ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that a good psychoanalytic way of approaching the business of both boundaries and limits, and of the need to be met by someone when going beyond, is the name of the father. But the father is also implicated in some of the key topics of psychoanalytic therapy, both as theory and as practice. These include sexuality, identity, the capacity to develop adult relationships and, finally, love. A therapy, however intense and lengthy, however profound the regression or intimate the transference and counter-transference, can only give expression to this capacity and impulse if it has an end. For Sigmund Freud, originally, transference was a form of resistance which got in the way of the patient's free associations, blocking them with a distorted notion of the analyst. While Freud modified and expanded his ideas on transference, in particular to give it an important role in the unravelling and articulating of the patient's loves and hates.
