Customer Reviews

Love Relations: Normality and Pathology

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Kernberg goes where psychotherapy fears to tread. By continuing -- mostly convincingly -- to find Freudian thought useful, he eschews the naive humanism one might argue embodied by people like Erich Fromm and Karen Horney.

Whenever one wants to dismiss his insistence on, what at times seems like obsession with, theoretical constructs like castration anxiety and penis envy, when he gets to the meat and potatoes of his theory, he convinces. Anyone who has sensed a strange pattern or a strange logic in particularly exciting and frustrating sexual relationships will find a lot to comfort him here. I'd recommend this book to lay readers who have generally strong egos but find that, in sexual areas, their lives don't make sense, their relationships at a much lower level of functioning than the other parts of their lives.

If you have trouble integrating sexuality into your life and relationships, and have a general grasp, and affection for, psychoanalytic topics, you will find this book useful. Kernberg's naievete shows in the obstinacy of his writing, but while one might wish for a clearer explication, it's also clear he's not writing for a general audience. He leaves little room for disagreement, but it could also be argued that the strength of his convictions is what allows for such original and at times disturbing insight.

My gut tells me Kernberg's right more than he's wrong. The bleakness of his vision has integrity, and the hard lessons he seeks to teach are worth heeding.

....if you're looking to understand the psychology of love--for this book is mostly about its sexuality and psychopathology, with the usual psychoanalytic references to penises, superegos, and Oedipal conflicts.

Not that these don't imbue every romance. But the constant references to them throughout the analytic literature get one wondering about a sort of theoretical perversity, a morbid preoccupation with the shadows of love to the cost of illuminating its joys and burning passions.

Though a brilliant thinker, Kernberg occasionally shares the analytic tendency to be centuries behind everyone else. For instance, he recognizes his debt to Stoller, who maintains that erotic love must have "mystery," and to Balint for his emphasis on "tenderness." Nor will the reader gasp in admiration to learn that self-love and love of others develop together and enrich one another. Sorry, but these are NOT revelations--except to a discipline so tradition-bound that only its own coinages are acceptable currency. (Methinks analysts could learn a lot from the Vatican's attitude toward Galileo.)

Nor will the tiresome equation of homosexuality with unsatisfactory object relations prove helpful, least of all to LGBT couples.

Kernberg shines best here in discussing narcissistic and superego influences on relationships. He also makes the case that society tends to attack love relationships, which for that reason need to fortify and ground themselves.

If you're looking for more, I recommend the generally non-reductive ART OF LOVING by Fromm.

An excellent book on relationships from a Freudean perspective. People without any background in the jargon will find it slow reading, but it is a lean book. For the average person, they won't benefit from it until they have been burned in relationships with people that have emotional problems, but for folks that have been around the block once or twice, much of this book will be startlingly clear. Freud is like scotch - you appreciate more as you get older. Also, this book explains why a person may have a satisfactory sex life in college during a period of rebellion, but then "settle down" to a loveless marriage with someone who will take turns acting like the guilty, pouting destructive child and the punishing, negligent parent rather than an autonomous adult.

Love Relations is a book that exists at the mid-point between pop and professional psychology. A real strength of Kernberg's is that he is able to write in a comprehensive manner which is not sabotaged by a lust for jargon. I do think there is one internal problem within the text that I should mention sooner rather than later: his observations are light on the "normal" and heavy on the "pathological." Remarks specific to the whole are what is of most use in analyzing love relations, and I know, from trying to find quotes to use for my own work, that much of his passages are in reference to hysteria and narcissism-- which makes it far more difficult to develop an overall view of romantic and familial interactions. I was rather surprised that many of Kernberg's assumptions are not discordant with those of evolutionary psychology which, it becomes more clear with each day, has far more to say about the world around us than anything from the psychoanalytic school. Other than the time I recall his referencing the discredited Money study from the seventies, Kernberg is in the vicinity of the truth on many occasions. Furthermore, the individual cases of couples he references are very interesting even though they are too brief. On the whole, this is a solidly educational work which contributes to our aggregate knowledge of that most wondrous of human states.

In lively, vivid clinical examples, this book validates Freudian-derived object-relations concepts brilliantly. Erotic forces and the conflicts they engender powerfully shape personality, relationships, and experience of life.The serious student of humanity will find in these pages enlightenment and depth.