ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has regarded transference exclusively as an “artificial illness,” a “new edition” of core childhood psychopathology that is revived and compulsively repeated with the analyst as the original childhood imagoes. This chapter presents the case of Ben. The deflection of the idealizing and twinship transferences inadvertently encouraged Ben to displace his thwarted needs for affirming experience—from the psychoanalytic situation and the psychoanalyst to the secret source of affirmation derived from the twins he met in the bookstores and baths. The chapter aims to understand Ben’s larval transference as it emerges in several hours in the second month of treatment and briefly mention the “beautiful man” and “hungry guy” transference in the second year of the analysis. It is clear that the unanalyzed selfobject experiences with Ralph Roughton had a profound effect on Ben’s beginning sense of cohesion. Thus, what Roughton calls “good” analysis should mean that cure for patients, in general, for gay and lesbian patients.
