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This paper offers a retrospective reading of long-term analyses conducted by a female analyst with female analysands. Focusing on the particular intensity of woman-to-woman analyses, it explores the clinical and theoretical relationship between aggression, melancholia, and eroticism that emerges in these encounters.
The paper argues that woman-to-woman analysis reactivates the archaic memory of the mother-infant fusion, carrying both the promise of deep recognition and the threat of psychic annihilation. Clinical observations suggest that these analyses unfold through four successive phases: the emergence of a melancholic core, a sadomasochistic struggle, mourning work in the depressive position, and the symbolization of erotic transference. The analyst's confrontation with her own aggression, power, and femininity is understood as an inseparable dimension of this process.
Drawing on the conceptual frameworks of Perelberg, Benjamin, Abrevaya, and Winnicott, the paper argues that the dissolution of the imaginary father opens the way not to heterosexuality, but to subjectivation and the unfolding of bisexual potential. It is proposed that two women are capable of generating their own analytic third. The paper concludes that freedom is not found beyond duality but within it — continuously recreated in the space between fusion and aggression.