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.
Combining a historical overview of erotic transference with six different current views affords us an opportunity to study this phenomenon from many different angles. The source, meaning, function, and analysis of sexual fantasies, desires, wishes, and demands expressed by analysands toward their analysts may then be better understood. Differences among the various presenters can be identified if not reconciled. Perhaps an overarching perspective on transference, in general, and the ubiquity of the erotic transference, in particular can be envisioned.
The problems created by gathering these papers on erotic transference, however, are manifold. Unfortunately, too frequently, we give scant recognition of what others have contributed to a topic when we delineate our own views. References to Freud and to Blum's (1973) paper do appear in several contributions but after that, it's each man and woman an his or her own. Self-demarcation wins out over the ideal spelled out by Benjamin: “floating in the reflection of the other's knowledge, which need not be distinguished from self's knowledge…. This experience … is love of self and other at the same time, not of one at the expense of the other.”
Considerable variability is noted regarding what is “erotic” and what is understood by “transference.” Is transference best conceived as the patient's displacement and projection of internal conflicts and