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Is the analyst's love essential to liberating the patient's ability to love? Or might it represent a lurking reimprisonment in a stultifying and repetitive dead end? These questions are considered in the context of a reexamination of three seminal papers by Freud, Loewald and Benjamin and in discussion of detailed clinical case. The paper suggests that in order to fully accomplish the task of freeing patients to be able to love more fully and authentically in their real lives, the analytic relationship must be able to contain and embrace both the imprisoning and the liberating potential of love as real possibilities in the analytic engagement.
She Loved Me
SOME YEARS AGO I WAS CONSULTED BY A WOMAN IN HER MID THIRTIES who had a very successful career in another field. But Linda wanted to study psychology. She had heard that I knew about doctoral programs and asked to meet with me. She told me that although she enjoyed her current work, it had been more her father's idea than her own. Now, having completed an analysis, she decided that she wanted to do what she had always most loved. I was impressed by the personal awareness she showed in the way she spoke and commented that she must have had a good analysis. She said she had. With my own thinking at the time quite caught up with the relational perspective that was exploding all around, I said offhandedly that her analyst must not have been very classical. "No" she said, "she was very classical. She almost never answered questions and I never really knew very much about her. But I found it very helpful." I asked what she thought was helpful. Linda replied immediately, "She loved me, I knew she loved me." I said, "How do you mean?" She replied, "I just knew it. In our last session she said something about how she appreciated working with me. It was the most personal thing she had said to me. Well, I got up from the couch and turned around and looked at her and I said, 'You don't appreciate working with me, you love me! I know you love me. I have always known that.'"
Someone Is Crazy About You
When R came...