Portrait Of A Man With An Insatiable Lust For Love

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

What is the difference between a normal need for love and a neurotic one?

K. Horney lists several features.

1. Obsessive character With a neurotic need, a person cannot live without receiving evidence of love

2. Inability to be alone, fear of loneliness So, a wife can call her husband at work several times a day, discussing insignificant issues with him and demanding attention. The constant attention of a partner or children has an over-significance. Therefore, if a partner expresses dissatisfaction with too "dense" communication, the thirsty for love feels on the brink of disaster. Parting with his partner, he is not able to wait for a suitable person to appear on his horizon, and chooses the first candidate that comes across, who may not be suitable at all in his qualities. The main thing is that he agrees to be there. Since with such a fear of loneliness, the partner acquires a supervalue, those thirsting for love are ready to pay for it with humiliation and rejection of their own interests. Naturally, in this case, they do not get satisfaction from the relationship.

3. Manipulative ways of getting attention and love:

• bribery ("If you love me, I will do whatever you want for you")

• a demonstration of helplessness • a call for justice ( I am doing so much for you! You must repay me)

• threats, blackmail

4. Unsaturable The neurotic need for love cannot be satiated. A thirsty for love is never satisfied with the amount and quality of attention shown to him. Since he himself is not sure of his own worth for a partner, he needs constant confirmation of his importance in the eyes of a loved one. But the partner gets tired and begins to move away, trying to take a break from exorbitant demands, increasingly leaving the sufferer of love alone, demonstrating his coldness

5. Demands for absolute love The neurotic need for love turns into demands for absolute love, which are as follows. About “I must be loved, in spite of the most unpleasant and defiant behavior; and if they don't love me, when I behave defiantly, it means that they did not love me, but the comfortable life next to me.”“They should love me without demanding anything in return; otherwise it’s not love, but taking advantage of communicating with me”

6. Constant jealousy of a partner This jealousy arises not only when there is a real danger of loss of love, most often in circumstances when the partner is enthusiastically engaged in another business, admires another person, spends time communicating with others

7. Painful perception of rejection and objection. Since the thirsty for love is never satisfied with attention, for which he pays a high price, giving up his own interests, obeying and breaking himself, he constantly feels deceived. Negative emotions can be hidden for a long time, but then they will necessarily manifest themselves directly or indirectly.

One of the most common options for developing an insatiable thirst for love is cold-polite relationships in the family, when the parents do not love each other, but try very hard not to quarrel and not openly show any signs of dissatisfaction. In this atmosphere, the child feels insecure: he does not know what his parents are feeling and thinking. But he feels cold when he is shown love. While the child feels discontent, tension and alienation, they try to instill in him that peace and tranquility reign in the family. What he is told does not coincide with what he sees and experiences, and this entails the development of strong anxiety, which is further intensified by the fact that behind the external expression of attention the child does not feel love and the child decides that it is he who is the cause coldness. After that, he only has to conclude that he failed to earn the desired love.

In any case of development, those thirsting for love are "disliked" people who again and again strive to "correct" the course of events, to break out of the vicious circle of not receiving love.

Most often, such phenomena are found among the so-called "borderline state"

Borderline states are positions or intermediate stations in the process of decompensation from a non-psychotic state to a psychotic one or in the process of regression from a neurotic to a psychotic level of mental organization. The term can be used, for example, to describe a patient who no longer appears neurotic but does not yet appear overtly schizophrenic. In this sense, it was introduced in 1953 by Robert Knight.

The term borderline encompasses two rosy but partially overlapping concepts. Borderline personality disorder is a descriptive phenomenological concept that refers to a separate psychiatric syndrome - transient, reversible, and self-dystonic micropsychotic episodes characterized by diffuse impulsivity, chronic irritability, unstable interpersonal relationships, identity disorders, and often feelings of self-mutilation and self-devastation. On the other hand, borderline personality organization (as defined by Kernberg, 1967) is a broader concept. It refers to a character structure that notes: 1) an essentially intact reality check function; 2) the presence of opposite and unsynthesized early identifications leading to an insufficiently integrated identity of the I (this can manifest itself in the contradictory nature of character traits, lack of temporal continuity of self-perception, insufficient authenticity, dissatisfaction with one's sexual role and a tendency to subjective experience of inner emptiness); 3) the predominance of splitting (often reinforced by denial and various projective mechanisms) over repression as the usual way of the I to deal with ambivalence and, finally, 4) fixation on the recovery phase in the process of separation-individuation, which leads to the instability of the concept of the Self, the absence of constancy of objects, overdependence on external objects, an inability to tolerate ambivalence and a noticeable pre-Oedipus influence on the Oedipus complex.

These two concepts represent different levels of abstraction. The first refers to a nosological syndrome, the second refers to the development and structure of the psyche. However, both concepts overlap in many ways. Borderline personality organization includes all manifestations of borderline personality disorders. However, there are other personality syndromes that also belong to the borderline personality organization. These include narcissistic, schizoid, and antisocial personality disorders, as well as some forms of drug addiction, alcoholism and sexual perversion.

Descriptively, borderline personality organization is inherent in individuals whose apparently unstable behavior contradicts their outwardly more stable character structure. Persons with such a diagnosis lead a chaotic life, they can hardly endure loneliness, are impulsive, preoccupied with themselves and are not capable of introspection. They cannot clearly separate themselves from others and use others to get rid of unpleasant feelings or satisfy the desire to feel well. They also allow themselves to be used by others. The result is, as a rule, not success, but constant frustration, accompanied by anger and despair. Borderline individuals make extensive use of defense mechanisms of projection and introjection and exhibit feelings and attitudes of hostility and rejection. Sometimes they have psychotic symptoms - paranoid and delusional. These patients lack personality integration, they often speak and act, contradicting themselves.

There is considerable theoretical controversy about how best to conceptualize borderline personality organization. The disagreements concern primarily the origin of these states: whether they are a consequence of conflict and defense (as in psychoneuroses), developmental delay caused by inadequate object relations, or developmental deviations based on adaptation to pathological primary objects. Kernberg's formulation uses the traditional model of psychoneurosis, but he largely relies on the theoretical constructions of Melanie Klein, concerning, in particular, defensive splitting and projective identification in conflicts associated with aggressive attraction. British analysts working in the framework of the theory of object relations, whose ideas also go back to the concept of Klein, use the term schizoid personality to denote such a personality structure. Selfish psychologists argue that borderline individuals lack the cohesion of the Self and are therefore incapable of even the most primitive forms of transference. Traditionally, oriented analysts view patients with such disorders as polyneurotic personalities, whose conflicts and symptoms belong to very different levels of development and, possibly, are accompanied by structural defects.

Borderline diagnostics are easier to do in a psychotherapeutic or analytic setting than in a simple interview. However, in most cases it is very difficult, if not impossible, to treat borderline patients with classical psychoanalytic techniques (even using parameters), since, among other problems discussed, they require satisfaction and prefer the action of verbalization, reflection and understanding that characterize psychoanalysis.