ABSTRACT
Maternal erotic transferences are often due to unmet desire and the need for sensual body-based contact. The primal panic in the face of early erotic transferences may involve the threat of disappearing into the mother's body, leading to psychic annihilation, or the fear of losing one's gender identity, especially if these feelings rest on polarized stereotypic gender categorizations. Many of the speculations about the facilitation or inhibition of an erotic transference revolve around experiences and reactions vis-a-vis empowerment, the patient's experience with an empowered other, and the therapist's experience of the self as empowered. The power conferred on the analyst through therapeutic matrix thereby establishes a hierarchy. When the analyst is male and the analysand female, this power differential coincides with traditional gender stereotypes. The psychoanalytic setting, for this gender pairing, is a powerful instigator of traditional developmental and societal expectations, especially as these expectations were conceived by classical theorists.
