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Everything we know of psychoanalysis, and everything we have learned from psychoanalysis, warns us that a sense of limitation and feelings of disappointment are inevitable and even essential reactions to our work. Freud—never a therapeutic optimist after the earliest, euphoric days of doing treatment—gave disappointment a central place in his vision of human experience. In “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” he wrote: “However strange it may sound, we must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction” (1912a, pp. 188-189).
It does sound strange, of course, especially coming from the man who taught that the pleasure principle regulates our psychic economy. And Freud's reasoning, his attempt to probe just what it is about “the nature of the sexual instinct” that works against full satisfaction, was necessarily shaped by the model of the mind with which he was working at the time. Because of this his thoughts about disappointment will seem incomplete today, and some contemporary analysts will find them at least a bit archaic. But they bear review, because they provide an intriguing perspective on the disappointments that are inherent in doing analytic work.
There are two principal reasons that explain why the sexual instinct cannot be fully satisfied. The first has to do with the history of our loving relationships: we learn what it is to love and to be loved in our families, so at its origins love crosses a generational divide. Our first desire is directed toward an object that for any number of reasons (the taboo