ABSTRACT
The impulsive, chaotic, infantile personality functioning on a borderline level has a better prognosis than the narcissistic patient, although superficially his love life may seem disturbed, inappropriate, and immature. Sexual promiscuity on this structural level may reflect the rapid breakdown of the primitive idealization typifying his sexual involvements and the desperate search for another object with whom a primitively idealized relation can be reestablished. Patients representing the next level of the continuum, characterized by the capacity for falling in love and for establishing a stable love relation, although accompanied by some degree of sexual inhibition, reflect the predominance of oedipal conflicts as the overriding aetiological factors. Clinically, one finds that the full capacity for orgasm in sexual intercourse is present both in severe narcissistic personalities and in mature people, and that sexual inhibition is present both in the most severe type of narcissistic isolation and in relatively mild neuroses and character pathology.
