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An important indication of cultural evolution in psychoanalysis has been our increasing acknowledgment that we not only love but also passionately hate psychoanalysis, even and especially when it is our discipline of choice. We have ideas about what good psychoanalysis ought to be, and we want to embody that goodness for our patients, students, and others. At the same time, we admit to feelings of hatred toward this good thing precisely because it demands so much of us.
In Muriel's Dimen's earlier work on boundary violations, “Lapsus Linguae, or a Slip of the Tongue?” (2011), she emphasized the need for the analyst to negotiate love and hate in the best interests of the patient, just as a parent must learn to resonate with, and simultaneously contain, the joy and pain of unrequited libidinal love, both the child's for the parent, and the parent's for the child (pp. 56-58). In offering this analogy, Dimen has enriched our concept of what is involved in a sexual boundary violation. Apart from the issue of overt sexual relations, she insists on the clinical and ethical importance of the analyst's nonappropriative stance: this involves a deep respect for the personal autonomy latent in the patient's struggle to express and somehow realize newly discovered desires and archaic, possibly unanswerable longings. When the analyst is psychically unable to contain the arousal of these energies in the mutual transference field, or to make good reparative use of their inevitable enactment, then the analytic opportunity to integrate desire as one's own may be lost to the patient (pp. 58-62). Underlying every sexual boundary violation lies a subtler and sometimes more insidious “narcissistic boundary violation.”