ABSTRACT
There are many kinds of seductions that can take place in analysis, and many kinds of risks and potential dangers for both patient and analyst. When an analyst betrays a patient, it has far-reaching implications, not just for those directly involved in the transgression, but for other patients, colleagues, peers, and the profession as a whole. An enactment becomes risky to a patient when the analyst fails in the task of mediating between inner and outer, between imagined and represented, between felt and lived. For the bystander patient, the injury itself—the injury of traumatic disillusionment—is invisible as well, and may lead the patient to seek relief through somatisation or another form of enactment. For the patient trapped in a shattered disillusionment, the expectable phases of mourning the idealised analyst cannot evolve. The fallen hero cannot be remade into a benign, "ordinary" object, but remains a shattered figure, too splintered to make whole again, too damaged to be internalised.
