ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud was the first to describe transference love, to theorize about its precursors in our developmental lives and its meaning in the psychoanalytic process, and to make a connection between transference love and real-life love. Freud in 1915 believed that the erotic transference was primarily an impediment to therapy and advised the therapist to demonstrate to the patient that she has fallen in love with him only as a means of avoiding the painful discoveries about to be made. According to Freud, all love is a re-finding, repeating infantile reactions; but transference love, he claimed, for reasons not altogether clear, was dominated by the straitjacket of repetition to an even greater extent than was romantic love. Friedrich-Wilhelm Eickhoff observes that Freud’s paper on transference love, though brief, “occupies an outstanding place in the debate on the curative significance of the interpretation of psychical conflicts versus direct emotional experience.”.
