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It is a pleasure for me to discuss Dr. Friedman's engaging, courageous, and challenging “Eros in a Gay Dyad.” He makes the discussant's job relatively easy by raising many central questions himself, throughout his presentation, but particularly in its last paragraph. In this response, I will try to consider and elaborate on some of Dr. Friedman's questions, as well as to bring some other issues into view as they occur to me in my comfortable perch observing and considering his presentation. But is my “perch” so comfortable, or can I too feel some modicum of the discomfort and confusion that Dr. Friedman must have experienced—with his patient, and with us, his particular audience?
For I am on this panel, I surmise, as the representative of both the straight world and the psychoanalytic establishment. What, then, is my role to be? Who is my constituency, my particular audience? Should I “enlighten” my analytic brethren with insights about twoperson psychologies, intersubjectivities, the therapeutic value and inevitability of countertransference feelings and enactments? On the other hand, should I “caution” the nonanalytic therapists here, gay and otherwise, against the potential pitfalls of countertransference enactments and about the strains of overwhelming emotions and desires? Would efforts at “enlightenment” make me seem like a proponent of wild analysis to members of this Institute, or would it generate “ho-hum” feelings in others of “Are you guys still struggling