Analytic Love and Human Vulnerability: A Comment on Lawrence Friedman's “Is There a Special Psychoanalytic Love?”

I have much admiration for Lawrence Friedman's article. He reviews a complicated literature with exemplary lucidity, and he makes a cogent and creative proposal of his own. Friedman needs to negotiate a delicate balance between various unacceptable extremes. The love of analyst for patient needs, it seems, to be really felt as love, and yet not as some inappropriate form of erotic love. A view of this love needs to take account of the asymmetrical relationship between analyst and patient, and yet not to build too much on the parent-child example, which risks infantilizing the patient. The love must involve understanding of the patient's particularity, as conveyed in a narrative history, but it must not be a “bloodless” type of understanding; understanding must involve both dynamism (the activity of striving together at a common task) and what Friedman nicely calls “juice,” the sense that this really matters, for the analyst, at the emotional level. The analyst's response must be truly heartfelt, but not in such a way as to make the love depend, in a chance-governed way, on contingent responses to the idiosyncrasies of patients of many different types. Finally, if the account is to come to grips with what is distinctive about psychoanalytic understanding, as contrasted with forms of understanding generated in other forms of therapy, it must incorporate a role for the analyst's