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It is a privilege to read and review a series of papers that explore a topic of special interest with new and enlarged perspectives of contemporary psychoanalysis. The subject of erotic transference elicits transference as well as reality-oriented reactions to both the topic and the review task. Given the wealth of ideas and observations and the often convergent yet very different papers under review, it is impossible to do justice to their contributions. And for those papers representative of other frames of reference and alternate analytic theories, I will generally limit comment to ways in which the paper has stimulated my own analytic thinking and reaction.
The terms “erotic transference,” “erotized transference, and “instinctualized transference” continue to be used without sharp conceptual differentiation. The analytic situation and process facilitates the development of erotic transference with expressions of love and demands for reciprocal love from the analyst. Freud (1915) early distinguished transference love from positive, aim-inhibited, friendly transference, but he did not specifically refer to erotized transference. Since transference has been classically categorized according to its manifest positive or negative appearance, I still believe it is useful to delineate manifest “erotized transference” as I did in 1973. I focused as Hill notes in his paper in this issue, “The Special Place of the Erotic Transference in Psychoanalysis,” on the spectrum of erotic transferences. Erotized transference is an extreme sector of the erotic