Love and Work: Analysis and Ordinary Ongoingness

Abstract

To explore the analyst's loving feelings, this article conceives of a wide territory of affective experience marked by the boundaries of a certain affinity with the swooning crush to a melancholy, resigned constancy, contrasts that conform roughly to the categories of the spontaneous and the disciplined, echoing Hoffman's (1998) axis that has now become virtually canonical in contemporary relational thinking about psychoanalytic work. Here I oscillate between these affective experiences, knowing that their relationship is not polar, that the dialectic they activate is not exhaustive, but in the hope that conversation can continue on a theme that can be usefully amplified. I seek here to flesh out the lived experience of the analyst's love, the struggle to maintain a relational neutrality, defined by Davies and Frawley (1994) as the capacity to avoid becoming entrenched in any single transference/countertransference configuration. I want to explore a relational neutrality that involves the analyst's love for the analysand as part of its ground. In order to do so, I present material from an analysis where the themes of love, sadism, enactments, and disclosure are detailed utilizing the conceptual axes of ordinary—special, and discipline—spontaneity.

Notes

¹Seth learned of the death of my former partner when he saw a brochure for workshops I conducted on bereavement for clinicians and for clinicians who were HIV positive.