ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines what he considers to be the major contradictions in the classical psychoanalytic view of the love or erotic transference. One of the most striking features in the scarce literature on the erotic transference is that most of what has been written has been done in the United States. Love is blind, but it also leads to insights and greater understanding as the lovers seek to explore each other psychically as well as physically. Placing the erotic in the negative transference has had an astonishingly tenacious grip on our theoretical understanding and our ability to think afresh, and this has caused more problems than necessary in connection with this challenging phenomenon. Love simultaneously contains infantile origins and hopes for the future. The frustration imposed by the necessary analytic abstinence is what turns the sexual desire into something hostile and sometimes anti- or counter-therapeutic.
