Object love stands as one of the foundational developmental achievements charted across the depth-psychology corpus, yet its precise meaning, trajectory, and value are contested from multiple theoretical vantages. In classical Freudian and post-Freudian theory — most systematically in Karl Abraham’s libido schema — object love designates the capacity to direct affective and erotic investment toward an external person as a whole, differentiated being, marking the terminus of a developmental arc that passes through narcissistic, oral, anal, and partial-object stages. Abraham’s famous stage of ‘object-love with exclusion of the genitals’ captures the hysterical compromise that falls short of full genital integration. Lacan radically de-idealized this telos, arguing that the analytic tradition immediately effaced its most subversive discovery — the partial object — by redirecting it toward a ‘dialectic of totalisation,’ a ‘flat, round, spherical’ total object that forecloses rather than illuminates desire. Edinger, writing from a Jungian developmental perspective, treats object love as the mature transformation of ‘needy love,’ achieved when the libido ceases to be organised around power-striving and projection. Fromm reframes the problem entirely: the question of love is not the problem of the object but of the faculty itself, and exclusive love directed at a single object betrays love’s essential universality. Klein’s account of early object relations offers a genetic underside to the concept, showing how splitting, projection, and idealisation precede any capacity for whole-object relating. The term thus anchors debates about development, desire, narcissism, partial objects, and the therapeutic aim itself.