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What is the relationship between the time-honored term, Love, and the specialized terms, Transference and Therapeutic Alliance? Swartz attacks this question which has been perennially fascinating and challenging since the first revelations—and blushes—greeted Drs. Freud and Breuer in their consulting rooms more than 70 years ago.
Swartz rightly points out that Transference covers a multitude of phenomena—and some sins. He focuses on the “Erotized Transference,” defining it as a pathologically distorted, demanding, unrealistic emotional state. He further sees it as related to a defect in the Alliance, or working relationship established with the analyst by the healthy part of the patient's personality.
Manifestations of the transference neurosis, in the specific psychoanalytic
sense, vary from positive to negative, according to the predominance of libidinal or hostile elements. Similarly, alliance varies from good (collaborative) to poor (resistive). But the two by no means always vary in parallel.
A good alliance leads predominantly to positive transference but not exclusively so; if genuine, the transference itself must include negative detours, whether from revival of old hates or simply in reaction to the fears and frustrations of revived old loves. A poor alliance may lead to negative transference and the end of treatment. This may also be preceded by numerous detours. One of these may lead up the blind alley of erotized transference, an exaggerated, ostensibly positive state in which the patient entrenches himself and in which he may remain stuck.
Swartz deals with the vicissitudes of such cases, how they got that way and what to do about them. Their hallmark is a masquerade of love, covering thinly-disguised infantile, greedy demands and defenses against chaotic infantile destructiveness.
They are close to being a “transference perversion.” It is the kind of accentuated, often loudly proclaimed “love” which one encounters in many perverts and in the tenacious ac