The Potion

. . . as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly.

One image for the psychoanalytic situation might be the legend of Medusa and Perseus. In that myth the hero’s bright shield provides, simultaneously, a mirror and a protection. The terrifying monster with snaky hair is visible in a polished, reflective surface where the image is no longer fatal or immobilizing. A mirror that is also a shield, the monster held in the shield—an image, one might propose, for the transference (Pinsky 2012, p. 53).

But that idealized image fails to include other, more unstable and conflictual aspects of the psychoanalytic situation—an extraordinary arrangement where two people talk in a way that, in Freud’s words, has no parallel: “The course the analyst must pursue,” he writes, “. . . is one for which there is no model in real life” (1915, p. 166). And though the image of a reflective and containing shield has its merits, the arrangement also invites—intends to invite—(here’s another, different image) a conflagration.

“No model in real life”—that is an astonishing assertion. What is Freud talking about? If there is no model for this artifice-that-is-not-artificial, what form does it take? What dangers does it carry? What image or formulation is adequate to those incendiary dangers? Richard Roud wrote of Jean Renoir’s masterwork, The Rules of the Game, that “if France were destroyed tomorrow and nothing remained but this film, the whole country and its civilization could be reconstructed from it” (1980, p. 841).

And what about the “talking cure”?

Imagine the entire psychoanalytic literature is destroyed tomorrow. Psychoanalysis vanishes, but you can bury a time capsule for digging up after a few hundred years. Into that capsule you can put a few papers—a handful of short works people of the future might use to reconstruct psychoanalysis: as mirror, as shield, and also as something more ambiguous, even messy.

Over time, I’ve added or removed papers from my own imaginary capsule. But certain things are always there—for example, Hans Loewald’s paper on therapeutic action (1960), Paula Heimann’s “On Counter-transference” (1950), Winnicott’s “The Use of an Object” (1969). Sometimes I include Brian Bird’s “Notes on Transference” (1972), Macalpine’s “The Development of Transference” (1950), a paper by Melanie Klein, John Klauber, or André Green. It’s always useful to argue why a particular essay is indispensable to reconstructing psychoanalysis.

For me, as maybe not for some, Freud always takes up a lot of room in the capsule, with two of his briefest papers competing for first and second place: “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914) and “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915). In these two closely linked short pieces (barely twenty pages in all)—rich, maddening, impossible to exhaust—in these two essays, I find the foundation.

But if I have to choose, “Observations on Transference-Love” reigns alone at the top of the list. It’s the quintessential document—defining the clinical setup, charting its dangers, providing ethical precepts for guiding treatment, and perhaps above all, in the context of those ethical questions: confronting the immense power and necessary strangeness of the transference, that form of love, or attachment, a shield and a mirror and a—a volatile something—that fuels the process and can burst into flame. Is it a flammable potion? A magic formula?

When I first read the essay many years ago as a graduate student, it confused me with its turnabouts; annoyed me with its tone about women; bemused me with its wit and off-color comedy—I think of the demeaning description of “women of elemental passionateness who . . . are accessible only to ‘the logic of soup, with dumplings for arguments’” (pp. 166–167), and of the sexualized joke about dogs and sausages Freud invokes to capture the forbidden in the analytic doctor’s “line of action”:

For the doctor, ethical motives unite with the technical ones to restrain him from giving the patient his love. . . . He must not stage the scene of a dog-race in which the prize was to be a garland of sausages but which some humorist spoilt by throwing a single sausage on the track. The result was, of course, that the dogs threw themselves upon it and forgot all about the race and about the garland that was luring them to victory in the far distance [p. 169].

In the effort to chart how the analyst must behave “not to come to grief” over the erotic transference (p. 163), Freud takes a curious tone with this joke—is he condescending? Does he smirk, revealing his discomfort? Nevertheless, in its conversational manner, and its remarkable twists and turns, “Observations on Transference-Love” mesmerized me. Not only does the essay lay down technical principles and ethical precepts, but it teaches us that they are the same thing.

This idea, that for the analyst the ethical and the technical are inseparable, will be a central point of my effort to examine the force—we call it the transference—that propels the healing process. Though written a hundred years ago, and cast as instructions for the beginner, Freud’s paper is more relevant today, in my view, amid the welter of accumulated orthodoxies and refinements and revisions.

“Observations on Transference-Love” is Freud’s methodical argument for what he calls the “fundamental principle of the treatment being carried out in abstinence” (p. 165)—the analyst says, “No,” tacitly setting up the forbidden: an absolute embedded in the restrictions of the setting. With abstinence comes the closely associated though distinct notion of neutrality, the former referring to the analyst’s behavior (he does not yield to the patient’s invitation), the latter to the analyst’s attitude, a benevolent receptivity not to be confused with coldness, or not caring. Freud never meant by these often caricatured terms “the deprivation of everything that the patient desires” (p. 165); nor did he think the human analyst “proof against every temptation” (p. 166). With these two concepts, abstinence and neutrality, plus the essential third element—the patient’s requirement to say everything, the pledge to candor—with these three structuring principles, Freud gives us psychoanalytic treatment. Everything follows in a complex way from that basis: principles that are spacious ideals, and never intended as tidy rules.

Abstinence, neutrality, and candor, then, structure the psychoanalytic situation. Two people, patient and analyst, meet privately and regularly; they don’t touch—implicitly proscribing sexual activity, which becomes taboo (incestuous); and the patient freely speaks his or her desire to the analyst, who listens with a benign receptivity, not to judge but to understand, and to offer back that understanding—a reciprocal offering called “interpretation.” I’ve identified this as a combustible arrangement. The image of fire is Freud’s own—he speaks of “highly explosive forces” unleashed by the transference, whereby “a woman patient shows by unmistakable indications, or openly declares, that she has fallen in love, as any other mortal woman might, with the doctor who is analysing her” (p. 159). Freud joins the simile of combustion to another figurative element—theatrical performance: “There is a complete change of scene; it is as though some piece of make-believe had been stopped by the sudden irruption of reality—as when, for instance, a cry of fire is raised during a theatrical performance” (p. 162). This alarming “irruption of reality” in the psychoanalytic theater is the woman patient’s “passionate demand for love,” a fiery desire evoked in the developing transference. Something comparable to the power of theater art is interrupted by a different kind of power, more like the physical threats of fire and crowd panic. Unlike the theater, however, the analytic stage invites real risk, even requires it; and the psychoanalyst knows that he “needs to proceed with as much caution and conscientiousness as a chemist” (p. 170).

But the fire alarm is in the script. The abstinent analyst performs as a deliberately incendiary human lure in a process focusing and magnifying the patient’s love cravings. Freud is clear that anything interfering with “the continuation of the treatment may be an expression of resistance,” and he has no doubt, in this instance, that the woman’s passionate intensity is “the work of resistance” (p. 162)—Freud’s term for those unconscious forces in the patient interfering with remembering, and manifesting her reciprocal “No.” Suddenly, the analyst is center stage in a “real” life drama, the patient seems “swallowed up in her love” and wants it returned—her docility, her intelligence, her insight are gone, memory is replaced by alarming passion and the treatment comes to a halt. In this way the resistance makes use of the woman’s love, “acting as an agent provocateur” (p. 163), intensifying her passion in order to hinder the treatment.

Or so it seems. But Freud tells us that appearances are deceptive: though the woman’s “falling in love in the transference” (p. 162) might at first look disadvantageous, the same agent provocateur that threatens the scene also animates the treatment, dramatizing the patient’s inexpressible (because unconscious) difficulty. (The link to “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” written one year earlier, is apparent.)

As Max Hernandez concisely puts this transference/resistance paradox, “Love is the motor of the analytic cure as well as the main obstacle to it” (1993, p. 98). Freud, having written eight times in the essay’s first pages simply that the woman “falls in love” with the doctor, here the crucial ninth time deftly adds the phrase “in the transference,” explicitly qualifying his subject. Is the temperature building as he elaborates on this induced passion? One could say the terms “transference” and “resistance,” though necessary to structure the setting and guide the analyst’s thinking, serve also to deflect from the strangeness of what the analyst sets in motion: Freud is perhaps muffling the doctor’s own activity as agent provocateur—someone who offers himself as a hook to snare desire.

Freud’s hypothetical patient serves as an extreme instance of transference intensity. However, he acknowledges the narrowness of his focus, noting in a footnote the “less tender feelings” that can manifest in the transference (p. 161 n.1). How strange are the analytic form and function? Masud Khan elaborates Freud’s achievement in structuring a ritual scene:

how ingeniously Freud had ritualistically established taboos that made incest and parricide in this very exclusive human community of two persons impossible. The basic taboos are: of motility (lying on the couch), and of sight and touch (the ego functions that normally intensify excitement most readily). To these taboos Freud had adjoined a revolutionary transgression: he invited and facilitated the patient to express his incestuous and parricidal wishes through the Word. Thus the taboos create that area of illusion where language explores and expresses the wish-system. Without this illusion language would yield merely humiliation and remorse [1973, p. 233].

Khan here couples taboo with “revolutionary transgression,” filling out, perhaps, Freud’s astonishing “no model.” In “Observations on Transference-Love” Freud struggles to measure the audacity of the analyst’s activity: Psychoanalysis creates a “no, you may not” coupled with a “yes, you must”—don’t move, don’t look, don’t touch, but speak the words that expressively reflect the desire.

Like a stage play, the artifice of the psychoanalytic process, as Freud describes it, contains the transgressive by ritualizing it. “Observations on Transference-Love” refers explicitly to magic rituals. Responding to the patient’s erotic transference by urging that it be renounced or suppressed, Freud writes, “would be just as though, after summoning up a spirit from the underworld by cunning spells, one were to send him down again without having asked him a single question” (p. 164). Neither rejecting the love nor responding to it—the course for which “there is no model in real life”—the analyst instead treats it as unreal. In the analyst’s not acting on the love, coupled with the expectation that the patient speak it, the patient’s longing persists and intensifies.

The “cunning spells” or magic potions have had unintended consequences. As in Freud’s own time, the “boundary violation” (the discipline’s current euphemism) remains embarrassingly common. Usually the clinician is a man, often professionally distinguished, with years of experience, and the patient a younger woman. Freud treats the analyst who succumbs to this pattern with a dry, corrective irony: “[the analyst] must recognize that the patient’s falling in love is induced by the analytic situation and is not to be attributed to the charms of his own person; so that he has no grounds whatever for being proud of such a ‘conquest’, as it would be called outside analysis” (pp. 160–161). In other words, he must not confuse the enchantment of the situation with “the charms of his own person.”

Can erotic feelings be so delusory, ductile, nearly arbitrary, induced by a construct? The Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt describes the fairies’ “love juice” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Desires in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are intense, irrational and alarmingly mobile. This mobility, the speed with which desire can be detached from one object and attached to a different object, does not diminish the exigency of the passion, for the lovers are convinced at every moment that their choices are irrefutably rational and irresistibly compelling. . . . The emblem, as well as agent, of a dangerously mobile desire is the fairies’ love juice. No human being in the play experiences a purely abstract, objectless desire; when you desire, you desire someone. But the love juice is the distilled essence of erotic mobility itself, and it is appropriately in the power of the fairies [1997, p. 810].

The two people in the consulting room, analyst and patient, are merely talking, but in a way that invites the mobility of desire, with an intensity like the stage-woods of Midsummer Eve. The psychoanalytic process devises that love juice, channels it, and distributes it for a special use. The fairies’ potion is in us all, with its insistent, dizzying, fluent power. Easy here to see the likeness to Freud’s “cathexis,” which, as Paula Heimann describes it, “presupposes the existence of a mobile energy, derived from the instinctual reservoir, which can be moved from one place to another, from the subject to an object, from one object to others” (1956, p. 303). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream do the characters truly love each other? Or is it the potion?

In the analytic situation, however, the potion—Greenblatt’s “distilled essence of erotic mobility itself”—is not in the power of a magical creature in a theatrical drama. It’s in the power of the human analyst on the tilted, and private, analytic stage. The analyst plays with fire! What brings about such madness? Historically, a standard explanation of the “irruption of fire” attributes the patient’s falling in love to the arrangement itself—the rules, the frame, the analyst’s technical procedures—tending to leave the person of the analyst out of it. He (or she) doesn’t make it happen, it’s the setting.

On such a tidy but limited understanding, the situation itself, supposedly, entices, while the analyst is merely the analyst, doing analysis: an innocent, more like a steward or dull chaperone than a breathing human lure for someone’s love cravings. And in a sense this is true: the analyst’s most essential and difficult task is to restore the virtuality of the transference—Freud’s “intermediate region between illness and real life” (1914, p. 154) where healing takes place—and through his interpretive understanding to get things back up onto the play stage. In that sense, the interpreting analyst is both reliable shepherd and guide: in finding words to convey his understanding of the sources of the patient’s suffering, he is guardian of the treatment.

But why do I call this way of understanding limited? Because it skirts the issue. To assign the “seduction” merely to the situation is self-justifying, a way of deflecting, even disavowing, the real—and in a sense uncanny?—discomfort and danger inherent in the analyst’s position. Sidney Tarachow some fifty years ago astutely observed that “object hunger is as much a problem of the therapist as it is the patient’s” (1963, p. 17)—both people have “a basic urge to mutual acting out,” a human need and wish for a real object (1962, p. 380). The analyst’s act that transforms the real into an as if is interpretation: “The imposition of this barrier [to reality] creates a therapeutic task for both patient and therapist” (1962, p. 380), countering the inevitable temptations to come closer together. Hans Loewald’s idea is similar, describing the analyst’s task as a “persistent renunciation of involvement, a constant activity of uninvolving which tends to impel the patient to understand himself in his involvement” (1971, p. 63).

The analyst’s interpretation, then, is another form of “No, we may not,” the same proscription that ignites desire, for both people. As Friedman puts it (1991), “in the back of his mind the analyst always knew . . . that he could not divorce himself from his procedures. He knew that it was he (or she) who enticed and endangered the patient” (p. 94). The “no” of the setting’s restrictions stirs up the “yes” of “I want,” thus directly implicating the analyst in the combustion. Fidias Cesio is helpfully blunt: “In the very act of enunciating the setting as a ‘prohibition’ of direct sexual activity, the analyst is the protagonist of incest but, as Freud says, he is so with due ‘considerations of analytic technique’, that is, as a technical device . . .” (1993, p. 139). With that extraordinary coupling—“the protagonist of incest . . . as a technical device”—psychoanalytic treatment takes its strange shape.

Freud struggles with precisely this discomfort and danger in “Observations on Transference-Love.” In ending, Freud returns to fire, and the essay concludes, to my ear, with bravado:

But to believe that the psychoneuroses are to be conquered by operating with harmless little remedies is grossly to under-estimate those disorders both as to their origin and their practical importance. No; in medical practice there will always be room for the ‘ferrum’ and the ‘ignis’ side by side with the ‘medicina’; and in the same way we shall never be able to do without a strictly regular, undiluted psycho-analysis which is not afraid to handle the most dangerous mental impulses and to obtain mastery over them for the benefit of the patient [1915, p. 171].

Ferrum, ignis, and medicina. There are “highly explosive forces” in the room, there’s chemistry, and “chemistry” indicates mutual attraction. Patient and analyst are two people, not one person tended by an articulate robot.

Three years earlier, in the remarkable closing passage of “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912a), Freud makes vivid the inevitable heat and struggle—indeed, a battle—between two people, patient and analyst, the forces alive in the room: “But it should not be forgotten that it is precisely [transference phenomena] that do us the inestimable service of making the patient’s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses immediate and manifest. For when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie” (p. 108).

I agree with those who view the psychoanalytic situation as a structured invitation to fall in love, a form of arrested or circumscribed seduction, courting the transgressive. To seduce, from the Latin seducere, is to lead away. “Desire, in human sexuality, is always transgression; and being something that is never completely fulfilled, its object cannot ever offer full satisfaction” (Kohon 1984, p. 77). As a human medium the analyst’s character is always being tested, as he (or she) resists the enticements and provocations not only of the transference—a psychological seduction, leading away, with the aim to bring back—but of the actual real-life, two-person engagement through which the “bringing-back” unfolds.

Here are two crucial, interrelated ideas: First, the analyst’s moral integrity is a technical requirement as well as the patient’s ultimate safeguard; Ida Macalpine, echoing Freud, understood this point in 1950, locating “form” in the analyst’s moral integrity: “it is a technical device,” Macalpine writes, “and not a moral precept” (p. 527). And second, in a profound paradox, abstinence is alluring—the principle of abstinence protects but, by design, also heats the treatment crucible (Pinsky 2011). That paradox captures the analyst’s inevitable necessary discomfort. In his remarkable 1912 paper, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love,” from the same period as Papers on Technique, Freud writes: “It can be easily shown that the psychical value of erotic needs is reduced as soon as their satisfaction becomes easy. An obstacle is required in order to heighten libido; and where natural resistances to satisfaction have not been sufficient men have at all times erected conventional ones” (1912b, p. 187).

The analyst, one could say, intentionally erects such an obstacle, though “conventional” would apply only within the strange ritual form. Questions follow: Outside the form, in “ordinary” life, might the analyst’s abstinent conduct be located on a continuum that includes, at its far end, the sadistic (if not the perverse)? Is the membrane that separates the two—the manners of ordinary life and of the clinical realm—more porous than that? However one answers, it seems reasonable that, when Freud addresses this “universal” predisposition, he plants (though perhaps not consciously) a significant warning: the “tendency to debasement” hovers in the treatment room.

“The aim of the analyst,” writes Forrester (1990), “is always double: to entice or attract, and then to decline and evade, to defer and delay” (p. 84). In more colloquial language, the analyst’s technical stance, structurally, includes elements of a tease, “the queasy uncertainty of [a] shifting come-on” (Friedman 2005, p. 426). Freud recognized early, in Studies on Hysteria, writes Friedman, “that [the analyst] was doing something forbidden to physicians; he was deliberately courting a personal, affective intimacy.” He quotes Freud: the patients “put themselves in the doctor’s hands and place their confidence in him—a step which in other situations is only taken voluntarily and never at the doctor’s request (Breuer and Freud [1895], p. 266)” (1997, p. 25; emphasis added).

To the volatile mix we can add what Freud, in the same early text, calls the “special solicitude inherent in the treatment” (p. 302)—a focused attention that builds rapport (transformed into tidier psychoanalytic terms, the “unobjectionable positive transference”) but at the same time, joined with the analyst’s abstinence, courts the erotic transference. “In not a few cases,” writes Freud, “especially with women and where it is a question of elucidating erotic trains of thought, the patient’s co-operation becomes a personal sacrifice, which must be compensated by some substitute for love. The trouble taken by the physician and his friendliness have to suffice for such a substitute” (Breuer and Freud 1895, p. 301). The analyst compensates the patient for her sacrifice—her “cooperation” in speaking her desire—by a “substitute”: his own effort and friendly attention. It hardly sounds, on the face of it, like a fair or reasonable deal.

What kind of caring is this? What are its ingredients? Moreover, what will the patient—besotted by the potion—make of what’s offered? All of this teasing, all this illusion and uncertainty, this courting and playing with mysteries, with inexplicable and semi-explicable meanings. Is the process natural? Unseemly? Is it trickery? As I write these sentences, I hear the Platters singing Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach’s Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, in 1958:

They said some day you’ll find

All who love are blind

When your heart’s on fire

You must realize

Smoke gets in your eyes.

How does this induced blindness lead to transformed vision?

I want to be clear: I’m not saying the situation is corrupt but that it is corruptible, perhaps inherently so. ¹ “Corruption” suggests something dishonest, and covert. At the very least, the enterprise is full of paradoxes and contradictions: the situation is real, it’s unreal; it’s staged, it’s real life; it’s personal, it’s impersonal; it’s personal, it’s theoretical; it’s an artifice, it’s not artificial; it starts with “no,” it stirs up “yes”; it provides safeties, these safeties heat things up; it frustrates, it relaxes; it forbids, it permits; if it succeeds, it disappoints (try saying that about your orthopedic surgery); “psycho-analytic treatment is founded on truthfulness” (p. 164) but begins with a seduction; it’s founded on truthfulness but self-deception is fundamental to being human—no concept is more psychoanalytic than this last.

What will prepare the analyst for such an “impossible profession”?

This device, or ritual, that has “no model” can be justified only if it provides an avenue to a region of extraordinary complexity—the unconscious mind—otherwise inaccessible, and potentially the source of restorative insight, and healing.

Writing about the analyst’s own analysis in his 1937 “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Freud says (with striking simplicity) that the analyst’s analysis “has accomplished its purpose if it gives the learner a firm conviction of the existence of the unconscious, if it enables him, when repressed material emerges, to perceive in himself things which would otherwise be incredible to him . . .” (p. 248; emphasis added). Can one believe it? What gives firm conviction, and credibility, to the “incredible”? The complexities of psychic life are so manifold, the interaction between conscious and unconscious mind so mysterious and infinitely complex, that one can almost doubt what we take as evidence. Dreaming, for example, that rich form of narrative produced in sleep. Is it chance? Neurons firing? Magic? The potion? Beyond “the existence of the unconscious,” what is its nature, in general and in particular?

Early in my analysis I had this dream: The dreamer finds herself at a crossroads marked by signs on a mountain path high on a slope above the sea. The scene is cartoonish, nothing looks quite real. One marker points to a “high road,” a second to a “low road.” The dreamer takes the high road but becomes stuck midway, sandwiched by two more arrow-shaped signs planted in the middle of the path. These enormous signs blocking her way point in opposite directions: one arrow reads in bold capital letters LOUGON, the other reads LONDON. Far below this mountain is the ocean; it may be labeled MER. The dreamer seems to know that these signs allude to two previous lost therapists—“Lou” in LOUGON is the beloved uncle called to mind by a first therapist, now dead, and LONDON alludes to a second therapist’s accent. Paralyzed, unable to move in either direction, the dreamer watches, immobilized. Then two large white birds lift away off the side of the slope and fly together out over the water. The feeling that accompanies their flight is suffused with relief.

On waking, I review the dream in my mind’s eye, taking in its cartoonish character. I see the bold signs, so striking in the dream, and play with the letters, a symmetry that was clear even while dreaming: the same number of letters in each sign; both destinations begin with “L” and end with “N.” And then, a couple of seaward-bound water birds emerge from the signs, formed by the first two and last two letters in each—two “loons.” The play on “loons” (birdbrains, loonies, divers, laughers, lovebirds, doves—are loons even white?) is pleasing for the delighted yet incredulous beginning analysand, growing giddy with the potion, and further inebriated by the associative process itself. The dreamer is in love with her own production, as if to say: “Look what I made, and now look what I can say about it!”

And there is plenty to say about the dream, but I’ll focus on only one further element, possibly the ingredient hardest for me to believe, as well as the most self-intoxicting: in the dream there is an anagram. Finding (and freeing) the loons requires removing the two middle letters from each sign, leaving “UG” from one, “ND” from the other. Just a messy clot of letters—until, unscrambling them, I make DUNG. Who would believe that? Certainly, I had trouble believing it. Is it chance? Neurons firing randomly? Magic? The potion? Is it a kind of quasi-authorial overexcitement—or just crap? (Now I hear Mel Brooks’s psychiatrist Dr. Thorndyke in High Anxiety: “Are we talking about . . . number one . . . or cocky-doody?”)

What makes it possible for the dreamer (any dreamer, any therapy patient) to embark? Among many things, my dream is about a desired return to the mother—la mere—and to dream it required the risk of trusting someone else—as if it were an intense love relation: a falling in love “in the transference.” On the crucial subject of trust Freud in 1915 is remarkably clear: “The more plainly the analyst lets it be seen that he is proof against every temptation, the more readily will he be able to extract from the situation its analytic content. The patient . . . will then feel safe enough to allow all her preconditions for loving, . . . all the detailed characteristics of her state of being in love, to come to light . . .” (p. 166). The ethical and technical unite. They are not separable.

The “high road” in my dream is perhaps the idealization of early transference love, a form of denial, and an escape—in Freud’s vocabulary, resistance—and the twin birds, freed of the dirty waste, fly away together over the ocean. To say it another way, the dream perhaps tells the dreamer: “Cut the crap and get to work.” The analysis has begun, and the flight (and I do mean “flight” in both senses, elevation and retreat), the flight will be long.

Does this brief chemical analysis of a dramatic scene, conjured in sleep and stirred by the potion, reveal something that would otherwise seem “incredible”? Does it give Freud’s learner “a firm conviction of the existence of the unconscious”? And what about the low road? I’ll return to those dream-matters in a minute.

There’s a bone I’m worrying, I’m sure you can tell. This is powerful material the analyst is handling: chemicals, combustibles, “mental impulses” to extract and examine, having called them up from the underworld “in the transference.” What are the risks attendant to a setup that so intensely pulls for passions, deliberately heats up desires, yet so stringently requires renunciation, for both people? The analyst is not “really” a seducer, though he is seductive—actual seduction, we all know (and perhaps too easily take for granted), must not be the outcome. But the ritualized arrangement positions him precariously. The situation puts exquisite pressure on certain human traits—an ordinary person in a vulnerable position. The structured invitation for the patient to fall in love presents complex risks, with many temptations embedded in the extraordinary power of the transference: the most troubling of these, perhaps, the invitation for the analyst, the purveyor of illusion, in his (or her) human capacity for self-deception, and grandiosity, to believe he inhabits an enchanted kingdom, like Shakespeare’s fairies, magical in his powers. The analyst, drunk on the love juice, may feel justified, thrilled by “the charms of his own person” and their effect—he believes he is himself a bit magical: charismatic.

Freud’s tone about this ever present danger in “Observations on Transference-Love” recalls A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The cool, smiling irony of Freud’s “not to be attributed to the charms of his own person” mocks the notion of charisma. Self-deluding, the idea of a personal charisma beyond the structural is also, as a matter of theory, redundant. As a moral or ethical matter, it is radically defective: a charismatic analyst, within the clinical setting, is a massively destructive contradiction in terms. It punishes trust. The patient’s love is a construct provoked by the analytic situation, and it is the responsibility of the analyst, having set the process in motion, to limit and protect it.

In Shakespeare’s play, Bottom, the loquacious clown, becomes an ass-headed man who by magic potion is adored by the enchanted fairy queen Titania. For her, Bottom becomes charismatic. The boastful, ambitious Bottom himself, with his ass’s ears, believes he is charismatic. In Freud’s terms, Bottom believes in “the charms of his own person.”

But while Freud says, wisely enough, that it’s not the analyst’s own charms that enrapture the patient, perhaps in another sense that’s exactly what happens. In a well-conducted analysis, guided by the analyst’s abstinence and neutrality, the transference is a kind of enchantment, transitory and functional. As Max Hernandez writes, “Once an analysis is over—one hesitates to say finished—the memory that the analyst or the analysand has of it, and especially the written account of it, is but a pale reflection of what happened during the analysis to either of them or between them. All one knows is that it occurred once upon a time” (1993, p. 101).

It occurred once upon a time but the enchantment can still get called up. One way it’s called up is in dreams. I believe this can be true for any analysand (or, in a sense, for anyone). Perhaps it’s even an element in why one writes: The enchantment is called up when trying to write an essay like this one. “Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person,” writes Freud, “and the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease” (1930, p. 91). Now I’ll return to my dream about the signposts, the mountain, the birds, and returning to the mother.

It was dreamed many years ago, and the analysis has ended—“terminated,” in our bizarre lingo. (Talk about skirting tender affect!) “Whatever termination is,” writes Gabbard, “it is certainly not the end. Analysands continue to try to work through the loss of the analyst in fantasy, in dreams, and in other relationships” (2009, p. 591). Incorporating the dream into this paper, I found a new element that I’d never thought much about before, though I’ve talked about the dream many times. What about the “low road”? The dreamer, eventually, will have to choose the “low road”—which requires integration, acceptance of imperfection, a letting go, if you like, of an omnipotent denial: a process of mourning (in Freud’s language, “working through”). In the return to the mountain from flight over the ocean, the dreamer now takes the “low road”—and here came the new thought—and now the letters in the anagram can go back where they were, LOUGON (Lougone), LONDON (Londone). But the signs, in their original form, no longer need block the dreamer’s path: limitation, with the attendant disappointment, is accepted (returning to the vernacular, they can keep their shit, and the dreamer perhaps more easily tolerates her own). And the birds can separate, marking the end.

If that sounds too tidy, you didn’t hear me say the process is ever complete. It’s never finished, and then we die. Truisms. Maybe the fact of the final limitation—mortality—is why we strive in the first place. That’s not a new idea either. But the awareness of, and rebellion against, mortality—that ultimate blow to our narcissism, our wish for omnipotence—has some relation to love in the analytic setting. Psychoanalysis is a powerful instrument with an enormous potential to help, that helpfulness conjoined with potential to harm, sometimes grievously. What kind of caring is it? What words to capture it?

I’ve called the therapeutic offering a “mortal gift” (Pinsky 2002, 2012). It would be located at one end of an imagined continuum that includes the transference enchantment that is the vehicle for healing (Freud’s “intermediate region,” the area of illusion). I don’t object to calling it a mature love or, if you prefer a little more distance, call it analytic love. Loewald is among those not shy of the word: the analyst’s stance, he writes, “requires an objectivity and neutrality the essence of which is love and respect for the individual and for individual development” (1960, p. 229). Writing of the child’s first love, Anna Freud is characteristically direct: “The ability to love—like other human faculties—has to be learned and practiced” (Freud and Burlingham 1943, p. 191). Perhaps Simone Weil succinctly captures that ability to love, in its maturing, when she writes: “Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love” (1963, p. 56).

If terms like these, however imperfect, approximate the nature of the analyst’s disciplined caring, or love, there is also the matter of the analyst’s hate—on my imagined continuum of “caring,” located at the other end from the “mortal gift.” The problem I’m poking at throughout: the analyst’s narcissism in this combustible arrangement, and our discipline’s century-long effort to address it. In “Observations on Transference-Love,” which I’ve termed the quintessential document, Freud grapples with just that issue: we witness his struggle to find adequate terms for the forces inevitably stirred in the clinical interaction. The power of the potion, as devised in the psychoanalytic situation, heightens the analyst’s vulnerability to forgetting himself. How to proceed safely? How to manage the excitement of looking at the forbidden—the analyst’s “ineluctably conflictual task”? (Levine 2003, p. 209; Blum 1981). How to keep the solution balanced, the concentration right? In 1915 Freud was concerned, and a hundred years later we’re still concerned.

The extensive contemporary literature on boundary violations examines these matters in considerable depth but at the same time deflects and clouds thinking—like the transference process itself, a simultaneous opening up and covering over. When the analyst has sex with a patient, that’s ethical misconduct. Few would disagree. But is such catastrophic exploitation adequately captured by the term “boundary violation”? The term boundary suggests a border, evoking a neatly defined separateness: in baseball, the foul line is marked and the umpire’s ruling (more or less) precise.

In contrast, whatever separates the two people in the consulting room is not clear in the same static, linear way but instead is necessarily tense, or kinetic: more like two forces at the line of scrimmage. If our vocabulary doesn’t take that built-in aggression into account, it’s euphemistic, substituting an inoffensive or soft term for a truer one—a form of evasion. To put the problem in quasi-legal language, the term “boundary” evokes the wrong kind of malfeasance because what happens in the clinical exchange involves more than property lines: it is a fiduciary matter. Violating a “boundary” suggests you’ve infringed on my property line, when in fact the analyst’s sexual misconduct is less like crossing lines than it is like an offsides violation, or like fraud, or in its most extreme form, like rape.

It could be argued that the vocabulary of “enactment” attempts better to account for the kinetic, and there is a logic to that idea. But the problematic nature of that quasi-scientific terminology, which in my view is also euphemistic, and evasive, entails what Orgel refers to as “invoking or constructing theories that rationalize yielding to internal and external ‘necessities,’ that relieve the analyst of the demands and frustrations of being the protector of the patient’s individuality and potential autonomy by maintaining reasonable abstinence and neutrality” (1997, p. 58). Might one view enactment theory, if taken too far, as an invitation to accept, rather than counter (as Tarachow counters it, with the analyst’s transforming act of interpretation) the merely human need and wish for a real object, the “basic urge to mutual acting out”? (Tarachow 1962, p. 380). Where one vocabulary diminishes malfeasance, the other neutralizes it, making the potion more like a bromide—a simple chemical reaction, reductive in comparison to the reality.

The potion: Is it medicinal? Magic? Poisonous? The liquid is powerful, it’s thrilling, it’s dangerous, it’s essential, it’s in us all. In the transference, as well as in life, people can fall in love for many reasons—including to fill an internal absence, to manage loneliness, or to avoid something, as Freud points out with the essential concepts of transference and resistance. Is there an antidote, a “potion-diluter,” when it’s the analyst who is vulnerable and falls in love with the patient “in the countertransference”? Is this truly love? Who’s to say? If the analyst acts on that “love,” do we still call it love? Is it closer to aggression? Is it more like Winnicott’s countertransference hate (1949)? Or, to borrow Stoller’s language (1986), is it an “erotic form of hatred”? Anna Freud, in related terms, elaborates on the “ability” to love: “The opposite of this ability to love,” she writes, “is not hate but egoism,” or self-love (Freud and Burlingham 1943, p. 191).

I’ll end as I began, and offer another image in the hope of capturing an aspect of the complex, endlessly puzzling psychoanalytic situation.

In the story of Orpheus, as told by Bulfinch, the great musician plays and sings to such perfection that he entrances everything—his fellow mortals, the wild beasts, “nay, the very trees and rocks were sensible to the charm” of his music (1964, p. 134). One day his beautiful wife Eurydice, while fleeing a shepherd’s advances, “trod on a snake in the grass, was bitten in the foot, and died.” Grief-stricken, Orpheus follows her to the underworld, where he implores the deities, in song, to let her return to life with him: “As he sang these tender strains, the very ghosts shed tears. Tantalus, in spite of his thirst, stopped for a moment his efforts for water, Ixion’s wheel stood still, the vulture ceased to tear the giant’s liver . . . and Sisyphus sat on his rock to listen. Then for the first time, it is said, the cheeks of the Furies were wet with tears.” Pluto too finally gives way and permits Orpheus to take Eurydice back with him, but on one condition: “that he should not turn around to look at her till they should have reached the upper air.” We all know what happens. Orpheus leads, his wife follows, and as they near the upper world: “Orpheus, in a moment of forgetfulness, to assure himself that she was still following, cast a glance behind him, when instantly she was borne away” (p. 134).

Orpheus thoughtlessly glances back, Bulfinch writes, “in a moment of forgetfulness.” How do we understand a “moment of forgetfulness”? Does the moment contain the forbidden? In the simple turning of his body and the directing of his sight, Orpheus breaches the taboo—a failure to resist the excitement of looking. And the beloved Eurydice dies for the second time.