Analytic Love: Possibilities and Limitations

Abstract

In this article, I consider how the psychoanalytic situation functions to facilitate, but also to inhibit, the intimate, loving connection that develops between analyst and patient. The article is a meditation on the intricate interplay of possibility and limitation in psychoanalysis. My thesis is that the very factors that make therapy safe enough, and rich with possibility for the deepest interconnectedness, can also exert a constraining influence on our work. The clinical approach I am most interested in exploring involves an engagement of certain loving capacities, including those of discernment, critical thought, committed challenge, generosity of spirit, and acceptance.

Notes

¹There is every indication that Speilrein came to know Jung intimately, an example of the type of theraputic possibility explored in this article. A case could be made that she had a deeper, more comprehensive sense of her analyst than he did of her, and that she tried to work therapeutically with him, often in the face of his considerable resistance. In part she was motivated by her need to make him more available to her as analyst—and perhaps as lover—and in part by concern for his welfare. This type of situation may be more commonplace in analytic therapy than we would like to believe. It is interesting, but goes beyond the scope of this article, to consider the ways in which the patient's role, which involves considerable license to talk and to be, without concern for therapeutic outcomes, may afford the patient opportunities for the expression of discernment and insights that may be overlooked in many analyses.

^{2 2}It is true that Freud, in advocating the analyst's evenly hovering attention, created space for a mode of participation that integrated the analyst's affective and associational capacities with his secondary process. Despite this, the freedom and spontaneity embodied in the analyst's receptive resonance with the patient was, traditionally, rarely communicated openly. Inevitably, what cannot be said, cannot be fully experienced (Wilner, 1998).