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The opportunity for reunion (i.e., for an actual remeeting with a person, group, place, book, art object, thought, feeling, etc) from the past often creates intense ambivalence. This is not unlike the ambivalence experienced in the transference of the psychoanalysis. As I will show, reunion and transference (the latter full of reunion fantasy) often represent similar configurations of anxious desire, defense, and object relation.
Reunions stimulate desire to meet an external object (included here are persons, places, ideas, etc.) with whom an internal object relationship previously has been established. Since internalized object relations are based partially on fantasies of the past, reunions create a “new edition” of the past. As in transference, there are the forces struggling to repeat as well as to avoid repeating the same behavior of the past. In addition, there are conflicts around making a “fresh decision.”10
With desire, reunions stimulate anger and guilt. Even the most constructive separation disturbs a relationship and arouses hurtful feelings. Separation involves “ruthlessness”14 to the present. It makes the present that is the present that was. In reunion there is a return to the scene of the crime. Anger and guilt are present and are to be faced if the experience is to be felt as real.
Reunions are existential moments, since some choice must be made as to where to “live,” in the present or in the past. A clash with