Love and Other Monsters: An Introduction

This is the third in a series of papers (and the second by Lawrence Friedman1) that were written for oral presentation and, following peer review, considered significant enough in form and content to be published as they were delivered. In it Friedman cites four “monsters” of psychoanalysis that have, alas, been tamed over time. Each monster was conceived out of an unlikely amalgam of ingredients: the first monster was the procedure, a “lumpy fusion” of examination, diagnosis, and treatment manipulation; the second, the “odd coupling” of force and meaning, cause and motive; the third, the analyst as a “thoroughly ambiguous figure”; and the fourth, the “flickering reality of past in the present.” All four monsters have been dissected over the years, their organs dispersed, reducing each to only one or another of its parts because the combination proved too uncomfortable for the analyst. You will recognize in this paper Friedman's provocative—some would say outrageous—speaking style. Be prepared to feel challenged, even assaulted. Almost everyone will find something to disagree with.

Take love, for example, featured in Friedman's fourth monster. Is it true that the analyst's love is an illusion and the patient's love “merely virtual”? Let's have another look. In his paper on transference love, Freud (1915) famously waffled on whether love in analysis was as genuine as any other love. You remember:

First, the argument against:

Against the genuineness of this love we advance the fact that it exhibits not a single new feature arising

1. See also Friedman 2005.

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from the present situation, but is entirely composed of repetitions and copies of earlier reactions, including infantile ones. [p. 167]

And then the argument for:

Can we truly say that the state of being in love which becomes manifest in analytic treatment is not a real one? … It is true that the love consists of new editions of old traits and that it repeats infantile reactions. But this is the essential character of eve