ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a particular emotional aspect of the analytic experience: the sense of entitlement or the feeling of being special. It illustrates how in some instances there can be a conflict between the analyst’s and the patient’s values concerning entitlement, quite apart from transference and countertransference per se. Many aspects of the analytic relationship suggest the analyst’s vulnerability to irrational entitlement. The analyst may achieve greater freedom to participate in a lively, appreciative, even humorous manner, when he or she owns personal entitlements as part of the ongoing action. This entails the analyst accepting that, like the patient, he or she needs to feel and to be treated as special, and that, when threatened, characteristic defense patterns are likely to emerge in the interaction. The patient may quite accurately perceive aspects of the analyst’s psychology of entitlement and may use and abuse such knowledge in the therapeutic relationship.
