Limitations to the capacity to love.
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.
New York Presbyterian Hospital, 21 Bloomingdale Road, White Plains, New York 10605, USA. okernber@med.cornell.edu
Otto F
OF
Kernberg
D004532:Ego; D004644:Emotions; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008149:Love; D008398:Masochism; D009289:Narcissism; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D012649:Self Concept; D012747:Sexual Partners / Q000523:psychology*