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The erotic transference has been a resource for the discovery and development of central ideas in psychoanalytic theory and technique. Among these are the management of transference, a continuum of erotic manifestations in the transference, sexualization as a defense, the intrinsically therapeutic potential of transference, and the influence of gender on the analytic process. At the same time there has been an evolution of ideas about the erotic transference itself.
I have broken these developments down into two phases. The first begins with the case of Anna O. Freud (1915) used her transference love as an example to illustrate the difficulties encountered in the management of transference. However, Freud's optimism about the analyzability of transference love and his appreciation of the complexity of the experience were unfortunately lost—replaced with reduced conceptualizations and with pessimism about analyzability. Transference love seems to have been reified as the case of Anna O.
The second phase is initiated with a paper by Blum (1973), which lays out a continuum of erotic manifestations with special attention to an extreme version that he names the “erotized transference.” This effectively dereifies the erotic transference, freeing it for further study. Coen (1981) looks at the erotic transference (and perversions) to differentiate the defense of sexualization. Schafer (1977) uses the erotic transference as a springboard for understanding the therapeutic