Response to Martha Nussbaum

I congratulate my paper on being the occasion of Martha Nussbaum's philosophically enlightening and clinically useful contribution to JAPA. I admire her precise grasp and the lucidity of her exposition. She has laid out the landscape I was exploring so crisply and knowledgeably, understood my path so empathically, weighed the issue with such analytical and psychoanalytical insight, that I would ask her to ghostwrite my next paper did I not know that she has better things of her own to do. By setting the Stoics beside my essay, she has revealed a larger dimension of what I thought was a parochial problem. The parallel between Freud's treatment stance and the Stoics’ is startling, even allowing for the fact that Freud did not recommend the analyst's stance as a wholesome way of life, much less a peaceful one.

Naturally I winced a little at Nussbaum's suggestion that I was less than forthright in my attempt to explicate ideas that I thought less than forthright. But I am grateful even for that gentle criticism, since it gives me an opportunity to emphasize my initial caveat, perhaps lost in the paper's bulk: namely, that my inquiry is a hypothetical one.

Both common sense and psychoanalysis tell us that two people in a room will have just those feelings they personally stir up in each other: mixtures of plain love, attraction, repulsion, hatred, fear, etc. But I had wondered if there might be a universal and peculiarly psychoanalytic something in the analyst's feelings that somehow deserves the name of love, since analysts through the generations have seemed to think so. Martha Nussbaum has understood my question well, and I thank her for presenting it so perfectly.

How forthrightly can the question be answered? Rather forthrightly, I think, in ordinary language—that is, as a patient would see it. And the forthright answer (on the whole, and in principle) is: No. If we ask what a patient means by love, we cannot find a criterion more perfectly framed than Nussbaum's: Like