Introduction

Are we ultimately alone with our struggles and experiences? To what extent can those struggles be modified by the influences, love, and care of others? The three papers of this symposium address these fundamental questions concerning the possibilities and limitations of analytic love. Of special interest to the authors are the paradoxes, even the contradictions, between the creative reach of personal agency and the loving, sometimes intrusive, influences of others. The fragile balance between mutual love and respect is always at risk, and as Rank (1936) noted, may quickly degenerate into a Pygmalion-like power struggle between two creative wills. In this regard, as analysts we would be well advised to be alert to the different ways in which one person may use the loving, expansive aspects of his or her personal agency to creatively render another person into his or her victimized creature. And yet the pull to care for those who use their freedom of self-determination to be cruel to themselves or to shame themselves is very great indeed and perhaps often should not be resisted. How, then, may we be of best use to our patients without intruding on their sense of personal agency and insulting the dignity of their freedom of self-determination?

In the first paper, “The Conundrum of Self-Care,” Steven Stern addresses himself very directly to the possibilities and limitations of analytic love. First, he asserts that the issue of poor patient self-care has not received attention as a primary clinical problem in its own right. This omission is of special importance because poor self-care can undermine the potentialities of personal agency. Stern suggests that these problems of self-care result from a breakdown in the dialectic between concerned action and empathic recognition within the parent-child relationship. Whereas concerned action is