ABSTRACT

One of Freud’s great contributions to psychoanalytic theory and technique was his constantly calling attention to the gain of pleasure concealed within the chronic psychical suffering that analysands present for treatment. It is now one of the chief aims of psychoanalytic work to interpret this gain in pleasure. To mention only a few examples of these unconscious pleasures: some analysands unconsciously maintain gratifying attachments to figures in their lives who, superficially, are presented as incontrovertibly “bad objects”; some, suffering from low self-esteem and complaining that they feel alone and helpless in a barren, persecutory world, get to be understood as satisfying their envious intentions to spoil actual or potential “good objects”; still others contrive to be punished as a way of assuaging their unconscious guilt feelings, in that way both enjoying relief from guilt and confirming their reassuring and pleasurable unconscious fantasies of omnipotent control.