throne gratifies narcissistic needs and compensates for the unconscious envy of men. 

Whereas sexual promiscuity in men is largely of a narcissistic type, sexual promiscuity in women may be of either narcissistic or masochistic origin.

At the same time, Kernberg does not suggest that a woman should be understood simply on the basis of whom she chooses as a partner. The same relationship may have entirely different psychological meanings for different individuals. This is why the psychotherapist is interested not only in whom the patient chooses, but also in the unconscious function that this choice serves: whether it helps maintain self-esteem, avoid intimacy, defend against disappointment, or reenact longstanding internal conflicts.

It is precisely this psychodynamic perspective that allows us to recognize, behind repetitive patterns of romantic relationships, not a series of accidental life events but the underlying logic of personality functioning. For this reason, the analysis of love relationships represents, for Kernberg, one of the most important pathways to understanding narcissistic pathology and its potential for therapeutic change.

(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy