What we do with and without erotic transference?

Theory and practice of psychoanalysis

Abstract

In the proposed article, the author argues that ambivalent intertransference exists from the very beginning of the psychoanalytic process and represents a dynamically changing balance between erotic and aggressive components. Erotic transference and countertransference are inseparably linked with the primal scenes of the patient and the analyst respectively. The analyst's ability to maintain and work through erotic transference without its transition into “hot” phases; to get out of them, if they arise, preserving the psychoanalytic process – all this directly depends on the stability of his internal triangularity, namely, on a good enough acceptance of his own primal scene. This will allow him to accept all kinds of paternal and maternal projections of the patient and to be for him in transference and countertransference different images of mother and father at the same time. The analyst's ability of simultaneous unconscious empathic identifi cation with the latter directly depends on the, to a certain extent, confl ict–free inner space of the primal scene that has developed in his own analysis - the erotic coexistence of the paternal and maternal, masculine and feminine. The theoretical positions are illustrated in detail by the analysis of the psychotherapeutic case.