“I Love My Wife. Yet I Am Involved in Other Relationships... ”

Stories like this are not uncommon in clinical practice. On the surface, they may appear to reflect a lack of responsibility, a moral choice, or an inability to end a relationship. From Otto Kernberg’s perspective, however, love triangles and marital infidelity often reflect much deeper intrapsychic conflicts.

Otto Kernberg emphasizes that the capacity to integrate love, sexual desire, and long-term commitment is one of the most important achievements of mature personality development. Difficulties in this area therefore often reflect not only problems within a relationship but also the structure of the individual’s internal world.

In his writings on love relationships, Kernberg repeatedly argues that sexual passion develops not outside the Oedipal conflict but, to a significant extent, through it. Love almost always includes the wish to be chosen over others, competition for the love of the object, and the capacity to tolerate the existence of a third person.

For this reason, triangulation occupies a central place in his understanding of love relationships. According to Kernberg, mature love requires the capacity to tolerate the reality that the loved person has an independent inner world, other attachments, and desires that are not fully under one’s control.

When this capacity is compromised, Oedipal conflicts, narcissistic envy, and unconscious rivalry may become activated. In such circumstances, the love triangle ceases to be an accident and instead becomes a way of organizing relationships.

Kernberg draws particular attention to the fact that chronic infidelity is often rooted not in an excess of love for multiple people but in difficulties integrating love and sexual desire within the same relationship. In such cases, an individual may unconsciously split tenderness and sexuality, intimacy and passion, creating separate relationships through which different aspects of emotional life are expressed.

In Kernberg’s view, narcissistic envy also plays an important role. When a couple is perceived as possessing a special source of gratification, intimacy, or happiness, envy may generate an unconscious wish to disrupt that bond or to occupy the position of the third party. As a result, love triangles are often sustained not only by love but also by aggression, rivalry, and envy.

Kernberg also emphasizes the role of superego pathology in love relationships. Excessively rigid moral prohibitions may inhibit sexuality and spontaneity, whereas an insufficiently integrated superego may contribute to repeated violations of agreements and an inability to take responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions.

According to Otto Kernberg, mature love involves the capacity to experience sexual desire, tenderness, gratitude, aggression, and ambivalence toward the same object simultaneously. It is the integration of love and aggression, rather than their splitting, that forms the foundation of stable and enduring intimate relationships.

‍

(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy