Comment on Anne Springer's ‘Paying Homage to the Power of Love’

Anne Springer's paper, ‘Paying homage to the power of love: Exceeding the bounds of professional practice’, is the most convincing account I have read of the psychodynamics of sexual boundary-crossing in psychotherapy. Calling the analyst who sexualizes the therapy a ‘pervert’ on the one hand brings us up short because the word, at least in English, has such monstrous affective connotations. On the other hand, Springer follows through with a compelling psychodynamic account of just how she sees this ‘perversion’ manifesting in the transference-countertransference interaction; her description to me completely justifies designating the psychotherapist's sexual perversion as the central psychological reality in the all-too-frequent moments of sexual boundary-crossing in psychotherapy.

We still very badly need to learn the lessons that Springer offers us through her frequent, at times unnerving, repetitions of the words ‘pervert’ and ‘perversion’. Her paper's great overt strength lies in the careful and intellectually coherent way she informs us about the psychodynamics of perversion as they enter the countertransference. Yet by not mincing those particular words about what is involved, she reaches us also at an affective level, giving us an opportunity to move past our defences and stop fobbing off these boundary violations as ‘situational vulnerability’ in ‘lovesick’, but otherwise intact therapists; as legitimate, though failed attempts at having a ‘real love relationship’; or as the case of ‘an ethical analyst who concretizes his sexual desires in therapy [being] certainly possessed by the Pan/Nymph archetype … Ethical, moral and legal approaches to the problem miss the point’ (Robert Stein, ‘The fear of phallos’,  Spring,  51, 1991, p.  31). I have read or heard each of these rationalizations,