You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The chairman opened this very well attended panel with an excellent introduction by pointing out that contemporary analysts had become more comfortable with their passionate feelings towards their analysands and felt less restricted by an old psychoanalytic ego ideal that had seen feelings of hatred, love and desire in the analyst as pathological countertransference requiring more personal analysis. He said that we had become more comfortable with talking about our analytic problems, stalemates and failures, and could even take pleasure in presenting details of how we had struggled with understanding our feelings and needs in analysing our patients so as to advance our patients' analysis.
He said that the presentations would show how analysts had contended with difficult patients whose erotised longings towards the analyst had drawn the analyst into intense feelings, both erotic and aggressive. Highly erotic transference, the insistence of the patients on ‘dumplings’ (Freud, 1915, p. 167), their wish to be gratified rather than understood, all of these threatened the analytic couple's alliance and disrupted analytic enquiry. How could both analysand and analyst—assuming he returned such feelings—be helped to tolerate such erotic longings between them? The chairman strongly encouraged the audience to play with the clinical vignettes in a respectful, complementary way, and reminded the audience of Tuckett's (1993) suggestion of making use of the different potential competence of the audience in order to see what the presenting analyst could not see. The chairman pointed out that only one of the three panellists would talk about his own erotic desires towards the patient, acknowledging them but also realising his discomfort at a position in which he feels helpless and duped after the interpretation of a non-verbal gesture had been repudiated. He suggested that the women patients in the other two vignettes seemed to crave intense responsiveness, caring and bodily c