Hysterical personalities love love. They love everything that can increase their self-esteem — rapture, ecstasy, passion; love is perceived by them as the pinnacle of their experiences.
If obsessive personalities view love yearning as violence, then hysterical personalities belong to the Dionysian side of the Apollonian line of attitude towards love. They are attracted to boundless love experiences, but not in the form of self-giving, as is the case with depressive individuals, but in terms of spreading and expanding their «I», to the apotheosis of their «I». If depressive individuals seek to cross the boundaries of their own «I» for a symbiotic merger with another, with a partner, and thereby try to transcend themselves outside, then hysterical individuals try to increase the intensity of their experiences, that is, they direct love feelings inward, to satisfy their «I «. In this regard, the love relationships of hysterical personalities are characterized by intensity, passion and exactingness. They seek in love, first of all, confirmation of their «I», they like the ecstasy and intoxication that a partner gives them, they expect the climax of their life in connection with a love relationship. For them, the erotic atmosphere is a matter of course, they resort to various methods of charm and seduction, often being true masters of erotica. This implies mastery of various erotic tools — from flirting and coquetry to mastering the art of seduction in all its nuances. Tantrums tend to believe that a partner should keep them feeling their own love attraction. They have a great power of suggestion that is hard to avoid. In the consciousness of their merits and their attractiveness, they force the partner to believe in it.
When establishing a love relationship, the power of desire is important for them first of all. These people take the fortress by storm, without delaying the siege, according to the principle «veni-vidi-vici» — «I came, I saw, I conquered.» They easily come into contact with the opposite sex; communication for them is not boring and painful. They love love more than a partner, they like to get acquainted with different ways and patterns of love, as they are filled with curiosity and love hunger. They like splendor and luxury, holidays and celebrations, they are ready to celebrate on any occasion, while being in the spotlight with their charm, temperament, spontaneity and extravagant clothes. They consider it a deadly sin if the partner did not find love qualities in them or did not appreciate them — they endure this with difficulty and can hardly forgive. For them, the situation “it would be better if they had stolen a horse” is preferable than a calm, without sentimentality life. Boredom is mortally unbearable for them, they are always bored, being left alone with themselves. They are bright, lively, quirky partners, spontaneous and unpredictable in their sensual manifestations, capable of intense short-term love. They strive for pleasure, are prone to fantasizing and … often lose. To fidelity, at least their own, they are dismissive. Secret, forbidden love is especially attractive to them, as it gives scope for romantic fantasies.
There are difficult circumstances in their sexuality: erotic play, tender love foreplay is more important for them than the satisfaction of sexual desires. They like to say unexpectedly:
“Stay with me a little longer, and everything will be fine,” and it gives great pleasure to slow down or postpone the completion of sexual intimacy. They want to perpetuate their honeymoon, and after the wedding heights, they hardly endure immersion in everyday life. They love variety. If healthy attitudes regarding one’s own gender and the opposite sex are not realized, hysterical personalities easily experience a violation of their love abilities up to frigidity and violations of sexual potency. Both genders view sex as more of a self-esteem-enhancing goal and a test of how their desires affect their partner. In this they differ from obsessive individuals who use sex to bind a partner to themselves. For hysterical personalities, it is important to delight in the power of their influence on a partner, on how deeply the features of their character and their very essence influence him.
The more pronounced the specific features of the hysterical personality structure, the more demanding the manners become, the more pronounced the exactingness in confirming one’s own value. In such cases, the love relationship has a dominant attitude towards constant confirmation of its own significance, in connection with which a constant renewal of love is necessary, and the impermanence inherent in hysterical personalities is enhanced. The need to increase self-esteem at the same time leads to new attempts to surprise others, to create an unusual, festive atmosphere.
Naturally, aging causes a decrease in attractiveness, which is predominantly external, superficial, which, accordingly, leads to the emergence of age-related crises.
Tantrums need a partner, but not in the same way as depressed individuals who cannot live without committing themselves to him; they need a mirror that reflects their ability to arouse love in order to increase their own unstable self-esteem. Their self-admiration needs constant confirmation. They easily succumb to flattery, which they willingly believe. They need a partner, first of all, in order to enlist his confirmation of their charm, beauty, value and attractiveness. In this regard, they are prone to narcissistic partner choice, however, not due to the fear of «all other» persons of the opposite sex, as is the case with schizoids, but especially because they hope to find their own likeness in the partner, in which they regain and love themselves.
Often, hysterical personalities of both sexes find nondescript and inconspicuous partners for themselves in order to rise above their background and be the object of their unconditional adoration. This is reminiscent of the fable about the peacock who wanted to marry a simple hen: in the registry book, the raven noted with surprise that the beautiful peacock wanted to register a marriage with a nondescript hen due to the fact that, as he pointedly noted, “I and my wife are crazy love me.» Such a strong thirst for constant confirmation of one’s own value and significance, of course, cannot be quenched, no partner can fully satisfy it. In this case, they are looking for a new partner who could play the role assigned to him by a hysterical personality. Desperate adventurers and cunning manipulators of men’s hearts are, as it were, scalp collectors, whose self-esteem depends on the number of their victims and for whom love is a game for which one has to pay a high price.
As great as their demands for love, so great are the disappointments associated with these demands and hopes: dissatisfaction, whims, bad mood and caustic accusations after each new love adventure often end in financial costs and the undisguised persecution of a partner whom they consider as their own and who , in their opinion, is not entitled to play an independent role. Since the self-esteem of hysterical personalities is associated solely with evidence of love for them, they are insatiable in the means and methods by which they achieve this: they constantly compare a partner with others «who know how to love truly», while implying what others are able to do for them whatever they wish; they make scenes and passionately reproach the partner for “not loving them enough”, they react violently, catastrophically, if the partner moves away from them. At the same time, such a mixture of feelings and calculation is observed that the partner cannot understand what is the matter.
If love or marriage is based on illusory expectations, then the requirements for a partner exceed what the hysterical person puts in. This causes disappointment, this kind of relationship is recognized as unsuccessful and a new search for «great love» begins. Partner relationships of hysterical personalities are characterized by frequent breaks and reconciliations; in the end they demand compensation for their disappointment, in new relationships they are overly demanding, which becomes a source of new failures and failures.
We all get our first experience with the opposite sex from our parents, brothers and sisters. The relationships our parents have with each other—whether their marriage is based on love or otherwise—the love experiences of our brothers and sisters—all shape our expectations of partnership, love, and sex. Whether our parents have the happiness of mutual love or do without idealizing each other, pity, despise or even hate each other, whether we know about their opportunities, concerns and problems, their relationships, their joys and their mutual trust — our views depend on this. to choose a partner, our expectations and our ideas about their implementation in mutual existence. Parents, who are the ideal of superiority and infallibility for children, are forced to show them the perfect marriage, no matter what happens behind the scenes of this game. This ideal is what grown-up children hope to find in a partner. Parents who do not meet their children’s needs to create ideas of the opposite sex cause them frustration and fear, which leaves a negative imprint on the expectations associated with partnerships.
The love life of hysterical personalities is further complicated by the fact that, being fixed on their first connection with a person of the opposite sex, they cannot completely renounce identification with her. In this respect, tantrums remain at that stage of the child’s development, corresponding to the age of 4-5, when, as we now know, he identifies with the impressions received earlier and develops the initial preforms of his ideas about his own and the opposite sex. Fundamentally, there are the following possibilities here: the childish reverence or idealization of a parent of the opposite sex or a brother (sister) in relation to a partner is repeated, from whom they expect the embodiment of the “dream of a man” (“dream of a woman”), or previously experienced disappointment, fear and hatred, caused by unprocessed childhood impressions of the person who cared for the child, how negative experiences are transferred to the partner. In this case, the partner is treated with prejudice and from the very beginning of the relationship, it is expected that it will be painful. There is a projection of the original image of the mother or father onto the partner and installation on this initial image, regardless of what role the partner actually plays, i.e., getting stuck on the long-standing role of “son” or “daughter”.
A son disappointed by his mother may develop misogyny, he takes revenge on his partners for the disappointment suffered, becoming like Don Juan, who seduced and then left women, causing them the same pain that his mother caused him. Daughters disappointed by their father take revenge on men in the same way: they develop man-hatred or a false idea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbfemale emancipation — they not only strive for the realization of equal rights with men and increase their own importance, but «turn the spear in the opposite direction», demanding equality for reasons of revenge and while taking a purely feminine position. Or they cast men aside, viewing contact with them as meeting with an unloving, rejecting father («if you do not love me, then I do not want to pay attention to you, and get out» — the psychodynamic basis of some virgins). Some of them, like Circe from Homer’s Odyssey, attract men only with their sexuality, choosing various forms of seduction, and in doing so use and humiliate men, «turning them into pigs.» Close to this type are those women who make excessive physical, psychological and material demands on men, using, exhausting and depriving them of strength and power, as if “castrating” them and humiliating their manhood. Such «demonic» women prone to ruin and destruction are often found in Strindberg’s novels and plays. In the end, disappointment with the opposite sex or fear of it leads to homosexuality. It may also be that in this case a sister or brother replaces the mother or father.
The connection with the first impressions of a person of the opposite sex caring for a child is a universal phenomenon, which the French expressed as follows: «We always return to our first love.»
Examples of dependence on the person who cared for the child in early childhood, on their «family romance» are so well known that hysterical personalities often fall into a situation of «triangular» dependence, in which their position between two parents subconsciously repeats and which is often found as the basis structuring personality in a family with an only child. It seems to them that, being in such a “triangle”, they are thrown to the will of fate and often, referring to “fate”, they say that they are constantly “pushed” into such relationships that all the men or women they met, already connected to others. In fact, in search of a partner who is connected with another, knowing that he is not free, hysterical personalities, as it were, renew their long-standing rivalry with their mother or father. They are fixed on taking the chosen one away from the other, entering into a rival relationship with the abandoned one, and in every possible way strive to prick him, at the same time demanding seriousness, responsibility and manifestation of stormy joy from the new connection from the lover.
Getting to know the love stories of each person helps to understand their behavior. Hysterical individuals continue to sin and make mistakes, while denying any connection of their behavior with the family history, and believe that their femininity or masculinity developed normally. Sometimes they have no idea about the development of their own gender role and respond to any sexual demands, making their gender identification in its various versions dependent on its evaluation by a partner. At the same time, it should be borne in mind that the development of femininity or masculinity also depends on mental and sexual maturity.
The main problems in the life of hysterics are seen in the connection of love and partnerships with their illusory expectations and ideas about life, love, marriage and, in general, about the opposite sex. Their demanding position in relation to others, without being ready to satisfy the needs of the partner and take care of him, leads them to new disappointments, giving them the right to conclude that the life attitudes of hysterics are based on illusions and therefore disappointment is so inevitable. Passionate and active desire, combined with requests full of joyful anticipation without their own participation in creating such relationships, is the problematic side of these personalities.
When choosing a partner, their position, opportunities, title and other external attributes that characterize their value and significance are important for them. And in this they remain children, who are impressed by external attributes, which, as it seems to them, are the source of a good life; they tend to blame their partner for their disappointments. Fear of their own inadequacy evokes in them an attraction to confirm their ability to love, their self-worth, and they realize this attraction in their demands on the external environment.
The tendency to project one’s own shortcomings naturally causes many problems in partnerships. Hysterical personalities can use various types of reproaches and find many reasons to blame a partner, making tendentious accusations, distorting facts, using «crooked logic», slander and intrigue. The relationship between hysterics and individuals with obsessive development, which are, as it were, opposite in structure, develops especially hard. The more the partner with obsessive development inexorably and consistently insists on his own and categorically proves his case in the current situation, the more the hysterical partner deviates from such a sequence, resorting to an incomprehensible “logic”, jumping, as described by Schulz-Henke, from one thought to another , which resembles a completely random movement of pieces on a chessboard without established rules. At the same time, tantrums, on the one hand, tend to get rid of an annoying partner, and on the other hand, they want to dispose of him. Being flexible enough, they do not burn bridges behind them and leave an open way back. Instead, however, the obsessive developmental partner remains back against the wall, unsuccessfully trying to understand and interpret the experiences of his hysterical partner.
Schizoid partners instinctively avoid hysterical personalities, they easily guess them and show little willingness to admire them and confirm their claims. Therefore, hysterical personalities are more willing to choose partners with depressive development, who are ready to continue to fulfill the increased demands of hysterics; the duration of such an association is a good price for depressed individuals.
The connection between two hysterical partners satisfies them only when the hysterical features are not very pronounced. Otherwise, rivalry and mutual teasing is an inevitable pitfall of such relationships.
In fiction, we find many examples of the depiction of hysterical women («Louise» by S. Maugham or Scarlett in M. Mitchell’s novel «Gone with the Wind»). From the letters of Pushkin and Fontan, the difficulties in relationships with women are well known, in whom the hysterical personality structure prevailed. The same kind of collisions are described in The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish.
Video from Yana Shchastya: interview with professor of psychology N.I. Kozlov
Topics of conversation: What kind of woman do you need to be in order to successfully marry? How many times do men get married? Why are there so few normal men? Childfree. Parenting. What is love? A story that couldn’t be better. Paying for the opportunity to be close to a beautiful woman.