Otto F. Kernberg is one of the most influential psychoanalysts of the late twentieth century, best known for his work on borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. Less well known is that he also wrote one of the most thorough psychoanalytic accounts of adult romantic and sexual love. In Love Relations: Normality and Pathology (1995), he asked what a mature love relationship involves, why some people cannot fall or stay in love, and how a couple works as a psychological unit in its own right.
This article is part of the Psychoanalysis of Love series. It explains Kernberg's model of personality, his view of mature love and what can go wrong with it, and the therapy that grew out of his work. His thinking builds closely on Freud and Klein, who are discussed elsewhere in the series.
Background: bringing two traditions together
Kernberg was born in Vienna in 1928 and grew up in Chile, where he trained in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In the United States he worked at the Menninger Clinic and later in New York, where he directed the Personality Disorders Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College. He was President of the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1997 to 2001.
Much of his importance lies in combining two schools of thought. Post-war American psychoanalysis was dominated by ego psychology, which focused on how the mind adapts and defends itself. In Britain, Klein and the object relations theorists used a different language of internal objects, splitting and projection. Kernberg brought the two together, drawing on Edith Jacobson's work on images of self and others, Margaret Mahler's research on child development, and on Klein and Fairbairn. He set out the result in Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis (1976).
At the heart of his approach is a simple idea: the mind is built from relationships we have taken inside ourselves. In psychoanalysis, "object" simply means another person as we picture them in our minds. For Kernberg, the basic building block of personality has three parts:
- an image of the self (a self-representation)
- an image of another person (an object-representation)
- the feeling (affect) that links them
For example, a small, helpless self may be linked to a cold, withholding other by fear or rage, or a satisfied self to a caring other by pleasure. Kernberg came to see these feelings as the raw material from which the two basic drives, love (libido) and aggression, are gradually formed.
Three levels of personality
Kernberg's best-known clinical idea is his model of personality organisation, first presented in the paper "Borderline personality organization" (1967) and developed in Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975). Instead of classifying people only by symptoms, he described three levels of personality, told apart by three questions:
- Identity integration. Does the person have a stable sense of themselves and of the important people in their life, or identity diffusion, in which these views are contradictory and shifting?
- Defences. Defences are the unconscious ways we protect ourselves from painful feelings. Are they mainly built around repression (pushing unwanted thoughts out of awareness), or around more primitive mechanisms, such as splitting, projective identification, primitive idealisation, devaluation, denial and omnipotent control?
- Reality testing. Can the person tell self from others, and inner experience from the outside world?
At the neurotic level, identity is integrated, defences are more mature and reality testing is intact; conflicts are painful but occur within a stable personality. At the borderline level, reality testing is usually kept, but identity is diffuse and primitive defences dominate. At the psychotic level, reality testing itself is lost. Kernberg later added further dimensions: the quality of relationships, moral functioning and aggression.
Splitting and an unstable sense of self
For Kernberg, the central mechanism of borderline organisation is splitting. Splitting means keeping loving, idealised images of people apart from hateful, threatening ones. In Kleinian terms, it reflects an incomplete move from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position, that is, from seeing people as all good or all bad towards seeing them as whole.
Splitting protects the good images from intense anger, but at a cost: neither the self nor others can be experienced as whole and continuous. A partner may seem perfect one week and contemptible the next. A new partner may be described as the most understanding person ever met, and then, after one forgotten phone call, as cold and selfish through and through.
A stable love relationship requires loving someone who sometimes disappoints us, and staying ourselves as our moods change. Identity diffusion and splitting make exactly this difficult, so Kernberg's levels of personality also describe different capacities for love. He developed this point in two papers published in 1974, "Barriers to falling and remaining in love" and "Mature love: prerequisites and characteristics", which later became part of Love Relations.
What mature love is made of
Kernberg's central claim in Love Relations is that mature sexual love brings together several parts, each of which develops, and can fail, separately:
- Sexual excitement and erotic desire. Sexual excitement is rooted in early bodily experience. Erotic desire turns it into a longing for one particular person, linked to fantasies of merging with their body and inner life.
- Tenderness. Tenderness reflects the ability to hold loving and angry feelings together, so that love outweighs hate and mixed feelings (ambivalence) can be tolerated. It matches the capacity for concern that Klein linked with the depressive position.
- Identification and concern. A deep identification with the other, including their sexual experience, and concern for them as a separate person.
- Mature idealisation. Unlike the all-or-nothing idealisation of splitting, this is directed at a partner seen as a whole person, valued for real qualities and for the shared ideals he or she represents.
- Commitment. Love is tied to a commitment to the partner and to a life built together, supported by the person's conscience (the superego) and their ideals (the ego ideal).
- Passion. For Kernberg, passion means crossing the boundaries of the self, both bodily and psychological. A feeling of merging with the other exists alongside a preserved sense of being separate.
This connects Kernberg with Freud's 1912 observation that many people cannot feel both affection and desire for the same partner. Kernberg placed this within a wider account of development: bringing tenderness and eroticism together depends on well-integrated inner images of self and others, a settled identity, and enough resolution of oedipal prohibitions, the early childhood rules and guilt surrounding desire.
The couple's shared ideals and conscience
Kernberg also treated the couple as an entity in its own right. Each partner's unconscious patterns of relating come alive in the relationship, so the couple acts out a combination of both inner worlds.
Over time, the couple also develops shared ideals and a shared conscience, which can support the relationship or turn against it. A couple with a reasonably kind joint conscience can tolerate conflict; one whose shared conscience is harsh or persecuting may find that guilt, moral condemnation and mutual accusation dominate their life together. In everyday terms, it is the difference between a couple who can argue and recover and one for whom every disagreement becomes a trial.
Aggression as part of love
Unlike many writers on love, Kernberg insisted that aggression is not simply the enemy of love but part of it. Mild aggression is present in erotic desire itself: in the wish to penetrate and be penetrated, to possess and be possessed, and in playfully crossing bodily boundaries. He saw the ability to include such elements, including varied childhood sexual fantasies, in a loving relationship as a sign of maturity rather than disturbance.
At the same time, envy, resentment and hostile inner patterns can wear a relationship down, and sadomasochistic patterns of hurting and being hurt may come to dominate it. What matters is not whether aggression is absent, but whether love is strong enough to contain it.
The couple and the outside world
Kernberg also saw a tension between the couple and the wider group. A couple keeps its own boundaries, private world and sexual life. Groups tend to have mixed feelings about couples, combining support with envy, curiosity and the wish to regulate sexuality through conventional morality. This echoes the oedipal situation of an excluded third. In Kernberg's view, a couple that protects its boundaries while staying connected to the wider world is better able to keep both intimacy and passion.
Narcissism: when love cannot last
Kernberg's work on narcissism, from papers around 1970 and Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (1975), shows most clearly how personality can limit love. He described the narcissistic personality as organised around a pathological grandiose self. This defensive structure merges the real self, the ideal self and the ideal other person. It protects against envy, dependency and rage, but leaves others experienced mainly as sources of admiration or as threats.
According to Kernberg, people with severe narcissistic problems are often capable of sexual excitement and intense early idealisation, but cannot sustain love. The partner's separateness, needs and independent worth provoke envy and devaluation. In the most severe cases, he suggested, sexual life may remain promiscuous and cut off from tenderness.
In borderline organisation, love may take the form of primitive idealisation and clinging dependency that suddenly turns into hatred. In neurotic organisation, the capacity for love and commitment is usually present, but sexual inhibition or oedipal guilt may get in the way.
Kernberg's view of narcissism led to a well-known debate with Heinz Kohut. In The Analysis of the Self (1971), Kohut saw pathological narcissism as a halt in normal development, calling for empathic attunement to the patient's need to be admired (mirrored) and to admire someone (idealise). Kernberg saw it as a defensive structure rooted in aggression and envy, which needed to be interpreted, particularly as it appeared with the therapist.
Transference-Focused Psychotherapy
Kernberg's ideas led him, with John Clarkin, Frank Yeomans and colleagues, to develop Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP). This is a structured psychodynamic treatment, set out in a manual, for borderline personality disorder and related conditions. "Transference" refers to the way patterns from past relationships are relived in the relationship with the therapist.
After a treatment contract sets out the framework, the therapist identifies the main self-and-other patterns that come alive in the therapy relationship, and helps the patient to recognise and bring together split-off parts of the self.
The aim is not only to reduce symptoms but to change the personality's structure, towards a more integrated identity and more stable relationships. For love, this means moving from all-good and all-bad perceptions towards a more balanced, realistic and lasting attachment. TFP has been tested in randomised trials:
- In a study by Clarkin and colleagues (2007), patients improved with TFP, dialectical behaviour therapy and supportive psychotherapy alike, with TFP linked to change across a wider range of outcomes.
- A trial by Doering and colleagues (2010) found TFP more effective than treatment by experienced community psychotherapists on several measures.
The evidence is promising but limited.
Why Kernberg's ideas matter in therapy
Kernberg's model suggests that relationship difficulties are not only a matter of communication or circumstances, but may reflect the underlying organisation of the personality. In practice:
- Assessment. Telling a neurotic conflict about intimacy apart from a borderline or narcissistic difficulty in sustaining love clarifies what kind of work is likely to help.
- Idealisation and devaluation. Cycles of intense idealisation followed by disappointment, contempt or sudden endings can be understood as expressions of splitting, rather than as proof that the "right" partner has not yet been found.
- The couple as a system. In couple therapy, the ideas of a shared conscience and of partners acting out their inner patterns help explain why couples get stuck in repetitive conflicts neither consciously chooses.
- The therapeutic relationship. Patterns that disrupt love relationships tend to appear with the therapist too, where they can be examined as they happen.
Patterns that Kernberg's ideas can help to make sense of include:
- falling intensely in love and then, quite suddenly, seeing the partner as worthless
- feeling desire for a partner but little tenderness, or tenderness but little desire
- needing a partner's admiration while feeling threatened by their independence
- arguments that turn into harsh moral verdicts about who is to blame
Criticisms and limitations
Kernberg's work has been criticised from several directions:
- Self psychology. Followers of Kohut argued that his focus on aggression and envy risks overlooking developmental gaps beneath narcissistic defences, and that a confrontational approach may feel like an injury.
- Relational psychoanalysis. Relational psychoanalysts have questioned his locating relationship difficulties inside each individual's mind rather than between two people. Stephen Mitchell's Can Love Last? (2002), for example, offered a different view of how romance and passion are kept alive or lost in long-term relationships.
- Cultural assumptions. His account of normal sexual love has been seen as reflecting the assumptions of its time, particularly about gender differences and the treatment of the heterosexual, monogamous couple as the model of maturity.
- Complexity. His theory has been described as complex and difficult to test, and categories such as "borderline organisation" risk being applied too rigidly.
Conclusion
Kernberg's contribution stands out for being systematic. He showed that the capacity for love depends on an integrated sense of self, tolerating mixed feelings and containing aggression. He described mature sexual love as bringing together tenderness, erotic desire, idealisation and commitment. Where these capacities are weakened, as in narcissistic and borderline organisation, love tends to swing between idealising and devaluing. His theory extends Klein's account of love and hate, and contrasts with Jessica Benjamin's intersubjective emphasis on mutual recognition.
For people whose relationships repeatedly follow painful patterns of idealisation, disappointment or distance, psychodynamic psychotherapy can provide a setting in which these patterns can be understood and gradually changed; online sessions are available to book here.
References
- Clarkin, J. F., Levy, K. N., Lenzenweger, M. F., & Kernberg, O. F. (2007). Evaluating three treatments for borderline personality disorder: A multiwave study. American Journal of Psychiatry, 164(6), 922–928.
- Clarkin, J. F., Yeomans, F. E., & Kernberg, O. F. (2006). Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality: Focusing on Object Relations. American Psychiatric Publishing.
- Doering, S., Hörz, S., Rentrop, M., Fischer-Kern, M., Schuster, P., Benecke, C., Buchheim, A., Martius, P., & Buchheim, P. (2010). Transference-focused psychotherapy v. treatment by community psychotherapists for borderline personality disorder: Randomised controlled trial. British Journal of Psychiatry, 196(5), 389–395.
- Freud, S. (1912). On the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love. Standard Edition, 11.
- Jacobson, E. (1964). The Self and the Object World. International Universities Press.
- Kernberg, O. F. (1967). Borderline personality organization. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 15, 641–685.
- Kernberg, O. F. (1974). Barriers to falling and remaining in love. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 22.
- Kernberg, O. F. (1974). Mature love: Prerequisites and characteristics. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 22.
- Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. Jason Aronson.
- Kernberg, O. F. (1976). Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis. Jason Aronson.
- Kernberg, O. F. (1984). Severe Personality Disorders: Psychotherapeutic Strategies. Yale University Press.
- Kernberg, O. F. (1995). Love Relations: Normality and Pathology. Yale University Press.
- Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. International Universities Press.
- Mitchell, S. A. (2002). Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance over Time. W. W. Norton.
- Yeomans, F. E., Clarkin, J. F., & Kernberg, O. F. (2015). Transference-Focused Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality Disorder: A Clinical Guide. American Psychiatric Publishing.