“I lose myself in relationships. When I fall in love, it feels as though I stop being myself...”

Complaints like this are not uncommon in the therapy room.

At first glance, it may seem to be a matter of excessive attachment or dependency on a partner.

From Otto Kernberg’s perspective, however, the issue often lies much deeper — in a person's capacity to maintain their own identity within the context of intimate relationships.

According to Otto Kernberg, mature love allows a person to experience themselves as a separate individual even while engaged in a deeply meaningful emotional relationship.

One can love another person without losing one’s sense of self.

For some individuals, however, intimacy becomes accompanied by a gradual erosion of psychological boundaries.

They become increasingly oriented toward the partner’s needs, moods, expectations, and evaluations.

Their own desires, interests, and goals gradually recede into the background.

Sometimes a person becomes so focused on preserving the relationship that they lose touch with what they themselves want.

Otto Kernberg associated such difficulties with disturbances in identity integration. In his writings, he states:

“The capacity to love another person presupposes a consolidated identity that makes possible the selfless giving of oneself to another without fear of losing oneself.”

In pathological conditions, a person's sense of self may come to be determined by the presence, approval, or acceptance of another person. 

The partner then serves not only as an object of love but also as a source of support for the individual's sense of psychological cohesion.

This is why distance, conflict, or the threat of separation may be experienced as more than the loss of a relationship.

At times, they are experienced as a threat to one’s very sense of self.

In such situations, a person may unconsciously give up their own needs, tolerate what does not truly satisfy them, avoid conflict, or continuously adapt themselves to their partner.

Because the loss of the partner’s presence comes to be experienced as something far more threatening — as the loss of oneself. 

For this reason, therapeutic work in such cases involves more than exploring the relationship itself.

Equally important is the development of an integrated identity and the capacity to maintain a coherent sense of self, one’s own desires, and personal boundaries while remaining deeply emotionally connected to another person. 

After all, for Otto Kernberg, mature love involves discovering the freedom of another person. It is the recognition that the loved object is, at the same time, a body we may long to possess and a mind into which we can never fully enter, and which can never be completely controlled. 

So, mature love is not the fusion of two people into one.It is the capacity to remain oneself while being with the person one loves.

‍

(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy