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Let us stop to ponder the magnitude of Freud's discovery. For centuries men and women have searched for mandrake roots and other substances from which a love potion could be brewed. And then a Jewish Viennese physician uncovered love's secret. There is indeed a way in which one human being can make another fall in love, and the prescription is remarkably simple.
Nothing takes place between them except that they talk to each other.
This is an essay on an unpleasant subject: a subject so painful that some within the discipline of psychoanalysis wince and turn away from it—the sexual exploitation of patients. The psychoanalytic situation is an audacious endeavor that purposely courts risk: for a time placing one human being as if at the center of another's emotional life. In that power-imbalanced relationship, behind closed doors, what is the patient's protection?
Lawrence Friedman (2008) says the following about Freud's Papers on Technique, six essays written between 1911 and 1915:
Papers on Technique floats the buoys that mark out psychoanalysis from other human relationships. You can argue about whether to steer this way or that around those markers, but without them you have nothing but open sea [p. 1032].
In these pages, I try to consider what the bouys mean, and the perils they aim to mark. In my view, Freud's most fundamental “buoy” is the principle of abstinence. I am concerned in this paper with abstinence and integrity, and the shoals and depths that endanger them. I hope to raise more questions than I answer.