ABSTRACT
In developing the position on love, Freud is actually asserting several fundamental continuities simultaneously: that between the infantile and the adult, that between the normal and the neurotic (the rational-realistic and the irrational-unrealistic), and that between psychoanalysis and real life. Freud was surely right to be steadily concerned that any significant relaxation of the properly detached analytic attitude might easily lead one to slide into an ethically and therapeutically compromised role in the course of doing analysis. Freud came to view the female analyses and outpouring of romantic and passionate feelings and demands in two ways. On the one hand, it was a resistance insofar as it enacted her pressure on the analyst to change the analytic relationship into a love affair. In 1915 Freud was working with a theory framed almost entirely in terms of the driving force of libido.
