“I am jealous of my partner, and it is damaging our intimacy...”
Many people are familiar with such experiences, which often become a source of significant difficulties in relationships.
From Otto Kernberg’s perspective, jealousy is a complex psychological phenomenon in which love, aggression, envy, fear of loss, and the underlying organization of personality are intricately intertwined.
Otto Kernberg emphasizes that jealousy is not pathological in and of itself. In its normal form, it arises when a person fears losing the love of an important partner. For this reason, Kernberg views jealousy as a natural expression of libidinal attachment. Such feelings are an inherent part of intimate relationships and reflect the wish to protect the couple’s bond from the intrusion of a third party.
Pathological jealousy, however, has a different nature.
In such cases, suffering arises not only from the risk of losing the partner, but also from the activation of deeper internal conflicts.
Kernberg associates pathological forms of jealousy with elevated levels of aggression, narcissistic vulnerability, fears of abandonment, and difficulties integrating positive and negative aspects of the partner representation.
Otto Kernberg assigns a special role to envy in intimate relationships and couple conflicts, referring to it as “the greatest enemy of love.”
He emphasizes that jealousy and envy are not identical experiences.
Whereas jealousy is rooted in the fear of losing a loved person to a rival, envy is directed toward something valuable that another person possesses and that one perceives as lacking in oneself.
For this reason, jealousy often contains not only the fear of losing love, but also aggression, envy, and unconscious hostility toward the fact that another person may possess something valuable, desirable, or unattainable.
It is therefore not surprising that jealousy is often accompanied by controlling behavior, checking, accusations, or attempts to restrict the partner’s freedom.
Otto Kernberg emphasizes that the ability to tolerate jealousy without destroying trust and intimacy depends largely upon the capacity to integrate love and aggression.
Where a person can tolerate ambivalence, jealousy can be experienced, reflected upon, and discussed.
Where this capacity is impaired, however, jealousy begins to dominate the couple’s entire life. It ceases to be a signal of the importance of the relationship and instead becomes a source of control, suspicion, and the destruction of intimacy.
From Kernberg’s perspective, the crucial question is not only whether a real threat of losing the partner exists.
Equally important is understanding which internal conflicts become activated within the relationship and why they acquire such power.
For Kernberg, the capacity to tolerate the autonomy of another person was also of central importance.
Love requires recognizing that one’s partner is a separate individual with their own desires, feelings, and inner world—one that can never be fully controlled.
It is precisely this impossibility of complete control that often becomes one of the sources of jealousy.
For at times a person suffers not only because of the fear of losing a loved one.
They suffer because of the fear of confronting feelings of abandonment, envy, humiliation, or loneliness that such a loss may awaken.
For this reason, working therapeutically with jealousy involves more than examining what the partner is doing.
Equally important is understanding what is happening within the individual’s own inner world—with their love, aggression, envy, and fear of loss.
(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,
Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy