ABSTRACT
The idealized image of a mirror that is also a shield fails to include other, more unstable and conflictual aspects of the psychoanalytic situation—an extraordinary arrangement where two people talk in a way that, in Freud's words, has no parallel: "The course the analyst must pursue", he writes, "is one for which there is no model in real life". The power of the potion, as devised in the psychoanalytic situation, heightens the analyst's vulnerability to forgetting himself. As a human medium, the analyst's character is always being tested, as he (or she) resists the enticements and provocations not only of the transference—a psychological seduction, leading away, with the aim to bring back—but of the actual real-life, two-person engagement through which the "bringing-back" unfolds. It's always useful to argue why a particular essay is indispensable to reconstructing psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a powerful instrument with an enormous potential to help, that helpfulness conjoined with potential to harm, sometimes grievously.
