How Does a Narcissistic Personality Fall in Love?

In his article Limitations to the Capacity to Love (2011), Otto Kernberg, M.D. notes:

“ In the state of ‘falling in love’, we expect to see a degree of idealization of the other person, an enchantment with the partner’s physical, sexual and personality features, an interest in and respect for the other person’s value systems, and an intense longing for sexual intimacy, emotional closeness, and for a meeting of the minds regarding joint ways to experience the world and relate to it. It is a passionate experience. 

This is in sharp contrast to narcissistic patients’ typical ‘market analysis’ of the pros and cons of potential partners’ attributes, to masochistic patients’ anxious idealization of their love object with the phantasy that rejection would mean a major devaluation of themselves, and to paranoid patients’ fearful attention to not being treated badly or being cheated. 

According to Otto Kernberg, the lack of the capacity to fall in love is a characteristic symptom of severely narcissistic personalities; the incapacity to fall in love is an important diagnostic marker.

Necessarily, the initial idealization of falling in love will shift into the awareness of some shortcomings in the other and in the relationship, of new aspects of their interaction that have to be incorporated into the image of the other, both good and bad. 

The accumulation of gratifying experiences, intense moments of life together that enrich the relationship in the sexual, emotional, and value systems realms, while fostering a deep feeling of gratitude for love received and responded to, generates a sense of personal value and emotional wealth derived from the relationship, and leads to the transforming of falling in love into being in love, that is, a stable love relation. 

The nature of the idealization of the love object shifts throughout time. Again, narcissistic patients, given their difficulties in establishing object relations in depth, often evince a tendency to repeatedly evolving, transient falling in love or ‘infatuations’. They have great difficulty in maintaining a stable love relation. 

The unconscious envy of the sexual partner, defended against by a process of relentless devaluation is a dominant dynamic of these cases”.

For a psychotherapist, exploring this dynamic makes it possible to move beyond the patient’s presenting complaint about difficulties in their love or sexual life and to understand the quality of their object relations, the nature of idealization and devaluation, their capacity to tolerate dependence on the Other, as well as the role of unconscious envy in sexual and love relationships.

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(c) Yuliia Holopiorova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy