Falling in Love with Love: Oedipal and Post Oedipal Manifestations of Idealization,

Mourning and Erotic Masochism

By
Jody Messler Davies, Ph.D.

Work in Progress. Do not use or cite without permission of author. Draft being
distributed solely for the educational purposes of the Fall, 2002 IARPP Online
Colloquium. FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE FOR ANY
PURPOSE ELECTRONICALLY OR VIA HARD COPY.

About twenty five years ago, I entered psychoanalysis for the first time. I remember feeling
anxious, excited, hopeful; somewhat mesmerized by my own, then, rather innocent awe of the
process and of the particular analyst with whom I had chosen to work. I remember the day on
which my new analyst told me of some of the things that would be expected of me as I began this
process and of some of the things for which I could come to count on him. One particularly odd
moment comes to mind as part of this recollection, a moment which brings me immediately to
the subject of this paper and to what remains I believe, an essential historical and theoretical
anomaly at the heart of contemporary psychoanalysis. I remember him telling me, with all
earnestness, that at least in the first few years of my analysis, I should refrain from involving
myself in any new intimate relationship, in any romantic activity that might deflect or diffuse our
joint exploration of the feelings that I would inevitably be developing for him. I must have
looked rather perplexed I remember the buzzing in my brain as I attempted to integrate the
injunction and the allusions, “Was he talking of romantic feelings I was supposed to develop for
him? “No,” I thought, “he must mean something else.” Sensing my discomfort, he went on to
assure me that such feelings were “normal, to be expected in an intensive psychoanalytic
experience.” “No, he did mean romantic feelings,” I thought. I remember frantically
suppressing a surprising yet rather urgent impulse to giggle. From this particular vantage point,
a quarter of a century ago, from a position of as yet unruffled, pre- transferential sanity, my new
analyst seemed veeeery old - maybe almost fifty. Bookish and balding, he had impressed me as
enormously kind and intellectually challenging, but hardly the stuff of my youthful erotic
imagination. Not wanting to insult, I bit my lip, swallowed my smile and suspending for the
moment my rather dubious skepticism walked compliantly into what, in the end, I must say,
turned out to be a wonderful and life altering therapeutic experience.

But my story hopefully captures the dilemma, still extant in contemporary psychoanalytic
lore, that it is considered by some to be normal, to be expected, to be preferred, indeed often a
sign of emotional and psychological health, for a young patient to fall, for a respectable period
of time, rather charmingly and appropriately in love with her analyst. Indeed, the development
of what had come to be known as an “oedipal transference,” was for some the sine quo non of
what was thought of as “analyzability.” In its most naïve rendition this theory suggested that by
transferring a rather fixated and entrenched oedipal love from parent to analyst, a young patient
got a second chance to relinquish these impossible hopes; that a properly dosed and gently
administered frustration of such entrenched longings would turn the patient away from her
oedipal figures to more appropriate and available object choices. Of course we learn, as
experienced analysts who have been burned, to hope and to hope fervently, that the patient falls
only a little bit in love with her analyst, and that only for what seems a respectable period of
time before moving on.

When this process works, i.e. when the patient forms an erotic/romantic bond with the
analyst and is able over the course of analysis to relinquish this attraction, turning instead to
more appropriate objects for passionate attachment, particularly when these attachments seem
intimate and rewarding, we are given no reason to confront and question our theory of
therapeutic action - optimal frustration leading to the giving up of certain hopes for instinctual
gratification. Neither do we question the effects of entering a new treatment with a priori
expectations of what will emerge in the transference-countertransference processes. Successful
treatment outcomes often inadvertently confirm theoretical positions that we erroneously use to
explain the patient’s therapeutic progress. But of course we have no reason to assume that
therapeutic progress has anything whatsoever to do with the theories we employ to explain it. It
is, ironically, only when something breaks down in the anticipated therapeutic course of events,
that we are called upon to seriously explore, examine, and reevaluate our suppositions.

My point of course is to call attention to the fact that this process does not always work so
smoothly. As we all know and have come to dread, some patients fall desperately in love with

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their analysts, becoming more and more entrenched in a hopeless, masochistically organized
scenario of unrequited love; engaging in unrelenting exhortations amounting to unremitting
demands for reciprocity; for proclamations of the analysts love and passionate regard (see Blum
1973). Such patients often shy away from forming romantic attachments outside the treatment.
Marriages and long term relationships can be adversely affected or even broken up because the
patient’s significant other cannot hold sway against the perfections of such intensely idealized
transference love. It is these more desperate, more entrenched, more masochistic forms of
transference love that drive even the most experienced analysts to intensely guilt ridden
experiences of having unleashed something that they are unable to contain and subdue. And
brings us as theoreticians to the acknowledgement that we have had far more to say about the
libidinal vicissitudes of the oedipus complex, the importance of mobilizing these loving sensual,
and erotic processes in the patient’s transference experience; and far less to say about how we
help the patient to contain, subdue and transcend these oftentimes “too intense” feelings once
they are unleashed. It is I believe this realization that we have no clinically reliable “way out”
that often makes us as analysts reluctant to fully engage with our patient’s erotic transferences.

My second point in beginning my paper with this personal anecdote, is of course, to call
attention to the fact that beginning any analytic treatment with such a presumption about what
the patient will or will not feel in the course of the work, particularly what the patient will or will
not feel about her analyst per se, immediately and from the outset shapes the
transference/countertransference matrix in ways that may profoundly shape and influence what
emerges over the course of treatment. This presumptive shaping of the process is particularly
problematic since contextualizing what is “expected” by the analyst within a “normative”
template for the analytic process can blind us to the significance of certain emergent issues in the
treatment. In short, if they are “expected” than they are immediately less interesting; we look at
them and examine them less closely.

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The Oedipus Complex in Historical Perspective

Work in Progress. Do not use or cite without permission of author. Draft being
distributed solely for the educational purposes of the Fall, 2002 IARPP Online
Colloquium. FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE FOR ANY
PURPOSE ELECTRONICALLY OR VIA HARD COPY.

There have always been two discrete strains in our understanding and conceptualization of
oedipal processes and resolutions, one more mainstream and the other a steady drumbeat of
subtle difference. The more traditional formulation referred to above considers the process as it
resides fundamentally within the patient, and its resolution is regarded as stemming from an
identification with the superego prohibitions of the persona we have come to refer to as the
“forbidding oedipal parent” Even in its more subtle, more gentle incarnation this vision holds
frustration of these wishes and the analyst’s symbolic non participation as the therapeutic sine
quo non….the royal road out of incestuous object relations. The key to unlocking entrenched
and exaggerated transferential states residing in the correct interpretation of aggressively
eroticized reactions and a non participatory, non gratifying holding of the line against
increasingly demanding claims for countertransference participation.

The counterpoint to this theoretical perspective, and the space in which I locate my own
work on erotic transference/countertransference processes, holds that the oedipal love affair
between parent and child, and therefore its representation and enactment between analyst and
patient is a deeply mutual, intensely roma ntic co-created process. As early as 1959, Harold
Searles, in his paper “Oedipal Love in the Countertransference,” made the following, then
rather revolutionary assertion,

Since I began doing psychoanalysis and intensive psychotherapy, I have found,

time after time, that in the course of the work with every one of my patients who
has progressed to, or very far towards, a thoroughgoing analytic cure, I have
experienced romantic and erotic desires to marry , and fantasies of being married
to the patient. Such fantasies and emotions have appeared in me usually relatively
late in the course of treatment, have been present not briefly but usually for a
number of months, and have subsided only after my having experienced a variety

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 of feelings- frustration, separation anxiety, grief and so forth-entirely akin to those
which attended what I experienced as the resolution of my Oedipus complex late
in my personal analysis [p. 28].

Searles goes on to assert that the therapeutic process in these cases required that the patient
perceive and internalize the analyst’s romantic interest as a precondition for therapeutic progress.

Kohut (1977) writing in the late seventies, stressed, as well, the mutual, idealizing romance
that must exist between parent and child, in order for the child to emerge from these incestuous
processes and move on to more appropriate object choices. Hans Loewald, writing some twenty
years after Searles, in his paper, “The Waning of the Oedipus Complex,” stressed the mutual
interplay between parent and child that was necessary for the movement out of incestuous forms
of relatedness. Loewald stressed the symbolic parricide that is represented when the child begins
to replace his oedipal objects and a particular form of mourning in which the child on his way to
adulthood becomes capable of bearing rather than repressing the guilt attendant to such
murderous activity. Where such guilt is repressed rather than bourn, Loewald cautions a
relentless pursuit of unconscious punishment which plagues the individual’s future relationships.
But he cautions that parents must be willing participants in their own symbolic destruction, that
they must work through their own unconscious resistances to being replaced as incestuous love
objects. From within this model, the patient’s entrenched oedipal demands her “stuckness” in
pursuing unavailable relationships of masochistic unrequited love, including that with the
analyst, would be viewed, less as a failure to interpret oedipal wishes and frustrate their
gratification, and more as a mutual, bidirectional failure to successfully mourn and relinquish
them.

Indeed, in my own work I have emphasized the unique qualities of “oedipal love” as it
exists for parent and child alike. I have attempted to articulate the particular intensity of oedipal
love in the parent, and to emphasize the particular importance of parent and child/ analyst and
patient, mutually mourning not only the unrealizeability of oedipal love but its intensely
idealized images and scenarios of romantic perfection. In a paper published four years ago,
(Davies, 1998) I suggested that , within the psychoanalytic process, it is not our unavailability
and impenetrable stance that free our patients from the perpetually infantalizing circularity of

5
oedipal desire. Indeed, I proposed that such unavailability and uncomfortable silence could , in
certain cases of disavowed sexuality, become the ultimate incestuous reenactment, locking in
transference idealization and thereby limiting real object choice to the realm of imagined
perfection and inevitable disappointment. It is only in our willingness to relinquish the role of
“adored other,” to reveal ourselves to such patients as real, flawed, and human, that we
ultimately free them to seek better substitutes for what they have too long imagined to be our
perfection.

In such a way, I have attempted to relocate a significant piece of Loewald’s necessary

parricide and mourning into the patient’s symbolic deidealization of the analyst as an object of
romantic perfection, and in the analyst’s tacit and simultaneous willingness to be rendered thus
imperfect. For me it is this movement from experiences of intense romantic idealization, to de-
idealized, more imperfect, but more truly intimate, vulnerable, and emotionally interpenetrating
experience that marks the shift from incestuous oedipal relatedness in its actual and symbolic
forms to the kinds of post oedipal relatedness more endemic to adolescent development and
ultimately to adult love relations. Of course for me, the oedipal and post oedipal are dialectically
related, infusing each other, all the time, with the particular qualities intrinsic to each. From the
developmental sphere of oedipal relations proper comes the passion and intensity born out of an
illusion of romantic perfection and deep, mutual idealization. But from the post-oedipal
developmental process comes the capacity to tolerate imperfections in our love objects, to
experience disappointment without the death of desire, to apprehend that true intimacy requires
mutual vulnerability and psychic interpenetration.

A Relational Reconceptualization of Oedipal Processes

Work in Progress. Do not use or cite without permission of author. Draft being
distributed solely for the educational purposes of the Fall, 2002 IARPP Online
Colloquium. FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE FOR ANY
PURPOSE ELECTRONICALLY OR VIA HARD COPY.

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 In the present paper I would like to expand and elaborate on some of these ideas, attempting
to recontextualize the notion of an oedipus complex within a contemporary psychoanalytic
framework, and then, to look , as well, at how such a reconceptualization demands that we
rethink our ideas about analytic technique and therapeutic action. I believe that it is safe to say
that in contemporary psychoanalytic thought the concept of the “oedipus complex” itself seems
to have fallen into a period of relative disfavor. In 1977 Hans Loewald spoke of the “waning of
the oedipus complex,” as the contemporary decline of psychoanalytic interest in these issues, in
favor of a focus on preoedipal and infancy research related issues. For my own part I see this
diminution in interest somewhat differently. First, relational analysts are less enamored of
normative developmental crises and paths; we value the uniqueness of the individual and the
complexity and utter non reducibility of any one developmental course. In this regard, the
oedipus complex comes under a shadow as well, because it was, for many years, regarded as the
developmental crisis around which sexual orientation, the integration of earlier bisexual
potentials captured in the “positive” and “negative” oedipal constellations, were more or less
decisively organized around heterosexual primacy. Any other resolution, particularly a primarily
homosexual resolution was considered to be clearly pathological at the time.

One of my primary agendas in writing this paper is to attempt a revitalization of the oedipus
complex by removing from it the burden of any “normative” sexual patterns and “resolutions”
and by recontextualizing it within a relational theoretical framework that focuses our attention on
what I consider to be certain critical developmental achievements, most specifically the
developmental shift from primarily incestuous object relations to primarily non-incestuous object
relations, i.e. the movement from oedipal to what I have termed “post oedipal” forms of
relatedness, in the evolution and integration of a richly textured highly nuanced capacity for
romantic passion and erotic sensual vitality. I hope to offer a model for understanding this
critical phase of development in which multiple pathways lead to an assortment of potential
outcomes, focused not on sexual orientation or object choice but rather on the particular qualities
of intimacy, eroticism and a deeply resilient mutuality. Among the kinds of developmental
achievements to which I am referring, are the capacity to negotiate experiences of both inclusion
and more painful and/or tantalizing exclusion; to be both the subject and object of intense erotic
desire and longing; to enjoy and revel in experiences of romantic success- even “triumph” while
at the same time accepting experiences of romantic loss, rejection or defeat with a sense of

7
perspective and without a humiliating and shame riddled collapse of desire and longing; a
capacity to both win and lose romantic adventures with a sense of relative grace and humor.

On a more theoretical plane, I see the forms and vicissitudes of parent child engagement and
disengagement occurring around this particular phase of development as critically influencing
indeed, holding the fate of, the tension between certain kinds of romantic/sexual idealization
and overvaluation and the potential for catastrophic collapse and foreclosure of romantic passion
in the face of disappointment, rejection and disillusionment. It is during this developmental
epoch when experiences with enhanced intimacy and recognition, a sense of knowing and being
known, an interest in penetrating and being penetrated, psychically, emotionally and physically,
come to serve as the passionate counterpoint to romantic idealization and notions of
incomparable perfection. I believe that a closer look at the oedipal “experience” particularly if
we take that look under the aegis of a more postmodern eye, one that appreciates the potentials
of multiple realities and the paradox of simultaneous yet irreconcilable contradictions, will shed
light on just how this highly significant developmental crisis occurring between parents and
children can be reconfigured along such lines.

We have been taught most decidedly by our immersion in Freudian thought, that the oedipal
struggle is there essentially in order to be lost. To be lost we hope, gently and tactfully, but to be
lost decisively nonetheless, without contradiction or lack of definitive clarity. We rarely if ever
question this conventional wisdom. To be a symbolic “oedipal victor,” according to this line of
thought, is a bad and dangerous thing. It ties one irrevocably to incestuous reenactments, to the
seeking out of unavailable romantic objects, to grandiose and omnipotent self-appraisals and
inappropriate erotic entanglements. Far better to lose the oedipal struggle our theory would
inform us. Far better to accept, from early on, a more realistic and modulated sense of one’s own
natural place in the appropriate and clearly perceived generational order and hierarchy. And of
course this is true. But is it entirely true? Is it the only truth? Does this singular truth obfuscate
additional realities that can serve to elucidate oftentimes complex and illusive clinical
phenomena. What, for example, comes to distinguish between a person who has learned to
accept defeat in romantic situations with grace and a sense of perspective, going on to “try
again,” and the person who comes to see himself as a romantic “looser,” one who dares not try,
one who becomes an outcast from the world of passion and erotic adventure. How do we

8
understand the individual who seeks out time and time again, seeks with an addiction like
compulsivity unavailable love objects, painful experiences of unrequited love? How do we
explain why one person works at continuing to seek out passion, romance, and ever increasing
intimacy well into old age while others seem to renounce this need at some point, settling into
deadened forms of passionless pseudo-relatedness?

I would like to suggest an alternative formulation with regard to the fate of oedipal relations
in psychic structure; an explanation which I feel contributes to an enhanced complexity in
understanding romantic and sexual engagements across the life cycle. I have described
elsewhere (Davies, 1998 a and b) my belief that the oedipal love affair between parent and child
is a deeply mutual, intensely romantic and idealizing drama of erotic participation and parricide;
one which must be entered into and lived out by both participants, and one which must be
relinquished and mourned in equal measure by each participant as well. From the child’s point
of view it represents the tension between the child’s first traumatic experiences of
sexual/romantic exclusion from the parental relationship; the startling and quasi traumatizing
realization that there are highly significant intensely felt experiences going on in the world that
do NOT revolve around him; and the development and nurturance of a highly evolved deeply
nuanced compensatory fantasy of idealized romantic perfection and bliss between the child and
the parent chosen to be the object of this attention, a love story of mythic proportion and
perfection. From the parent’s perspective, I have tried to emphasize, how the unique qualities
and particular intensity of “oedipal love” for the child situates itself at the crossroads of
identification and object choice (see also Benjamin, 1998) how the oedipal child becomes for the
parent, the perfectly fantasized bisexual complement to the parents’ gendered identity; the
perfectly fantasized blend of who the parent would most desire and who the parent would most
want to become in an imagined gendered complementarity. From this perspective the parents
love for the oedipal child is simply different, of a different order and type than love for the
partner. It is more idealizing, more narcissistic, more visceral. The child is “of” the parent,
“part of” the parent. In it’s most basic form the child IS the parent. We might consider that the
parents love for the child is always infused with a healthy (perhaps more than healthy) dose of
narcissistic adoration, more primitive, more boundaryless, more “in the body.”

9
 In the most optimal family situations, I believe that it is this particular quality of the parent’s
oedipal love, the intense, narcissistically infused, idealizing belief in the child’s perfection and
superiority, existing within the context of a loving and intimate marital relationship, which
makes every child struggle with a deeply divided, disjunctive experience of himself as both the
subject and object of romantic/erotic passion. I have come to believe that the oedipus complex
is, from this perspective, neither won nor lost, but that in the most optimal situations it is BOTH
won AND lost. In her experience of being the object of intense idealization and adoration the
little girl comes to “know” or apprehend in an unconscious way that she has “won” her father in
some inexplicable way that she simultaneously knows her mother never can. Likewise the little
boy comes to know himself as both the object of the mother’s similarly intense idealizations and
as the little lover who has won himself an object of incomparable perfection against which all
others must be judged. These are experiences of oedipal victory. But these are moments. And
juxtaposed against these moments are others in which the child accurately perceives, as well, her
parents’ devotion to each other, their own sexual passion and emotional intimacy; an intimacy
from which she is clearly barred. Here we have experiences of betrayal, deflation and outrage.
And so we find moments of sexual power and potency, the capacity to attract, entice, and allure;
the search for objects of romantic perfection and heroic stature, which intermingle and comingle
with experiences of romantic and sexual failure and disappointment, a sense of being small,
sexually and romantically impotent even insignificant; a belief that both we and our partners are
flawed, ordinary, and dulled in this de-idealized vision.

The fate of homosexual and homoerotic love follows, I believe, a similar and equally
disjunctive course. If we take the normative and pathologizing implications out of Freud’s
notion of a positive and negative oedipus complex, we can assume that all of us must integrate
the idealized and de-idealized aspects of both heterosexual and homosexual incestuous
engagements. Although there may be a primacy of one dimension over the other depending on
the particular parent child dyad, the resolution of each for everyone is critical, and there is no
reason to assume that the fundamental paradox changes with the homoerotic counterpart. What
may be of clinical significance in children whose primary object choices are homosexual is the
degree to which the parent’s potential homophobia has the capacity to block experiences of
romantic idealization when the child turns to the same sex parent as the primary oedipal love
object. (see in this regard Gair, 1995 , and Kiersky 1996).

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 Within this perspective, it becomes clear, I think, that the movement out of oedipal forms of
relatedness involves far more than the child’s relinquishment of an unrealistic and idealizing
fantasy. The parent’s participation in intensely idealized romantic visions of the child, make the
child’s experience of oedipal victory AS real as the child’s experience of oedipal defeat. What
we are left with are conflicting, contradictory aspects of identification and self/other experience
which become organized, I believe, into separate centers of awareness and initiative that forever
hold the experiential potentials and pitfalls of passionate romantic idealization as well as scornful
and rage filled betrayal. I would like to suggest, therefore, that the oedipus complex is never
resolved. That its derivatives find their way into multiple self other configurations whose
ongoing presence infuses our adult sexual/erotic attachments with their unique and dyad specific
colorations and textures.

Hopefully there are few among us who have not experienced the unrivaled, unparalleled
delights of new romantic love. The sense of having discovered the ONE, the ONLY perfectly
created constructed other who resonates so deeply and so profoundly with the intricate nuances
of our own bodies minds and souls that all others, indeed the world at large fades into little more
than a blurry irrelevant backdrop. At such moments I am in love with “the other” with the other’s
perfections; with his qualities and quirks; with her unique quotidian flourishes and fancies. But
within such moments I also fall more deeply in love with myself, as I apprehend myself
enlarged, enhanced elevated to unrivaled perfection through the eyes of my lover. When such an
experience is mutually embraced, there is little in life which becomes quite so intoxicating. I
would venture to suggest, as well, that there are few among us who have not been forced to
survive the slow, painful, yet inexorable undoing of such romantic perfection. It is, as we all
come to know with enhanced maturity- inevitable. But why is it that some of our stars ignite and
burn themselves out, falling to earth as little more than ashen rock, while others, though muted
over time, continue to float gracefully through space, if no longer ablaze, than at the very least,
smoldering, taking on ever deepening textures and hues, like the multi-textured/ multicolored
embers of a late night fire. Indeed, as most fans of late night fires know, those embers actually
throw much more heat, sustaining themselves over a longer span of time than the blazing fires of
the night before.

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 Seen from such a light the primary developmental task of what I am calling the “post-
oedipal” period involves just such an emerging capacity to transform the unequaled passions and
perfections of oedipal love into the ever deepening self-sustaining multiplicity and complexity of
a more maturely tempered love; a love which more comfortably accommodates the necessary
dialectic tension between mutual adoration and the kind of intimacy born of acceptance of
imperfection, mutual recognition and inter-penetrability. Such a shift requires a mutual
relinquishing of both the idealized other and the idealized self, in return for the experience of
more deeply knowing and being known, being accepted for who one is and discovering in
oneself the capacity to love in spite of and because of the other’s imperfections. It is not a
repudiation of the idealized, but a growing ability to hold THAT image of the loved other and
adored self in simultaneous awareness with the more tempered more reality based assessment.
In this sense our multiple self other constructions and self states involve the enormously
complex organization of both loving and hating, homo and hetero erotic relations to both the
oedipal winner and the oedipal loser in our lovers and in our selves.

Such a re-conceptualization of oedipal dynamics and processes requires serious reworking

of what we have always considered to be a simple “oedipal transference,” into more complex,
clinically nuanced elaborations of the multiple, oftentimes contradictory forms via which such a
developmental crisis can locate itself and emerge in the transference/countertransference
experience between patient and analyst. I have stated my own belief that in our focus on the
normalcy and need to actually foster an “oedipal transference” we have failed in large measure to
adequately conceptualize the child’s movement OUT of such forms of relatedness; to look at
how and why children develop the capacity to replace their oedipal objects and to consider what
we can infer from such processes about those patients who seem to get “stuck” in this particular
form of idealized, unrequited, erotic attachment. How a failed oedipal situation and a hopeless
entrenchment in incestuous object relating actually looks in the transference-countertransference
mix.

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Oedipal and Post-Oedipal Transference/Countertransference Processes

Work in Progress. Do not use or cite without permission of author. Draft being
distributed solely for the educational purposes of the Fall, 2002 IARPP Online
Colloquium. FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE FOR ANY
PURPOSE ELECTRONICALLY OR VIA HARD COPY.

In the normal course of development adolescents turn away from their most beloved oedipal
objects and enter the world of peer relationships and teen age love relations. For some this
turning away is gentle and more tolerable for all concerned. For others the turning away process
is fraught with rage, rejection and contempt; a negative passion now levied against those same
figures who once inspired unmitigated adoration and erotic devotion. How the parent/child dyad
( and by extension the analytic dyad) copes with such a dramatic and painful turn of events, how
they tolerate such rejection and mutual de-idealization, whether they survive the contempt and
devaluing endemic to such a process in either its gentle or aggressive forms, speaks I believe, in
large measure to the fate of oedipal passion in later adult love relations. As analysts I believe,
that our expectation of and our focus on oedipal relatedness in the transferences of our patients
has led us to too often interpret this turning away from incestuous forms of object relatedness as
a “resistance” to the formation of an oedipal transference; and to miss, in large measure, that
such a turning away is a major developmental achievement in its own right; one that needs to be
supported and encouraged by us. We need to begin to look carefully at what we might consider
to be “post oedipal transferences,” those situations in which the analyst is expected to serve as an
“observer” to the patient’s extra-analytic erotic adventures in much the same way that the parent
of an adolescent child provides this holding function; or at transference/countertransference
situations in which the analyst is expected to bear the role of disappointing and/or disappointed
lover. Situations in which the analyst is asked to survive her own disappointed rejection as
primary love object and to regard approvingly or disapprovingly depending on the particular
coloration of each different situation, the patient’s movement out of incestuous object ties into
the diverse world of potential others.

If, as this line of reasoning suggests, it is the child’s and parent’s internalized involvement
in a mutually adoring love affair as well as its slow undoing that mark the developmental

13
movement from oedipal to post-oedipal forms of relatedness, how might we come to understand
the particular kind of scenario described, a scenario in which the patient becomes hopelessly
stuck in pursuing concrete expressions of the analyst’s erotic admiration and involvement - a
scenario in which the analyst comes to run from and dread, in the most profound and gut
wrenching ways, the very transference she once hoped to elicit. A scenario in which the required
mourning, parricide or deidealization either fails to occur., or occurs too completely,
precipitously, and catastrophically

I would like to propose, in this present paper, that it is not the failure of accurate
interpretation, nor the failure to optimally frustrate instinctual gratification, nor simply the
patient’s failure to relinquish and mourn that primarily define the clinical/developmental
conundrum to which I am referring. I would like to suggest, rather, that this inability to
relinquish and mourn the idealized oedipal parent emerges for two possible reasons. The first
situation arises when, for one reason or another, the particular patient/child has never become the
object of the parent’s intense oedipal interest and love in the first place. i.e., that the failure to
relinquish and mourn is predicated upon an earlier frustration of the developmental need to be
adored and to possess , to exist, for one perfect moment in time, in full possession of and
awareness of the parent’s idealized romantic interest; and to dwell there long enough and fully
enough to contemplate having had enough - moving beyond it. The second situation arises, I
believe, when for any of a multitude of possible reasons the parent or analyst is unable to tolerate
the rejection, aggression or contempt implicit or explicit in the patient’s turning away from a
mutually adoring process (for clinical descriptions of this particular transference
countertransference situation see Davies, 1998b). Of course the adequate provision of each of
these experience to the child, involves the parent’s optimally fine tuned capacities for
spontaneous self expression and appropriate controls and sensitivities even when the content of
such expression involves such deeply and universally conflictual content. The appropriate
manifestations of parental participation must be expressed fully enough and obviously enough to
be seen and internalized, while at the same time they are expressed moderately, playfully, and
symbolically enough to be taken in safely without traumatic overstimulation, dread or defensive
disavowal. (Davies, 1998, Hoffman, 1998).

14
 When the transference-countertransference scenario reflects the first of these situations, i.e.
parental failure to participate in oedipal romance and idealization, the ensuing therapeutic
process can often find the patient consciously engaged in attempts to elicit the very evidence of
romantic and erotic participation that was missing originally, while the unconscious reenactment
seeks to confirm the patient’s more basic experience of being undesirable and unlovable. In this
sense the distinction I am making is not dissimilar to Ghent’s (1992) distinction between need
and neediness, i.e. the “blackwashing” of true need behind an interpersonal process that in fact
creates more distance than intimacy. In the highly erotized scenario I am describing, the more
the patient insists upon witnessing the analyst’s love and adoration, the more frightened the
analyst is likely to become, of the patient’s inability to play, fantasize and incorporate symbolic
gratifications. The analyst may flea defensively from the patient’s concrete erotization of the
analytic process, and shut down areas of his/her own more natural playfulness and admiration in
fear of further erotization, concretization and foreclosure of symbolic processes. Ironically, the
very intensity of the patient’s need for a phase of mutually idealizing romantically tinged
analytic love, makes the analyst feel, perhaps rightly so, that his playful and symbolic
participation will be misunderstood and misused by the patient as a kind of traumatic
overstimulation. In such a scenario the analyst may flea into more distant and withholding
stances, or prematurely interpretive ones; interpretations that emphasize the failure or
unwillingness to relinquish and mourn may come to prematurely supplant those which
emphasize the wished for and playfully enacted experience. Unfortunately, it is not difficult to
see how this particular transference/countertransference scenario could become increasingly
intense, entrenched, and impassable over time. The patient’s demands can escalate to full scale
but ultimately impossible attempts to coerce and literally extract from the analytic interaction,
evidence of the analyst’s passionate attachment, while the analyst, terrified by the patient’s
increasingly passionate demands moves both defensively and appropriately, further and further
away from the patient’s wished for response and inexorably closer to what looks like the
original parental deadness or narcissistic preoccupation. The exaggerated, retaliatory contempt
hurled at the analyst represents both a desperate attempt to separate from the increasingly
ungratifying oedipal hold as well as the patient’s projective identification with the unconscious
parental position. The cycle of traumatic reenactment becomes closed, repetitive and seemingly
inescapable.

15
 Such cases of seemingly inescapable therapeutic impasse, always have for me the dilemma
that patient and analyst alike become prisoners of the coercive projective power of the other’s
vision; that each becomes hopelessly defined by the other, and incapable of escaping the force of
the interactive pull in order to act in creative and fully agentic ways. Most problematic of all, I
believe is the collapse of a particular kind of potential countertransference space; a space in
which the analysts’ playful fantasies live and thrive; a place in which analytic fantasy and
freedom can often give rise to creative flights and more hopeful responses that side-step the
deadening cycles of repetitive reenactment. From within different theoretical frameworks this
collapse of a potential space for creative interpretive self expression has been called a failure of
“observing ego,” a failure to achieve the “depressive position,” engagement with the
“subjugating third” (Ogden, 1995 )a reliance on dissociative processes which collapse multiple
interpretive possibilities (Davies, 1996 ); a failure to achieve “the third position.” (Aron and
Benjamin, 1998 ). Each despite clear theoretical differences implies a collapse of symbolic
meaning space and a stultifying paralysis of analytic participation, which oftentimes has the
effect of creating the very opposite of that which the patient seeks out.

The analytic conundrum in the kind of therapeutic impasse described here, is that the analyst
must find a way, to reopen a kind of potential transference/countertransference space in which it
becomes possible to experience the kinds of feelings the analyst would need to feel, in order to
figuratively “fall in love,” with the patient; providing her with a somewhat metabolized and
symbolic form of the kind of oedipally tinged admiration and adoration she seeks. But the
dilemma is that the analyst cannot simply “provide” the patient with what she needs. In the first
place the analyst is emotionally locked into the very opposite, complementary
countertransference position described above; and the patient is locked into intensified efforts to
extract her own perverse vision of analytic love. Symbolic thought and the capacity for the
emergence of multiple meanings is foreclosed. It appears that in order for the treatment to move
again, something essential must shift in the analyst’s experience of the patient’s relentless erotic
pursuit.

16
“Oedipal” Transferences and Erotic Masochism

Work in Progress. Do not use or cite without permission of author. Draft being
distributed solely for the educational purposes of the Fall, 2002 IARPP Online
Colloquium. FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE FOR ANY
PURPOSE ELECTRONICALLY OR VIA HARD COPY.

We must, I think, become sensitized in situations such as this, to the possibility that our
commitment to “working within the oedipal transference” can become a countertransferential
blind spot in its own right. That because we “expect” oedipally tinged analytic love, we do not
question the process when that love reaches perverse proportions, when it serves to collapse,
restrict and rigidify the patient’s experience of a multitude of potential self/other organizations of
experience; when such intense protestations of love and demands for reciprocity become ways of
extracting gratifications and so controlling and regulating the interpersonal field. Similarly,
because we are so focused on the “necessity” of oedipal love in the transference-
countertransference situation, we see the patient who rejects such a form of involvement with the
analyst as “resisting” the transference, rather than as one who is constructing a more post oedipal
transference around issues of separateness, rejection and/or contempt. We fail to apprehend the
enactment of a “failed oedipal love” and of a relentless but maddeningly ineffective attempt to
escape it’s clutches. Again, what we “expect” comes to influence and limit what we are able to
see. The suppositions themselves must become subjects of inquiry.

My own experience, leads me to conclude that in situations such as this, simply focusing on
and interpreting the patient’s aggressive constriction of the analytic experience, her rage and
retaliatory assaults on the process, will not necessarily reopen the fluid creativity of emergent
experience. Indeed, I find that clinically it often makes the situation worse, collapsing the
analytic interaction into an entrenched complementarity that becomes increasingly rigidified over
time. A relentless and repetitive reenactment of “she who wants,” and “he/she who withholds.”
It is only, in my experience, when we reopen, revitalize and reconceptualize the oedipus complex
as something which must be mutually possessed and reveled in, and then ultimately relinquished
by both participants equally that we are able to recognize the multiple ways in which different

17
aspects of this developmental crisis can manifest themselves in the transference
countertransference arena.

Indeed, it has been my experience that in attempting to break down the rigidification of such
complementarities, the analyst must sometimes make the analytically counterintuitive move of
shifting the patient’s attention away from its constricted focus on the immediate erotic impasse
with the analyst, either excessive romantic preoccupation or excessively frustrated demands, and
examine with her instead the relentless exclusivity of her romantic obsession with the analyst as
well as the absence of any external objects of romantic interest that might signal the
developmental shift into a more post-oedipal/adolescent form of relationship. To examine with
the patient WHY such a shift has failed to occur, the implicit gratifications of such a masochistic
entrenchment, as well as the developmental/historical antecedents in the life story of the
particular patient. Likewise, the analyst may come to see the patient who does not develop any
romantic curiosity or interest in the analyst, not simply as someone who has “resisted”
developing an oedipal transference, but as an individual engaged perhaps in a different phase of
the process, i.e. more concerned with extricating herself from an overly gripping masochistic
involvement and seeking instead an analyst who is capable of tolerating the rejection and
contempt implicit in the role of the “disappointing and disappointed” post- oedipal parent.

Clinical Example

Work in Progress. Do not use or cite without permission of author. Draft being
distributed solely for the educational purposes of the Fall, 2002 IARPP Online
Colloquium. FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE FOR ANY
PURPOSE ELECTRONICALLY OR VIA HARD COPY.

Consider the following clinical example:

Roberta was a 40 year old woman who entered treatment because she felt sexually flooded
and overwhelmed “too much of the time.” She often felt intruded on by sexual fantasy and
explained that she imagined sexual meanings even where she cognitively knew no sexual

18
meanings existed. She described this as a life-long pattern, and poignantly revealed growing up
with a sense of being “dirty,” “crazy”, “sick” and “perverse.” At the beginning of her treatment
Roberta described her mother as a rigid, repressive woman who sternly forbade any discussions
of sexuality or any warmly libidinally charged expressions of intimacy or physicality around the
house. Her father she described as passive and depressed and she remembered him being away
from home for extended periods of time. As she grew older Roberta entertained the fantasy that
father had a lover, out of town, who provided him with the warmth, physicality and sexual
satisfaction that she could not imagine him having with her mother. She remembers being
pleased that her father’s needs were being met, but longing for his presence in her life. She also
remembers extensive fantasies about her father’s imagined lover both as a warmer more
sensually responsive woman whom she could identify with, and as a fantasized lover for herself.

Roberta had been molested by her maternal grandfather during her latency and early
adolescent years. She loved her grandfather intensely, and remembered this sexual abuse as the
only warm physical contact she had had growing up. Roberta had always attributed her “over-
sexualization” to this early experience of sexual abuse. Together we speculated on the
possibility that her mother had also been sexually abused by the grandfather, and that this could
account for her severe and forbidding avoidance of physicality and intimate contact. But the
mother claimed no such memories and this speculation remained as speculation.

Roberta was married and had two children, an eight year old son and a twelve year old
daughter. She felt that although she and her husband had occasional “pro forma” sex, their
relationship had been “sexually dead” for many years. She described the two of them as “warm
and caring but never passionate.” The “passion” in Roberta’s life came from a series of covert,
extramarital, lesbian relationships which were intensely erotic but relatively short lived. These
relationships had begun shortly after Roberta and her husband were married and followed by her
own account a familiar pattern of early intense erotization followed by a waning of Roberta’s
interest whenever the woman involved expressed interest in increased intimacy or emotional
engagement.

Roberta entered analysis because her current lover, rather than responding to her eventual
emotional withdrawal, with the typical hurt and outrage, had strenuously confronted the split in

19
the patient’s emotional and sexual life, challenging her to address these issues and risk engaging
in a more mutually interpenetrating relationship of emotional and sexual fulfillment. An analyst
herself, the lover pushed Roberta towards analytic treatment, claiming that whatever the fate of
their particular involvement, Roberta owed it to herself to try and understand the profound
schism in her emotional/sexual engagements that had remained unformulated but had been
enacted over many years and with multiple partners. Eventually Roberta agreed, and she and I
began meeting on a four time a week basis.

As one might anticipate, the unfolding analytic process became intensely eroticized very
quickly. Erotic dreams, fantasies and reveries about the two of us seemed to flood Roberta’s
experience of the analysis with startling intensity, throwing her into a state of panic and
confusion, and calling into question for her whether we could work together; whether she had
chosen the right analyst. I recall the immediate countertransference challenge as walking the
fine line between being the overstimulating, penetrating grandfather and the cold, anhedonic and
rejecting mother. To accept Roberta’s fantasies without encouraging them; to help her contain
the arousal and intense overstimulation which often threw her into panic, without seeming to
reject her or distance myself.

This was no easy task. And despite our best efforts the intense erotization of transference-
countertransference space continued to escalate. Roberta began to insist that an analytic
relationship between the two of us might in fact be impossible. She wanted us to be lovers….not
patient and analyst. She demanded to know whether or not I found her attractive….whether I
found myself responding to her sexually…whether I found myself “participating” in the sexually
explicit fantasies which she described. As her relentlessness intensified, I found myself slipping
more and more into a traditional analytic stance…..”we were, after all, here to explore her
fantasies, not mine”…”to understand her history….the roots of her relational difficulties.”
Although my move to this position had for me the conscious intent of “calming things down,” of
reestablishing some appropriate analytic boundary, and refocusing the patient on her own
psychic experience, it of course served to enact the persona of the rejecting, coldly unavailable
mother, running repeatedly from her daughter’s attempts at emotional connection and intimacy.
It seemed therefore to have the paradoxical effect of intensifying Roberta’s desperation and
escalating her demands for information and disclosure on my part.

20
 She now began to wonder whether it was the homosexual dimension of our relationship that
seemed to be “frightening me away.” Whether my struggles to “protect the safe boundaries of
our relationship,”(repeated with bitingly sarcastic mimicry and contempt) could not be more
accurately understood as a kind of “disguised homosexual panic.” She again called the viability
of the analysis into question. How could she, a bisexual woman, work with an analyst “so
obviously afraid and overwhelmed by her homosexual experiences?” With almost frantic
intensity she demanded to know details of my own sexual history. Had I ever had a sexual
relationship with a woman? Had I ever had a sexual encounter with a woman? Indeed had I
ever had a sexual fantasy or thought about a woman? Her demands for information reached an
almost feverish intensity and pitch. She believed that she had a “right” to know. She believed
that knowing this aspect of my history was the only way she had to protect herself “from
insidiously absorbing destructive homophobic messages,” that my unconscious might be
delivering to her.

Although some of these issues certainly resonated for me with questions that might in
another context seem reasonable to consider addressing and certainly exploring in terms of the
patient’s fantasies with regard to my subjective experience of her and my own sexuality; I felt
clear that in the heat of such intense over stimulation and aggressive assault this was NOT the
optimal moment for such analytic inquiry. I became aware that in response to Roberta’s frenetic
activity I experienced myself, with her, as being always REactive; forced into a position of
responding rather than initiating; of interpreting and closing down, rather than exploring and
opening up.

Although there was painfully little symbolic space for deconstructing this analytic impasse
within the immediacy of the analytic interaction, (on one side lay the barren valley of maternal
rejection and libidinal death while on the other we faced a potential freefall into the abyss of
analytic overstimulation and retraumatization), outside the stalemated confines of analytic
projections and counterprojections, in more private self-reflective domains, this became a time
of intense soul searching for me. Why could I not respond to my patient’s demands for love and
recognition in a way that proved satisfying to her? Why were my own fantasies when with her,
not more playfully sensual and erotic in the way that she longed for them to be? Why did I feel
so rigidly shut down and reactive, rather than creative alive and excited by the work? Was the

21
patient correct, that my own homophobia and homosexual anxieties were at work in the
stalemate between us? Indeed, had I not written myself about the kinds of acknowledgements
and recognitions of mutuality in erotic transference-countertransference processes that the patient
said she needed in order to progress?

In the quieter hours I pondered, what did Roberta need and want from me? It seemed in
part, that she wanted from me, a warmly and sensually related mother, a comfortable and
comforting physical presence, an intimacy that was visceral, bodily and responsive, a mother
who’s own sexual traumatization or homophobia did not interfere with her capacity to accept
moves towards increased closeness and yearning. But it also seemed that she needed to be
recognized and appreciated as a sexually alive, attractively engaging and desirable woman. To
see herself reflected in my eye as she had never been seen and reflected by either parent, to see
herself held there as a desirable indeed idealized love object. Perhaps she needed a mother who
could celebrate her womanhood and sexuality even if that sexuality seemed to be moving in a
direction dissimilar from her own (Kiersky,1996 Gair, 1995). But how could I find or
“discover” this part of Roberta? How could I fall in love with a patient who pursued me with
such relentless aggression and contempt? Who seemed to proclaim with such defiant triumph
the hopeless impossibility of the very desire she so assiduously courted. It seemed clear that
something was going to have to change in the countertransference first; that some creative,
potential, countertransference space would have to be reopened if this stalemate was to give way,
and these mutually sensual and erotically charged developmental processes were to unfold.
Some internal countertransference shift in me, something akin to what Symington(1983) calls an
“ act of analytic freedom,” would have to occur.

Having come this distance, internally, I began to describe to Roberta some of the ways in
which I thought she needed me to love her and to appreciate and recognize her as a sexual being.
Trying desperately to move away from the intricate choreography of perpetual sidestepping that
her aggressive pursuit had confined me to, moving beyond interpretations and comments which
addressed my sense of her need to move beyond pleas for certain concrete gratifications; I
agreed with her, finally, that she probably did really need from me some of the very things for
which she had been fighting. But at this time I shared with her as well, my observation that for
someone who so wanted and needed to be loved, Roberta had kept the “loveable” parts of herself

22
well outside our analytic exchange. By so focusing her attention and demands on what she took
as the impossible dimension of our loving feelings for each other, we had enacted a scenario in
which her original experience of extreme alternations between erotic overstimulation and
sensual/romantic deadness had been reenacted. She seemed shocked by what seemed to her,
understandably, this sudden turnabout, but it was clear that I had her attention in a very different
way. Some potentially transformative space had been opened up between us, by the shift that
had occurred in my perception of her.

So I posed to Roberta, the dilemma that I had begun to ponder myself. A dilemma that only
became palpable when my own vision of what she needed had begun to shift.

“You know,” I said to her, “I think that on some level you began this process sooo
convinced that I could never love you…that you set about, from the very beginning, before we
even had a chance, trying to force from me…to .extract from me….the very love you had
decided I could never give freely. Of course, the very forcing of it…devalues it and makes it
useless…and you are drowned in disappointment before we ever have a chance.”

“For my part I think that the more you pushed, the more I withheld…..wanting more and
more to keep my love as a gift that I could offer and not as a submission extracted under
duress.”

“It seems like our dilemma is…how am I going to give you what you say you want….what I
agree that you need….how can I offer it genuinely given the atmosphere we’ve created?”

For the first time in a long time, Roberta and I sat in silence. I took this as an unmistakably
good sign. After about ten minutes she commented, “I don’t know the answer to your
question….but I do know that it seems like a much better question to spend time on than all
those other ones about why I can’t give up wanting what I can’t give up wanting.”

“I agree,” I said, “sometimes the answer can only grow out of finding the right question.”

Roberta and I laughed together. The tension eased….and I realized how infrequently we
had shared such moments. I found myself feeling closer to her even now.

23
 “You know I find myself wondering if I even know the part of you you want me to love. Do
you think you’ve allowed her to be here with me? I mean…I know that I hear about her….how
other people love her…but I’m not sure that I’ve really met her myself. Do you think I have?”

Silence again….and then…. “I don’t know…..tell me more….”

“Well…for example…I don’t hear much about you and Sondra….about the warm, sensual,
sexual parts of your relationship….I heard a good deal about the boredom and deadness and
tedium of your marriage….about the seeming impossibility of ever getting what you say you
need from me….but I don’t hear much about the places where you feel loved….and where you
love….I don’t hear much about the warmer, more intimate, sexier, more passionate and alive
feelings that you do have….I think that I’d like to meet THAT Roberta and get to know her. To
hear more about the places outside of our relationship where she loves and is loved….Maybe,
then, in the particular ways that I AM allowed as your analyst….I could even fall in love with
her in some of the ways you say she needs….I think I would like to see if that could happen.”

This interaction between Roberta and me gave way to a particularly rich period of
analytic work; a period in which she more freely allowed herself to emerge as a playful, sensual
and sexual adult woman; a period in which erotic dreams, fantasies and reveries began to flourish
and elaborate themselves in meaningful ways. As my own appreciation of this part of her began
to blossom and become incorporated into my internal vision of her, the patient’s demands for
concrete expressions of love and her relentless focus on my sexual history began to give way. I
do not want to somehow communicate that these transformations were “magical,” that they
completely changed the analytic dialogue. Roberta and I still got bogged down in many of the
old transference/countertransference processes; marked by disappointment, ambivalent demand
and struggle. But our newer ability to exist outside the particular
transference/countertransference constellation in which I became the embodiment of everything
which Roberta could NOT have, allowed us, when this paradigm did reoccur, to deal with it
from a far more “perspectival place.” There was, I believe, a shared sense between us that we
had entered a different phase of our work together.

What was the turning point we might well ask, in beginning to reverse this therapeutic
impasse? I would like to suggest that what often creates therapeutic movement, in such cases,

24
is the oftentimes imperceptible countertransference shift which allows new patient analyst
experiences, and therefore new representational images of the patient to emerge for the first time
in the mind of the analyst. Much as a parent holds hopeful futuristic images of who her child
might strive to become, prematurely foreclosed self experience will often give way to emergent
self experience, for the first time in the mind of the analyst. The patient will plant the seedlings
of emergent self experience in the analyst’s unconscious, held there for safe keeping, while she
is then freed to enact her hatred for, jealousy of, entitlement to, and love of these as yet
unintegrated self organizations. The analyst’s task becomes one of discovering and protecting
these nascent selves, buried under the landfill of countertransferential blindness, of holding them
there and of loving and protecting them sufficiently, until such time that the patient can discover
them for herself, reflected in the analyst’s vision and integrate them for the first time.

Peter Fonagy(1999) has suggested that,

The repeated experience of finding himself in the mind of his therapist,

not only enhances (the patient’s) self representation but also removes the patient’s
fear of looking……The analyst’s thinking, even if initially neither understood nor
appreciated by the patient, continually challenges the patient’s mind stimulating a
need to conceive of ideas in new ways….believing as opposed to knowing, allows
uncertainty rather than reliance on rigidity [p. 13].

Now borrowing from Bion’s perspective that what is contained must also be transformed
before being given back to the patient, and from Slavin and Kriegman’s 1998) formulation that
in many cases it is the analyst who must change in order to create therapeutic progress, I would
like to amend Fonagy’s more cognitive conceptualization of therapeutic function in the following
way. I would like to suggest that it is not simply THAT the patient discovers himself held in the
mind of the analyst, although this is necessary, but more significantly, I believe that it is WHO
the patient discovers residing in his analyst’s mind, as well as the transformation of that WHO,
the multiple and emergent WHOS, that determine the breadth and scope of therapeutic potential.
To what extent the images of himself, as discovered for the first time in the analyst’s mind,
represent the outcome of transformative potentials released via the analyst’s own self reflective
self analytic work. To what extent the patient can watch herself change by watching the

25
analyst’s perception of her reconfigure itself before her own eyes. To what extent these nascent,
buried, emergent selves, foreclosed by earlier developmental failures, are permitted to live,
breathe and flourish. To what extent, therefore, the patient meets herself - new selves - in
moments of analytic encounter and experiences moments of profound self recognition and
reintegration.

In some cases our theories impede rather than assist in countertransference analysis. And it
is only as theories are transformed that certain countertransferences can be disembedded from
the obfuscating influence of the theoretically sanctioned and expectable. In the specific
situation presented here, I believe that it was only after I was able to realize Roberta’s right to be
loved and adored, to be recognized by me as a sensual and sexual woman, that I was able to even
raise the question of why I had been unable to see her and embrace her in this way. To
understand that her most intense need was to move beyond the analytic relationship, but to
understand as well, that something developmentally denied had to be reenacted within that
relationship before the patient would become capable of moving on. To look more specifically
at the juncture of oedipal and post oedipal transferences and to understand the ways in which the
interaction between us had impeded the unfolding of such developmentally necessary
experience. Ultimately, it was only after understanding that this experience had failed to occur
between us that I could view in a different way the relentlessness and aggression of the patient’s
pursuit and to understand that what I viewed as her failure to mourn was really a result of her
having experienced nothing TO mourn in the first place. With such shifts in my own internal
process, the image of Roberta that was held in mind by me, and reflected back to her in my
moods, body language, interpretations and passing remarks, both conscious and unconscious,
began to shift in a series of imperceptible micro-adjustments that resulted in her finding a newly
emergent self, held in mind and reflected back, to her, by me. It was only via these
transformations in the transference/countertransference experience, that our frustrating impasse
of hopelessness and resignation was able to give way, eventually and over time, to moments of
deep mourning and a graceful relinquishing of the kind of oedipal adoration and romance that
had been hard fought and hard one between us, held for a moment of time, suspended in
potential space, sustained by illusion, and ultimately transformed by the attraction and enhanced
allure of actual, intimate, adult relatedness and sexual aliveness.

26
References

Work in Progress. Do not use or cite without permission of author. Draft being
distributed solely for the educational purposes of the Fall, 2002 IARPP Online
Colloquium. FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. DO NOT DISTRIBUTE FOR ANY
PURPOSE ELECTRONICALLY OR VIA HARD COPY.

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Benjamin, J. (1995) Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual
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