A common occurrence in psychotherapy is seeing a patient who seems unable to form any lasting or satisfying long-term romantic relationships. Frequently, they tend to be attracted to emotionally or otherwise unavailable individuals, resulting in repeated failed attempts to establish intimate bonds. In some cases, these same or similar dynamics can be observed in patients who are already in a committed but problematic, volatile, unstable, and stormy relationship. Everyone knows that good communication is essential for healthy relationships. But what happens when clearly communicating just isn’t enough? This is something psychotherapists see frequently: couples having serious difficulties for which teaching them basic communication skills is simply not sufficient. What’s going on in such cases?

Freud once remarked that in the marriage bed, there are at least six people present. He referred, of course, to the respective parents. And that’s not counting every previous spouse or sexual partner. One of the major difficulties with relationships is that there are always two individuals, sometimes with two different agendas, each bringing their own emotional “baggage” into the mix. More often than not, this baggage is unconscious. Unknown. Out of awareness. These patterns can also sometimes be expressed within the therapy relationship itself. All this makes for a richly complex psychological stew. What is the secret to making sense of and constructively dealing with such frustrating, confusing, complicated, and oftentimes repetitive romantic relationship problems?

Let’s begin by taking a look at the pervasive problem of pathological or neurotic narcissism. Psychologically, narcissism—and it was Freud (1914) who first introduced this now ubiquitous term—is a neurotic self-absorption which, in effect, prevents someone from achieving true intimacy with another. What many people are not aware of is that neurotic narcissism is fundamentally informed by underlying narcissistic rage: an unrelenting need to repay any perceived slight or insult. Indeed, conversely, post-Freudian psychoanalysts like Winnicott, Fromm, Kohut, and Kernberg have attributed anger, rage, and hostility to an underlying matrix of neurotic narcissism. Neurotic narcissism starts out as normal narcissism, a healthy, natural childhood need for attention and appreciation which, when continually frustrated, becomes fixated and pathological. Neurotic narcissism stems from inadequate, insufficient, or traumatic parenting and resulting emotional injury, especially before 5 years of age, during what Freud called the pre-Oedipal stage of psychosexual development.

Children at this tender age find any serious lack of attunement and attention—or certainly, any outright abuse, neglect, or emotional, if not physical, abandonment—an insult, a psychological injury, a traumatic psychic wound which distorts perceptions of themselves, the world, and their relationship to it. These can be, but are not necessarily, isolated traumatic events. More commonly, these traumas result from some daily deficiency or toxicity in the nature of the parenting and are referred to in the literature as narcissistic injuries or narcissistic wounding. Traumatic wounding during this delicate developmental phase is not fundamentally sexual, as Freud insisted. It’s more about a lack of love, acceptance, sensitivity, support, and caring on the part of one or both parents. Such insensitivity typically stems from some measure of pathological narcissism (or worse) in the parents.

When children experience parents or caretakers as unloving, rejecting, unresponsive, or hostile, they defensively react to this narcissistic wounding by creating a shell-like false self. This false self replaces, protects, and conceals the unaccepted, unloved, and damaged true self, while presenting a persona (Jung) based on what they perceive their parents and the world want them to be. A great deal of what pathological narcissism in adults disguises is unresolved infantile anger, resentment, and rage about not being recognized, accepted, and loved for who we are. This infantile anger or rage, along with feelings and beliefs of being unlovable and unworthy of love, is buried beneath the false self. It is repressed and dissociated, but not forgotten. Nor is it forgiven. Narcissistic rage from the past tends to be re-stimulated by intimate relationships in the present. In romantic relationships, which require emotional vulnerability and intimacy, feelings are inevitably re-injured, and the childhood rage resurfaces, with a vengeance. This is why I contend in my book, Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic (1996), that intimacy is “the provocateur par excellence of the daimonic,” referring to the repressed anger or rage triggered by the vulnerability of romantic relationships.

Freud’s original theory of narcissism derives, of course, from the famous Greek myth of Narcissus. Echo, a sweet and lovely nymph, falls madly in love at first sight with the impossibly attractive youth, Narcissus, only to have her hesitant overtures rudely rejected by him. Poor Echo is crushed and runs away, leaving nothing but her mellifluous disembodied voice to remember her by. But she’s totally enraged and embittered about her love being unreciprocated by the vain, egotistical, self-absorbed Narcissus, who is too busy admiring himself to notice her. As so often happens, her love turns to hate. So she appeals to Nemesis, the Greek god of revenge and retribution, to punish Narcissus for this humiliating rejection by causing him to suffer the same excruciating fate. This is not an unfamiliar sentiment when spurned by someone we love, much as we might wish to deny it. We can all relate to having had such hateful and vengeful feelings from time to time, if we are willing to be brutally honest with ourselves.

Sympathetic with Echo’s painful plight, Nemesis answers her prayer. Soon after, Narcissus, spying his handsome reflection in a still pool of water, falls completely and utterly in love with his own mirrored image: obviously, an impossible, superficial, nonreciprocal, unilateral relationship. Unable to turn away for a moment from the fascinating reflection of his own beloved visage, even to obtain something to eat, Narcissus too eventually withers away and dies of starvation, leaving merely a lovely flower, now his namesake, in commemoration. Paradoxically, like the profoundly neurotic Narcissus, the narcissist starves for real love because he or she can never get enough in the present to compensate for the past. No amount of attention, affection, adoration, or adulation can satisfy the incessant craving for that which was never received in the distant past or can obviate the narcissist’s profound feelings of inferiority, loneliness, and unlovability. So despite their considerable charm, affability, and attractiveness, narcissists feel empty, lonely, and unlovable inside but rigidly reject real love for fear of reliving the agony of losing it. Instead, they pursue only illusory, superficial, and ultimately emotionally unavailable partners such as themselves, and typically, those who serve to promote and perpetuate their grandiose self-image or persona and feed their insatiable appetite for constant “narcissistic supplies.”