ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that all psychoanalytic treatments bring suffering and pleasure to the psychoanalyst responsible. Thought originates in suffering, frustration, and absence. It seeks to work through mourning and that which is lacking. Suffering is inherent to all psychic development, designating and characterizing the fundamental lack that is recalled in all experiences of separation, rupture, and loss. As for pain, in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, S. Freud examines its various forms as an affect distinct from anxiety, and which might or might not be associated with mourning and the loss of the object. Suffering is an affect that anxiety, while endeavouring to ward it off, also actually engenders. In treatment, it accompanies the psychic movements associated with the castration/seduction anxieties, which awaken old narcissistic wounds associated with feelings of impotence and infantile dependency.
