Love Relations of the Heterosexual Couple

Otto F. Kernberg

In this talk, I want to convey some of the psychoanalytic under-

standing of sexual love—the loving relationship of a couple—that a
number of researchers, clinicians, and theoreticians in various
countries have achieved regarding what keeps a couple together
and what tends to separate them. I've been influenced by my own
study of personality disorders and by my work in recent years in
treating couples in serious conflict, as well as by the psychoanalyt-
ic literature.
The subject is so vast that I have to concentrate on just one
aspect of it. Ill talk about the dynamics of the love relations of the
heterosexual couple. Ill try to highlight what we know by describ-
ing how I would apply this knowledge concretely in dealing with a
couple, hoping that the general theory will emerge from this
description. It's an experiment; I hope it goes well.
I will use the scenario of my sitting in an airport waiting to be
called to board a plane. I have exactly half an hour. As I'm sitting
there I make friends with a young couple. They look as if they are
in their early thirties—for me that's young—and they seem to be
highly educated, professional, nice people who are not in the field of
mental health (and it's a relief to talk with normal people). They ask
me what I do, and I tell them I'm a psychiatrist. They remark, "Oh,
are you going to analyze us?" and I assure them that I don't work
outside my office. They ask what I work on, and I tell them that I'm
working on understanding what goes on between couples. They say,
"Oh, we are a couple; we are planning to get married. Can you tell
us anything that might be of help to us?"
I reply, "I can say nothing that can be of help to you; I don't
know you. Every couple has different problems, if you have any. You
look like very happy people."

29
Otto F. Kernberg

"Well, we love each other," they reply. "We want to marry, but
we are also aware that marriage seems to be disappearing—that
according to one statistic, only 17 percent of couples in love end up
in a permanent relationship. We are frightened by the 50 percent
divorce rate in the United States and by the fact that 80 percent of
those who divorce and remarry again get divorced. So it seems to be
a dangerous enterprise, to get married. In addition, we see less and
less of it. We understand that people live together without getting
married. They have fewer children. The population tends to be
shrinking, particularly in Western Europe."
I tell them I'm impressed by all they know, without being in
the field. To this they say, "In addition, we've heard that there's a lot
of talk about the 'deconstruction' of love, meaning that aspects of a
relationship that traditionally used to be put together—a heterosex-
ual couple in love, who have a sexual relation that is fully satisfac-
tory, and at the same time have children whom they love; that is,
the aspects of love, erotism, and reproduction—are getting
unhooked. The romantic ideal of love punctured by divorce, the iso-
lation of people, the ideology of 'combat' between the sexes, the
questioning of heterosexuality as one style among many others—
these don't speak well of traditional romantic love.
"Regarding erotism and sexual attraction," they continue,
"mechanics and chemistry seem to be invading sexual pleasure. We
have penile implants; vibrators and dolls, to avoid the complexity of
adjustment in sexual intercourse; internet sexuality, to avoid all the
complications of personal relationships. Is erotism in danger? And
then, when it comes to reproduction, of course, first of all we have
preservatives, we have selling of eggs and sperm, borrowing of preg-
nancy carriers, so that there is disassociation between the genetic
relation and the emotional relation, between an ordinary child and
an ordinary couple consisting of father and mother. So it's a little
worrisome. Is it the end of marriage? What do you think, doctor?"
I say, "We have only thirty minutes—you have told me more
than you've asked me! But I have the highest respect for what you
are saying. Let me say, first of all, that I don't know whether we're
seeing a permanent change. Everything you've said is absolutely
correct, but we don't know whether this is permanent or one of the
frequent fluctuations that have occurred historically and that are
motivated by economic, social, religious, and cultural pressures.
These pressures can lead to oscillation between periods of tradition-
al marriage, strict moral codes, and puritanical ideological atti-

30
Love Relations of the Heterosexual Couple

tudes, and periods of disillusion with all of that, periods of official

libertinism. And this also varies by social class; we have some
research on that. So it's hard to pronounce anything, because there
are such frequent movements in this regard. And I believe," I add,
"that there are biological as well as psychological pressures or
trends going in the opposite direction, tending to foster the stabili-
ty of a couple in love—although that seems to run so much against
what is popular nowadays.
"Now, I can't tell you at all what's going to happen with you,
but what I'm going to do in the time that I have left is give you a few
signals about what's going well in your relationship, and what prob-
lems are possible and how you can deal with them. You may have
none of these problems, but if you want me to give you some pre-
ventive treatment, you can have it. Are you ready? Good.
"First, keep watch over your sexual life. Mutually exciting and
gratifying sexual relations are a fundamental component of the
long-term relationship of a couple. Even if you have a good relation
right now, it may all of a sudden not be so good once you are mar-
ried, for psychological reasons, because we all harbor profound
guilt feelings against a satisfactory sexual relationship in a relation
that unconsciously reproduces that of the parents. Many couples
have a great sexual life so long as they are not married; the day they
get married, something happens. They do much better sexually
once they have bad fights, because then they have paid a price, and
sex becomes okay again.
"Try to keep your freedom—freedom from conventionalities.
Find your sexual pleasure. Do the kinkiest thing you're interested
in, and try to learn what turns you on; you may not know. Your
internal freedom in the sexual area will help your relationship. If
you can't achieve this, however, there's help. Today we know how to
diagnose and resolve severe sexual inhibitions. And IH tell you,
there are basically two.
"The most severe is a primary inhibition of sexual excitement
and eroticism because of excessive aggressive experience in the
early months and years of life. We now know that sexual affect, sex-
ual excitement, depends biologically on particular circuits and
structures in the brain. I won't go into details, but there are specif-
ic neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and specific limbic areas that
activate sexual excitement through the hypothalamus; there are
peripheral cells and organs that respond. (Poor Freud didn't know
anything about this and thought libido originated in the periphery

31
Otto F. Kernberg

of the body, but that was because neurobiology was not at this level
in his time.) But sexual affect needs an unconscious, erotic trigger-
ing by Mother in the form of enigmatic messages that transform
sexual excitement. It also needs an erotic disposition that looks for
an erotic object. To this day we don't know exactly what determines
whether this object will be homosexual or heterosexual, although
there are 'culture wars' over this issue. There is very little effective
research going on as yet.
"Anyhow, what I'm telling you," I say to the couple, "is that
the most severe sexual problem is primary inhibition, though you
don't look like you're going to have that. Primary inhibition is asso-
ciated with the most severe personality disorders that we treat, and
you just don't look like that (though I may be wrong—this is not a
consultation). But an important trigger of difficulties is a secondary
inhibition that arises out of unconscious guilt, stemming from an
excess in the infantile prohibition—real or fantasized—that reserves
sex to the parents, and unconsciously makes all sexual behavior
forbidden. Secondary inhibition can be treated psychotherapeuti-
cally, and in some cases psychotherapy can be complemented by
sex therapy. So there is help on the way.
"A second problem is that in sexual behavior, as well as in all
the other complex matters I'm going to mention, there will be not
only love—erotism is not only love—but also the activation of
aggressive affect, not only sexual excitement. We are wired from the
beginning to life to have, under conditions of gratification, intense
dependent and potentially erotic longings. And under conditions of
frustration, we are wired to have intense aggressive feelings, which
have the purpose of getting rid of bad stimuli. 'Getting rid' means,
at the most primitive level, destroying whatever creates pain, and
later on, it means trying to take revenge when somebody causes us
pain by causing pain in return. There's pleasure in revenge. We
tend to become sadistic in this pleasure, taking pleasure in hurting
others. Later on all of this gets toned down, and we just want to
control the Other, which is already a very sophisticated expression
of aggression and leads to the power aspect of relationships. {Aside,
to audience: You have heard these aspects brilliantly exposed, ear-
lier today, by Ethel Person.)
"This aggressive component of sexuality, which also shows in
other things, is both helpful and harmful. It is helpful in the sense
that it gives the special spice to sex. Exhibitionistic, voyeuristic,
fetishistic, masochistic, and sadistic tendencies are absolutely nor-

32
Love Relations of the Heterosexual Couple

mal in early infancy and childhood. Later on they get integrated into
the genital feelings, but they always remain as an important poten-
tial for sexual play, fantasy, and interaction, and for the expression
of all kinds of conflicts around love and aggression and power and
dependency. If you achieve sexual freedom, this means also the
freedom to treat each other as objects.
"Hey," says the man to me, "are you talking about pornogra-
phy? Isn't that the objectifying of women?"
I reply, "Yes, I'm talking about pornography; and 'objectifying
women' is a social ideology that can inhibit your sexual freedom, in
the same way that traditional, orthodox religious prohibitions
against anything except the—how shall I say?—'Sunday-school
position' for having sex can inhibit your sexual freedom. You have
to protect your sexual life. Francesco Alberoni, an Italian sociolo-
gist, has said that the relationship of a couple is a revolution of two.
YouU have to remember that, for the sake of your sexual life.
"But let me go on to other things. The next important matter,
as important as sex, is the nature of your emotional relationship.
That sounds kind of trivial, but it isn't. Your emotional relationship
means the capacity for an intense wish for fusion, for closeness—
the wish both to depend on the Other and for the Other to depend
on you. It means, at the same time, a tolerance for unavoidable
frustrations in the relationship, so that you can get very angry, and
you can get most angry with the person whom you love most. In
other words, all deep emotional relations are ambivalent. Don't
believe that what you have to do is try to get rid of all your fights
and anger and frustrations and only be loving. On the contrary: the
capacity to experience love and hatred toward the same person,
while one has the assurance that love will always dominate, is an
essentially normal condition.
"Ambivalence is normal. An older generation of psychoana-
lysts thought there were 'postambivalent' relations, which was total-
ly silly. We know nowadays that in the development of our psychic
life, very intense loving and hateful relationships tend to build up,
at first, separately. In the first year of life—initially because of bio-
logical reasons, then because of primitive psychological mecha-
nisms that tend to separate very frustrating, aversive, negative, or
bad relations from very positive and loving ones—there's an inde-
pendent buildup of memory structures, particularly in certain
structures of the brain. This is a very important function of the hip-
pocampus, and later on of the frontal preorbital neocortex as well.

33
Otto F. Kernberg

First of all, in very primitive limbic structures—the amygdala, the

hippocampus, the hypothalamus—we build up, separately, repre-
sentations of the other person and of our ourselves interacting with
the other person, within the frame of an extreme positive or nega-
tive affect. Only gradually, throughout the first three years of life, do
we integrate these representations, putting together the bad rela-
tions and the good ones. We realize that we are neither as bad as
we seem in a bad relation nor as ideal as we seem in an ideal rela-
tion, nor is the object of desire as good as it seems in the good rela-
tion or as bad as it seems in the bad relation, but there's good and
bad together. We tolerate an integration of the representations of
self, an integration of the representations of significant others. We
become more realistic, and at the same time we develop the ability
to experience relationships more in depth. The normal relations of
the couple play this out—the expression, in depth, of an awareness
of the Other, of interest for the Other, and of the security that love
can contain the anger, the hatred, the frustration, without going
under.
"Now this doesn't happen simply and harmoniously. It may
happen in different ways. Andre Green, the French psychoanalyst,
has talked about the 'private madness' of couples—couples who,
when they are alone, all of a sudden enter into crazy fights. As soon
as they are in public everything is fine. If people were observing
them in private they'd say, 'These people have gone mad. They are
not their usual selves.' But the private madness is part of that reg-
ulatory integration. The French philosopher Bataille said that we
oscillate between reality-oriented behavior, controlled by day-to-day
reality tasks and reasoning, and moments of intense ecstasies—
ecstasies both in the sense of intense love, sexual excitement, reli-
gious experiences, and also in the sense of intense aggression,
hatred, and self-aggression, which one hopes are controlled by the
intensity of love. But those moments in which we are dominated by
passion give intensity to life. If we live only in those moments we are
lost, because we lose our contact with reality. But if we live only in
reality and eliminate passion, our life is impoverished as well.
"And so I hope," I tell them, "that youll have a very good rela-
tionship, but remember there will be times of fighting, there will be
times of distance, there will be times of separation, and there will be
times of passion when everything goes well. Don't listen to people
who tell you that after a period of time, being in love—romantic pas-
sion—goes away and everything becomes calmed down and a mat-
ter of convenience, because that is a distortion of clinical reality.

34
Love Relations of the Heterosexual Couple

"And this brings me to the next point," I tell them, "which is,
the major interference that may occur with this normal aspect of the
relation. Here we come to the most interesting and most complicat-
ed aspect of the love relation of the couple: the unconscious enact-
ment, in the relationship, of the dominant, unresolved conflicts
from their pasts. Whatever is left as a major unresolved conflict with
their own parents tends to get activated in an intense relationship
that reproduces that of the parents. Both partners tend to activate
these conflicts, and in doing so they use a primitive psychological
mechanism. I have already mentioned to you one primitive mecha-
nism, that of the splitting of idealized relationships from bad, per-
secutory relationships. But there is a second and fundamental
mechanism called projective identification, first described by
Melanie Klein, one of the leading psychoanalysts. It consists of the
activation of an unconscious relationship that's conflictual, induc-
ing unconsciously in the one's partner the role of the person from
the past with whom one had a conflict, and activating in oneself the
role that one had in the past in the conflict with that person. We
activate the past relationship by inducing in the Other that which
was traumatic and problematic for us. We are causing this, but we
attribute it to the Other. We think, 'Oh, it's the Other's problem.'
What we unconsciously induce, we say that he or she caused, and
we react to her or to him in the same way that we reacted in the
past. So the mechanism of projective identification is a combination
of identification of the Other with a part of one's past, and projec-
tion onto that Other of the affective problem that we had with that
person in the past. If both partners do this unconsciously, they
complement their mutual processes, and it starts 'clicking.' All of a
sudden you have a specific conflict of the couple that, on psychoan-
alytic exploration, turns out to be a compromise between that load
from the past that they carry within, and their repetition of it, in an
unconscious effort to resolve it by repeating it. So behind every mar-
ital conflict, behind every couple's conflict, are not only destructive
efforts, but also efforts at repair—a desperate desire that the con-
flict be solved. And that's important for treatment."
I ask the couple, "Are you still with me?"
They reply, "It's a little complicated. We would raise ques-
tions, but as you have to leave in twenty minutes, just go on."
"Okay," I say, "111 go on." They look a little unhappy, and I
don't know—had I been going too far? But I continue. "What I'm
going to say next I'm sure you have read, because every magazine

35
Otto F. Kernberg

talks about Oedipal conflict. It's either considered a basic reality of

the human being, or one of these idiotic, old-fashioned assumptions
that only the Freudians believe, and that has long been proved
wrong—at least as we read about it in the middlebrow press." I
explain, "There is veiy good and convincing evidence that old-fash-
ioned Oedipal conflicts really are quite basic in the human being,
and that there are two kinds of conflicts that are central and preva-
lent, although there are many others. The first arise from the early
stages of development, the first three years of life, and have to do
with profound frustration in the relationship between infant and
caregiver, usually infant and mother; they have to do with profound
difficulties in establishing the normal perception of self and Other
because of distortion of the affective developments in that relation-
ship. We call these pre-Oedipal conflicts—a not-quite-correct name,
because such conflicts go on throughout life, and what we call
Oedipal conflict does not occur later but starts very, very early,
probably already in the first year of life. But the traditional term is
pre-Oedipal conflicts, for those occurring around dependency,
around affect integration, and now mainly studied in normal and
pathological attachment.
"What I'm going to tell you, in one word," I continue, "is that
the affect dispositions that I mentioned—good feeling or bad feeling;
euphoria, happiness, or anger, rage, resentment, irritation—at first
are overwhelming to the baby. But the mother—in understanding
those affects and reflecting them back to the baby, while at the
same time signaling that she doesn't share them completely, but
she understands them—helps the baby put a cognitive frame to the
affects and reduce their impact, particularly the impact of negative
affects. This decreases aggressive affects and facilitates integration.
If Mother is not able to do this—if there is pathological attach-
ment—then this function cannot be carried out, negative affects hit
the ceiling, and sometimes there may be terrible mistreatment of
the child—physical abuse, sexual abuse, the witnessing of chronic
physical or sexual abuse. But other times, even without abuse, just
because of the difficulty in metabolizing affect, there is such a pre-
dominance of negative affect that there's a lack of integration of pos-
itive and negative; and then, problems around dependency become
central.
"One frequent secondary defense against such problems
around dependency is a massive denial of all dependency, an ideal-
ization of the self, an attitude as if the only thing the person needs

36
Love Relations of the Heterosexual Couple

is admiration from others, and the rest, to hell with them. We call
this pathological narcissism. Pathological narcissism is a major
plague that affects love relations, because individuals who suffer it
cariy with them an intensive form of unresolved aggression that
takes particularly the form of envy. They experience envy because
at bottom they hate the person whom they need most, which is
Mother; they hate what they think Mother has and is not giving
them. This then generates hatred of what others have and they
don't have. The most fundamental hatred, unfortunately, is hatred
of the other sex, the other gender, because we are all condemned to
be only one gender. We miss half the fun and half the capacities—
and this goes for men who unconsciously envy women, and for
women who unconsciously envy men. Narcissistic personalities
need to unconsciously devalue the persons with whom they fall in
love. This is a disaster, because the narcissist first idealizes some-
body and then devalues him or her. Narcissists cannot stay in a
relationship, so sexual promiscuity is a consequence, an incapacity
to maintain the couple; and there are other, multiple symptoms that
I cannot go into.
"Even if the couple doesn't separate—if they are nice and tra-
ditional and feel that once you are married you are married forev-
er—the narcissist's unconscious devaluation of the Other takes the
form of profound boredom; he or she loses interest in the other per-
son. Narcissists suffer from terrible boredom. They are desperately
looking for somebody who will help them, somebody who will ani-
mate them, who will be fun always. This can destroy the intimacy
of the relationship, in addition to bringing about infidelity, extra-
marital relations, et cetera. If narcissism is present it requires indi-
vidual treatment, and we have now developed psychoanalytic and
psychotherapeutic treatments for the condition. I trust that you
people don't suffer from narcissism, but if you do, it's not the end
of the world.
"There is a second problem that is frequent, and you may
have this, because it's so frequent and it's less severe. It relates to
unconscious guilt over a good sexual relationship and intimacy,
because that is like competing with the Oedipal parents. It goes
against the prohibition of sexuality, against the Oedipal couple—
because unconsciously it is as if the two of you as a couple are a
reproduction of your parents as a couple. Even if you tell yourself,
'That's ridiculous, this has nothing to do with them, we're grown-
ups,' these are profound unconscious processes. They may bring

37
Otto F. Kernberg

about a chronic sense of unconscious guilt that is expiated by

destroying your relationship precisely when it is most satisfactory.
"This problem takes hundreds of different forms, most fre-
quently using aggressive affects, once more, to provoke fights and
destroy the happiness of the relation. Another form is the setting up
in the superego—in other words, in the unconscious internal moral-
ity that comes from childhood—of an attack on the self and on
whatever makes oneself happy. Enormous pressures from uncon-
scious guilt feelings bring about self-defeating behavior that may
take the form of provoking the Other, provoking, provoking, and
provoking until there's some punishment. Then the person feels
better. At the same time, when we have this kind of superego—the
size of a cathedral!—we tend to project it onto the Other, and then
we see the Other as very aggressive toward us. In fact, it's practical-
ly normal that the person whom we love most is the person who
hurts us most when that person is critical. We project our superego
onto the Other, who then attacks us, and we feel even more devas-
tated, so we may then try to defend ourselves by attacking the
Other, and this creates a dangerous, vicious circle of sadomasochis-
tic behavior that, under the worst circumstances, may get out of
hand. The intensity of the aggression is very important in this
regard.
"However, the superego is not only an enemy, insofar as it
also contains our value systems. It is the place from which our
ideals, our ethical values, our commitment to ideology, to religion,
to cultural values, to science, to art, arise. It powerfully influences
our capacity for falling in love, because falling in love is not only
erotic excitement, not only the search for mutual dependency and
intimacy, but also the wish for sharing value systems, for sharing
the ideal of what one's life should be, for sharing how one enters
into and how one relates to our culture. In that regard, the super-
ego permits us to develop certain value systems that constitute a
protective boundary for the couple, a basic set of laws that govern
their relationship, that protect them from aggression. So you see
that aggression has positive and negative aspects—at the sexual
level, at the emotional level, and at the superego level.
"Let me describe for you," I told them, "the most frequent
problem that derives from all these areas of sexual relation, emo-
tional relation, relation at the level of value systems. The most fre-
quent problem that evolves is the temptation, the tendency to break
up the couple that stems from universal fantasies—the idea that, in

38
Love Relations of the Heterosexual Couple

contrast with the limited nature of one couple, somewhere there's

some ideal partner; somewhere one will find the ideal woman, or the
Prince Charming. There is some other idealized object in one's
mind, in contrast to the real Other whom one has. But there is also
the fear that if we remain, the Other, our partner, is going to leave
us for a much better man or woman. This is, again, the Oedipal fear
that we do not measure up to the ideal father, and there will be a
much better man taking our woman, our wife, away. For the
woman, there is the same fear regarding a much better woman who
will take her man away.
"These fantasies, under conditions of severe conflict, tend to
get put into action. One of the partners develops a relationship with
somebody else, and it brings about infidelity that has very different
functions and qualities according to what the dominant problem
is—multiple affairs, in the case of the narcissistic personality, and
a self-destructive affair, in the case of the masochistic personality
who suffers under severe Oedipal guilt. The main problem of
Oedipal guilt—self-attack and excessive guilt—is represented by
masochistic pathology. A person with this problem may develop a
love relation that seems so self-destructive that its masochistic
function is quite obvious to people on the outside. There are also
love affairs that are totally irrelevant, that are almost culturally
pressured. And there is the type that is not simply an affair, but
reveals that a couple really is losing its intimacy and a new couple
is being established; so that sometimes the affair is not a triangula-
tion, but the end of a relationship. Do such ends of relationship
happen normally? Yes, they may, but most of the time they happen
because of the significant psychopathology of one of the two part-
ners, perhaps of the two.
"Long-standing triangulations, with long-standing affairs,
while the couple stays together and is fighting with a third exclud-
ed person, whether the Other knows it or not, always indicates a
profound conflict in the couple. And here, couple therapy can help.
The first task in couple therapy is, of course, to find out: Is this the
end of relationship, or is this a stable relationship that is under-
mined by an unresolved, chronic conflict that takes the form of mar-
ital infidelity—a third, excluded Other? The first thing the therapist
does is try to protect the person who seems to be the victim from
making everything worse, when things could go better. And the sec-
ond task is to study how both partners have contributed uncon-
sciously to the problem, and how this can be brought out in the

39
Otto F. Kernberg

open. What we do, in short, in treatment is available also for this

kind of problem.
I have to leave; they have just called me to board my plane.
I'm standing up. I say, "Goodbye, people, but let me give you two or
three general words of advice, what is always helpful.
"First, remember that behind the rage of the Other is also a
need to be loved. Think of that. Second, remember that love also
implies a certain humility, to go out there and be available even if
you don't know whether youll be accepted or rejected or humiliat-
ed. And third, reflect on what is left of your gratification in the sex-
ual area, in the emotional relationship, in your value systems, what
may permit the relationship to be picked up again.
"And by the way, if you want to read something," I tell the
couple, "I recommend as a basic text Henry Dicks's Marital Tension.
I think it's the best text we have. Of course I have my own modest
text, but I don't recommend that. And if you want to read good nov-
els about these issues, the best I know are Elective Affinities by
Goethe, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Märquez, and
a novel that unfortunately doesn't exist in English, but only in
Hungarian and German and probably French—Vicissitudes of a
Marriage by Sändor Märai."
Thank you very much.

Suggested Reading
Dicks, Henry. Marital Tensions: Clinical Studies towards a Psychological Theory of
Interaction. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967; 1983.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Elective Affinities. Trans, by R. J. Hollingdale.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
Kernberg, Otto F. Love Relations: Normality and Pathology. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995.
Märai, Sändor. Metamorphoses d'un manage [Vicissitudes of a Marriage], Trans,
from Hungarian into French by Georges Kassai and Zeno Bianu. Paris:
Albin Michel, 2006.
. Wandlungen einer Ehe. [Vicissitudes of a Marriage]. Trans, from Hungarian
into German by Christina Viragh. Munich: Piper Verlag, 2003.
Märquez, Gabriel Garcia. Love in the Time of Cholera. Trans, by Edith Grossman.
New York: Knopf, 1988.

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