ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how passion for psychoanalytic study and practice can ignite and instill life into a patient traumatized by murder. In psychoanalysis, we encounter both the positive and negative aspects of passion in our patients and within ourselves. Classic psychoanalytic issues of sex and aggression are examined from a contemporary vantage point influenced by concepts drawn from existentialism and deconstructionist thought as represented in literature and culture. Using film noir as a metaphor, an analyst demonstrates how she works with a patient who has destroyed desire and disowned passion through years of alcohol abuse. The analyst’s task is to awaken the individual’s passion so that he or she has the capacity to speak his or her unconscious meaning and desire. In film noir the effect of the femme fatale is to awaken passion in the detective and set action in motion. This is not unlike the task of the analyst who challenges a patient bereft of memories, devoid of emotions, and dead to life to awaken and confront passion in his life and discover a desire of his own.
