“I am not attracted to my partner” -
at first glance, this may sound like a problem of sexual incompatibility, relationship fatigue, or simply the fading of passion following the stage of initial idealization.
For Otto Kernberg, however, this complaint often points to a much deeper question:
Is a person capable of loving the same partner they desire,
and desiring the same partner they love?
It is precisely around this conflict — between love, sexuality, and aggression — that Kernberg builds his understanding of mature sexual love.
A person may genuinely love their partner, value them, feel close to them, and experience gratitude toward them. At the same time, sexual desire gradually fades or fails to emerge altogether.
Why do love and desire diverge?
According to Kernberg, mature sexual love is one of the most complex achievements of personality development. It requires the capacity to integrate love, sexuality, and aggression within the representation of one and the same person.
A central element of this achievement is object constancy — the ability to perceive one’s partner as a whole person, integrating love and disappointment, closeness and distance, tenderness and aggression.
For many patients, however, such integration proves extraordinarily difficult.
Through the mechanism of splitting, love and sexuality begin to exist separately from one another.
A person may be loved, yet difficult to desire.
Or conversely, sexual attraction may emerge only toward unavailable, cold, dangerous, or emotionally distant partners.Or toward others who are sexually available, yet do not evoke love.
A persistent dissociation develops between tenderness and eroticism.
Libido becomes separated from aggression. A person may experience profound tenderness and gratitude toward the “good object,” while sexual arousal becomes inhibited.
Eroticism is repressed or displaced. Desire emerges only where intimacy poses no threat and where the other person remains unattainable, distant, or emotionally unavailable.Or toward partners who are available, yet clearly incapable of evoking love.
The “good object” then becomes a source of safety, care, and attachment, yet loses its erotic appeal.
Otto Kernberg emphasizes that sexual desire requires an encounter with the Other — a separate and autonomous person who cannot be fully controlled or possessed.
For this reason, sexual attraction may weaken when the partner ceases to be experienced as a separate individual.
For some patients, the partner gradually ceases to be an Other and begins to serve an entirely different function — supporting self-esteem, protecting against loneliness, or compensating for inner emptiness.
In such cases, the partner ceases to be an object of love and desire and instead becomes a means of narcissistic regulation.
Closeness increases, but desire fades.
After all, it is impossible to desire one’s own reflection.
Kernberg also emphasizes that sexuality is impossible without the integration of aggression.
This does not refer to destructiveness, but rather to the capacity to tolerate the separateness of another person — their right to be different, to disagree, to disappoint, and to frustrate.
Sexual desire requires not only closeness but also a certain degree of distance between two separate individuals.
Where separateness is experienced as threatening and aggression cannot be integrated with love, a new form of splitting emerges.
The partner is experienced either as an ideal and safe object or as an object of desire.
But not as both simultaneously.
The problem, therefore, is not merely the loss of desire.
It reflects difficulties in achieving a level of psychic integration that allows one to love, desire, need, and tolerate ambivalence toward the same person at the same time.
Perhaps, then, the real problem is not the loss of desire itself.
Perhaps the most difficult task is the capacity to desire the same partner whom we love, and to love the same partner whom we desire.
(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,
Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy