A Case Study of Power and the Eroticized Transference: Countertransference

This study of power in the eroticized transference—countertransference presents two sessions in the middle stage of an analysis of a woman struggling with issues of anxiety about her own power and a belief that her love and desires are destructive, toxic, and murderous. The case is presented from a neo-Kleinian/relational perspective in which the analytic strategy focuses on the development of enactments and transitional experiences and the use of evocative, presentational language, in contrast to a more traditional interpretive strategy in which discursive language concentrates on historical explanation and the differentiation of fantasy and reality. The two contiguous sessions begin with the patient's concerns about the bad behavior of the analyst and his male colleagues at an institute group-process conference. These reservations reflect the patient's anxieties about potential destructiveness and aggression, her resentment about the unfairness of men's sense of social and professional privilege, and the use of sexuality to dominate and control others. The analysand initially presents her concerns in an abstract, intellectualized, impersonal manner with little affect or connection between external events and her internal world.

As the first session progresses, the patient's concerns become articulated in more personal affective forms reflecting the dynamics of a highly eroticized transference—countertransference relationship that is articulated as the patient's identification with a powerful woman and the fantasy of raping the analyst and the subsequent paranoid anxieties about being attacked by a female boss. The second session works through the issues of power and the eroticized transference—countertransference through the development of the patient's unconscious fantasies and beliefs that her loving and desirous feelings will be destructive, leading to loss, disappearance, and murder.