Love has a central place in psychoanalytic theory. From the beginning, psychoanalysis has treated love not just as a feeling but as a psychological process. It is shaped by early relationships, by wishes we are not aware of, and by patterns we tend to repeat. How people choose partners, idealise them, become disappointed in them or stay attached to them has been studied as an expression of deeper patterns formed in childhood.
The Psychoanalysis of Love series looks at how the major figures of the psychoanalytic tradition have understood love. Each thinker has a separate, detailed article. This introduction summarises the central ideas of each approach, outlines the themes they share, and points to the full article for readers who want to explore a particular perspective in more depth.
Sigmund Freud: love as "refinding"
For Sigmund Freud, love grows out of libido, the energy of the sexual drive. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he observed that "the finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it". In psychoanalysis, "object" simply means the person we love. Freud's point was that adult love unconsciously seeks to recover the first relationships of childhood.
In On Narcissism (1914), he described two ways of choosing a partner:
- the anaclitic type, directed towards people who resemble those who fed and protected us
- the narcissistic type, directed towards someone who reflects what we are, were or would like to be
Freud also described how, in falling in love, the loved person takes the place of one's own ideal. He wrote about the split between tenderness and desire that prevents some people from loving and desiring the same person. And he described transference love, the love that arises in the therapy relationship as a repetition of earlier attachments. In his theory, the Oedipus complex, the child's first "love triangle" with the parents, remains the template for later love.
Read more: Freud on Love: How Our First Relationships Shape Who We Love
Melanie Klein: love, hate and repair
Melanie Klein moved attention away from the drives and towards the inner world of relationships formed in infancy. In her view, love cannot be separated from hate.
In the first months of life, the baby protects its loving feelings through splitting: experience is divided into all-good and all-bad parts. Klein called this the paranoid-schizoid position. As the child develops, it comes to see that the loved and the hated person are the same. This brings guilt, concern and the wish to make things right. Klein called this the depressive position.
In her essay "Love, Guilt and Reparation" (1937), Klein argued that this capacity for reparation, the wish to repair harm done to someone we love, lies at the heart of mature love. Her later work on envy and gratitude (1957) helped to explain why destructive feelings can spoil love. It also shows why swings between idealising and devaluing a partner are so common in adult relationships.
Read more: Melanie Klein on Love: Love, Hate and the Wish to Repair
Ronald Fairbairn: love as the search for another person
Ronald Fairbairn was a founding figure of the British object relations school. He argued that libido is not mainly pleasure-seeking but "object-seeking". In other words, the basic human motive is not gratification but relationship. From this point of view, love is a primary need, not a by-product of the sexual drives.
Fairbairn also offered an influential explanation of why people stay loyal to relationships that hurt them. When early caregivers are both exciting and frustrating, the child takes them inside as two inner figures: an exciting object and a rejecting object. Parts of the self remain tied to these figures. In adult life, this can show itself as:
- an attraction to partners who are warm one moment and unavailable the next
- a strong attachment to relationships that are painful
Read more: Fairbairn on Love: Why We Stay Loyal to Relationships That Hurt
Donald Winnicott: holding, illusion and survival
Donald Winnicott stressed the role of the early environment. The "good-enough mother" provides a holding environment, a reliable setting in which the baby develops trust and a sense of continuity. He also described a transitional area, an in-between space that is neither purely inner fantasy nor purely outside reality. This idea helps explain why romantic love always combines a real person with one's own hopes and illusions.
Several of Winnicott's ideas are especially relevant to adult love: the capacity to be alone, the true and false self, and the "use of an object". In his view, the other person becomes fully real and separate only when they survive our aggression, without being destroyed and without retaliating. For example, a partner who stays present through an angry argument, without collapsing or striking back, is experienced as more real. A partner's ability to remain present through conflict therefore plays an important part in the growth of mature love.
Read more: Winnicott on Love: How Early Care Shapes Our Capacity to Love
John Bowlby: love as attachment
John Bowlby trained as a psychoanalyst. He developed attachment theory by looking at children's real experiences of separation and loss. He described attachment as an inborn system that keeps the baby close to a protective caregiver. This caregiver acts as a secure base from which to explore and a safe haven to return to when frightened. Early experiences are organised into internal working models: unconscious expectations about whether others will be there for us and whether we are worth caring for.
In 1987, Hazan and Shaver proposed that adult romantic love can be understood as an attachment process. Research on adult attachment has since shown how secure, anxious and avoidant patterns shape couple relationships. Attachment-based approaches such as Emotionally Focused Therapy apply these findings in work with couples.
Read more: Bowlby and Attachment: Love as a Search for Safety
Jacques Lacan: love, lack and desire
Jacques Lacan offered one of the most original and challenging readings of love. He placed love partly in what he called the Imaginary, the realm of images that begins with the mirror stage. In love, he suggested, we often love an image, including our own image reflected back by the other person. Lacan distinguished love from desire. Desire, in his view, is kept alive by a basic lack that can never be filled.
In his seminar on transference (1960–61), drawing on Plato's Symposium, Lacan described love as "giving what you do not have". In Encore (1972–73), he argued that "there is no sexual relationship". By this he meant that two people never form a complete whole. Love, he suggested, is what makes up for this impossibility.
Read more: Lacan on Love: Desire, Lack and Why No Partner Makes Us Whole
Erich Fromm: love as an art
Erich Fromm was a humanistic and socially minded psychoanalyst. In The Art of Loving (1956), he argued that love is not a sensation we fall into but a capacity that needs knowledge, effort and practice. For Fromm, love answers the basic human problem of separateness. Mature love means being united with another person while keeping one's own integrity.
He described four basic elements of love:
- care
- responsibility
- respect
- knowledge
Fromm also criticised modern societies for turning love into an exchange that follows the logic of the market.
Read more: Erich Fromm on Love: Why Loving Is an Art We Can Learn
Otto Kernberg: mature love and its difficulties
Otto Kernberg combined ego psychology and object relations theory to explain how personality organisation, the overall way a personality is structured, shapes the capacity to love. In Love Relations: Normality and Pathology (1995), he described mature sexual love as bringing together tenderness and erotic desire, along with commitment and shared values and ideals.
He also examined the place of aggression in love relationships. He explained why people with severe narcissistic or borderline personality organisation often struggle to sustain love. His clinical approach, Transference-Focused Psychotherapy, works directly with these patterns.
Read more: Otto Kernberg on Love: What Mature Love Needs and Why It Fails
Jessica Benjamin: mutual recognition
Jessica Benjamin is a leading figure in relational psychoanalysis. She brought the idea of mutual recognition into the psychoanalytic understanding of love. In The Bonds of Love (1988), drawing on Hegel and Winnicott, she argued that we need to be recognised by someone whom we, in turn, recognise as an independent person with a mind of their own.
When this balance breaks down, relationships tend to fall into patterns of domination and submission. Her later work on "the third" offers a way of thinking about how couples can move beyond such "doer and done to" dynamics.
Read more: Jessica Benjamin on Love: Recognition and Power in Relationships
What these theories have in common
Despite their differences, these theories share several central ideas:
- The past in the present. Adult love is shaped by early relationships, whether this is described as refinding an object, as inner relationships or as internal working models.
- Idealisation and disappointment. Most approaches describe the idealisation involved in falling in love, and the challenge of accepting the other as a real, imperfect person.
- Mixed feelings. Love and aggression exist side by side. Mature love depends on being able to hold both without destroying the relationship.
- Separateness. From Winnicott's "use of an object" to Lacan's lack and Benjamin's mutual recognition, many theorists stress that love requires seeing the other as a separate person, not as an extension of oneself.
Why these ideas matter in therapy
These perspectives are not only of theoretical interest. In psychotherapy, they help to make sense of recognisable patterns, such as:
- repeatedly choosing partners who are emotionally unavailable
- cycles of idealising a partner and then devaluing them
- difficulty feeling closeness and desire for the same person
- intense fears of being abandoned, or of being swallowed up by a relationship
- expecting a partner to make one feel complete
Psychodynamic psychotherapy offers a space to explore where such patterns come from and how they are repeated, including within the therapeutic relationship itself.
Where recurring relationship patterns cause distress, psychotherapy can help to understand and gradually change them. Online sessions can be booked here.
References
- Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. Pantheon Books.
- Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. Hogarth Press.
- Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1952). Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality. Tavistock.
- Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Standard Edition, 7.
- Freud, S. (1914). On Narcissism: An Introduction. Standard Edition, 14.
- Fromm, E. (1956). The Art of Loving. Harper & Brothers.
- Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511–524. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511
- Kernberg, O. F. (1995). Love Relations: Normality and Pathology. Yale University Press.
- Klein, M., & Riviere, J. (1937). Love, Hate and Reparation. Hogarth Press.
- Lacan, J. (1998). On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX (1972–73). Norton.
- Lacan, J. (2015). Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII (1960–61). Polity.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1969). The use of an object. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 50, 711–716.