ABSTRACT
One of the assumptions that informs people work as integrative psychotherapists and as supervisors is that being able to “read” and process transference—or the client’s mostly non-verbal communication of archaic experience—is essential to a successful therapeutic outcome. In the history of psychotherapy the powerful emotions of love and hate have been explored mainly within the psychoanalytic tradition, beginning with Freud. In 1930 he looked at the major challenges facing humanity in terms of our propensity towards destruction and explored the conflict between “eros” or the life instinct and “thanatos” or the death instinct. Of course the humanistic movement has always championed a two-person psychological approach to therapy working with the in-between to foster change, growth and healing. Although humanistic psychotherapies are predominantly American in origin they stem from the European existentialist tradition. Mann believes that the erotic “is the very creative stuff of life and is inextricably linked to passion”.
