ABSTRACT
All of our past loving/sexual experiences are part of us and are present to varying degrees when we love. Despite the common belief that we must be devoted to our lover with a single-minded passion, thinking only of them, we are an accumulation of self-experiences with multiple loves both romantic and platonic. Case examples illustrate how patients use fantasies of past loving and sexual experiences to access their loving and sexual selves in the present. The past experience with the other is the symbol for the experience of self. The true goal of the fantasy, the symbolized, is the activation of their loving or sexual selves. It is a transitional phenomenon in that it uses a memory of an object in fantasy; the object from a real-world experience is used to engage the self’s creative capacity to re-create past self-experiences. The re-creation of these relationships in fantasy has implications for the interpersonal relationship of an analysis. Self-experiences that emerge in the crucible of a mutually loving analytic relationship become memories of self-experience that may be re-created for use outside the consulting room. This is one crucial way that the analytic relationship contributes to an ever-expanding sense of self.
