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Barriers to Falling and Remaining in Love, Kernberg (1974)

Falling and remaining in love requires the achievement of two developmental stages. (1) Whole Object Relations. This is the integration of internal object relations that leads to an integrated view of self and others. (2) Full Genital Enjoyment. This involves overcoming oedipal conflicts and other unconscious prohibitions against sex. There are four configurations along the continuum of falling in love. (1) Severe Narcissism. These individuals are almost entirely incapable of establishing sexual and tender relationships with others. They might become sexually excited by a body or by a person considered attractive by others. (2) Moderate Narcissism. These individuals have never fallen in love but can be sexually promiscuous. When they feel sexually interested in someone, they unconsciously feel envy and greed and want to take possession of the other. Although they lust after the object before sex, their enthusiasm and interest dies immediately afterward; since they have projected thei
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Otto Kernberg: A Contemporary Introduction, Yeomans, Diamond, Caligor (2024)

Model of Mind Internal Object Relations Our basic psychological structure consists of internal object relations. An internal object relation is “a mental representation of a relationship, consisting of an image of the self (self-representation) interacting with the image of another person (object representation) and linked to a particular affect state.” Different situations activate different internal object relations and in turn shape our experience of that situation. For example, when interacting with an authority figure, I might have an internal object relationship of myself as helpless relating to a threatening authority figure that is linked to feelings of fear. This in turn leads me to feel “disempowered and threatened.” Origins Affects are “the inborn, biological drivers of human motivation,” and internal object relations are derived from “the interplay of affects and interactions with caretakers.” When we repeatedly experience a “high intensity affect” in a specific type of in
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CFPS: Schools of Thought

What Is Psychoanalysis Pine (1990) begins by quoting Pinchas Noy: “the uniqueness of psychoanalysis is in its metapsychology which is based on a multimodel theoretical system, i.e., a system composed of several theoretical models. In this respect it differs from almost all other contemporary schools in psychology and behavioral sciences, each one of which is based on a single and uniform model. The existence of these numerous models enables us to arrange clinical raw data in several alternate patterns, allowing the examination of each phenomenon from several points of view and the transfer of the focus of interest from one point of view to another, according to the specific clinical, experimental, or theoretical needs.” Noy compared the multimodel nature of psychoanalysis to line, which can be “understood as both waves and particles.” Similarly, Pine writes that psychoanalysis developed in three waves, “drive psychology, ego psychology, and object relations theory — with the last produ
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Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: Infantile Sexuality, Freud (1905)

Book II: Infantile Sexuality Introduction People mistakenly believe that sexual instincts do not exist until puberty. This mistaken belief is so widespread because people have been taught that it is not proper to talk about such matters and also because, for psychological reasons, we tend to forget our early years. This amnesia does not make sense biologically, as young children should have the capacity for creating such memories. This childhood amnesia is similar to the amnesia neurotics exhibited, meaning that these early sexual experiences are not forgotten but repressed. When the child is 3-4 we can observe his sexual behaviors. It is during this period that the child builds up “the mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restrict its flow—disgust, feelings of shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals.” The child’s sexual instincts remain during latency but become sublimated Sexual Manifestations in Children Different bo
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A Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality Disorders, Otto Kernberg and Eve Caligor (2005)

Introduction A personality disorder reflects “specific pathological features of underlying psychological structures.” Consequently, if we’re going to treat a personality disorder, we need to alter their underlying psychological structure. All of this is based on Kernberg’s object relations model, a model which holds that our psychological structures are formed by both constitutional and environmental factors that occur early in life. Internal Object Relations My psychological structure is composed of internal object relations. An internal object relation consists of “a particular affect state linked to an image of a specific interaction between the self and another person (e.g., fear, linked to the image of a small, terrified self and a powerful, threatening authority figure).” Internal object relations can be triadic, e.g., “an image of a sexual or loving couple and a third party who is excluded.” Identity Consolidation One with a consolidated identity experiences “a stable and realis
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Five Lectures on Psycho-analysis, Freud (1909)

First Lecture. Breuer found that Anna O’s symptoms would disappear “if she could be brought to remember under hypnosis, with an accompanying expression of affect, on what occasion and in what connection the symptoms had first appeared.” For example, for six weeks she “was suffering very badly from thirst” but could not bring herself to drink. One day during hypnosis “she grumbled about her English ‘lady-companion’, whom she did not care for, and went on to describe, with every sign of disgust, how she had once gone into this lady's room and how her little dog — horrid creature! — had drunk out of a glass there. The patient had said nothing, as she had wanted to be polite. After giving further energetic expression to the anger she had held back, she asked for something to drink, drank a large quantity of water without any difficulty, and awoke from her hypnosis with the glass at her lips; and thereupon the disturbance vanished, never to return.” Hysterical patients suffered a trau
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Nancy McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (2004)

Chapter 2 Elements that constitute the psychoanalytic sensibility: Curiosity and Awe. Those who have done analytic therapy have been amazed to learn “how accidental are the ‘choices’ people make,” e.g., how we can strive to find a romantic partner unlike our parents only to eventually realize how much like them they actually are. Those in analytic therapy can recall moments when they realized the power of the unconscious. “For a colleague of mine, it was when she dreamed about a ‘Thomas Malthus’ at a point in therapy when she was mourn-ing the fact that in her family, love had been part of an "economy of scarcity." She had no conscious knowledge that Malthus was an economic theorist who emphasized the limited nature of resources and was stunned by the fact that unconsciously, she had obviously regis-tered this information somewhere. For another friend, it was when he discovered that his depression had begun thirty years to the day after his father's death, a date he had n
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