ABSTRACT
Much like ordinary, everyday romantic love experienced outside the consulting room, 'erotic transference'-the term traditionally ascribed to the patient's erotic feelings for the analyst is a potent brew of fantasies of desire and longing for the other person. Freud describes the situation of erotic transference, or 'transference love' as he refers to it in his early essay 'Observations on Transference, Love', as 'distressing and comical', 'serious', 'unavoidable', and 'difficult to clear up' or to resolve. Given that both 'real' love and the fantasies of transference love are composites of several overlapping and different realities of fantasy and mixtures of past and present, one cannot even begin to discern their difference. Indeed, given that psychoanalytic theory invests so much in fantasy as that which substantiates and shapes our subjectivity and very sense of reality it would be imprudent to regard fantasy and reality as mutually exclusive conceptions and experiences.
