ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the therapist’s responses to the erotic transference. It describes current psychoanalytic views about the countertransference and explores how this particularly relates to the erotic countertransference. The model developed will relate to the therapist-parent response to the stage appropriateness of the patient-infant. The habitual notion that erotic material represents resistance in therapy, primarily signifies resistance in the therapist to recognizing ego-alien erotic desires in the patient and in him or herself. Classical object relations theory has tended to focus on the nurturing side of the mother while ignoring the erotic aspects. The analytic couple become increasingly genuine and whole as unconscious ego-alien erotic material is incorporated into a conscious ambivalence that is the hallmark of mature relationships, in which the sadistic exists but is tempered by the love. The erotic component has long since been recognized with regard to the Oedipal father, unlike with the pre-Oedipal mother.
