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This paper explores an outer limit of uncharted and perhaps dangerous territory in work with complexly provocative patients. Paradoxically, it delves into the dream life and the mutual consultative teamwork of the analyst, while revealing next to nothing about the patient or the session preceding the dream. The reader cannot enjoy the safe game of “discovering” what the dream was “really” about, nor how she or he would have handled some described impasse effectively and smoothly. Instead, Barish and Vida challenge us with their openness as they grapple with countertransference and its impact on the analyst's mood and self-assessment beyond the time boundaries of the session. Adam Phillips begins his book, Terrors and Experts, saying, “Iris Murdoch once suggested that to understand any philosopher's work we must ask ourselves what he or she is frightened of. To understand any psychoanalyst's work—both as a clinician and as a writer—we should ask ourselves what he or she loves: because psychoanalysis is about the unacceptable and about love, two things we prefer to keep apart, and that Freud found to be inextricable” (p. xi). Barish and Vida explore the overlap of these two areas, fear and love. They provocatively lead us into the swamps where discussants, like duck hunters, quietly lurk, ready to shoot off their mouths, aiming to bring down their prey, the presenters. However, I found their paper exciting, really new, a great adventure.
Among its accomplishments, this paper brings the analyst's homoerotic dream life into the literature and thus forms part of a powerful current paradigm shift, redefining psychoanalytic perspectives on sexuality, as exemplified by the papers in Domenici and Lesser's Disorienting Sexuality.