Limitations to the capacity to love

✍ Scribed by Otto F. Kernberg

• Book ID: 111360800
• Publisher: Institute of Psychoanalysis
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 230 KB
• Volume: 92
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7578
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1745-8315.2011.00456.x

✦ Synopsis

This paper is a meditation on the potential and problems of establishing and maintaining loving and passionate relationships, drawn from a lifetime of struggling with these issues in the course of doing analysis. It describes interferences with the capacity for mature sexual love as reflecting various psychopathological conditions. These limitations include a variety of psychological restrictions determined most frequently by masochistic, narcissistic and paranoid personality features. Clinical case material illustrates both mature and disturbed capability for love relations.