„We must love in order not to fall ill, and we are bound to fall ill if we are unable to love” – claims Freud. Love has an ambivalent status in psychoanalytic discourse. Although the importance of love for human life and health, both mental and physical, has been recognized since Freud, in the psychoanalytic literature it has been marginalized and relatively neglected. Falling in love implies the ability to connect idealization with erotic desire and the ability to achieve deep object relations, and the development of ego-identity is the prerequisite for it. A man and a woman who discover their attraction for each other, who are able to establish a full sexual relationship that carries with it emotional intimacy and a sense of fulfilment of their ideals, are expressing their capacity not only to unconsciously link eroticism and tenderness, sexuality and the ego ideal, but also to recruit aggression in the service of love. In the emotional and sexual relationship of a couple, the superego plays a crucial role. According to Kernberg, the couple as an entity also activates both partners' conscious and unconscious superego functions, resulting in the couple's acquiring, over time, a superego system of its own. The effect of this new superego system on the couple's relationship depends on the maturity of the superego of each partner. Normal capacity to love others and oneself requires an adequate integration of love and hate. Developmental deviations in the formation of the ego-ideal and superego, perturbations of the ego, pathology in the internalization of object relationships, and pathological mechanisms of idealization can lead to the development of pathological love relationships.