Observations on Transference-Love

"Observations on Transference-Love" is the third of Freud's "Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis", published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse in 1915. It takes up a situation that Freud counts among the only really serious difficulties of analytic work: a woman patient declares that she has fallen in love with her analyst. Freud sets aside the layman's solutions, marriage, an end to the treatment or a secret affair, and argues that the analyst must neither return the love nor suppress it with moral appeals or demands for renunciation. The love is induced by the analytic situation, not by the analyst's personal qualities, a fact that should warn him against his own countertransference. It breaks out as a resistance, often just when a painful memory is drawing near; yet resistance does not create it, but finds it already present, exploits it and exaggerates it. Freud lays down the rule that the treatment must be carried out in abstinence: the patient's need and longing are to be left in place as forces that drive the work, not stilled by substitutes. The analyst holds on to the transference-love but treats it as something unreal, to be traced back to its unconscious and infantile origins, so that the patient can reveal her conditions for loving and the phantasies bound up with them. He then asks whether such love is genuine, and answers that it is: like all love it repeats infantile prototypes, and it differs from ordinary love only in being provoked by the analytic situation, intensified by resistance and heedless of reality. Because the analyst called it forth by beginning the treatment, he may draw no personal advantage from it, and here ethical and technical reasons coincide. The paper ends by likening the analyst to a chemist who works with explosive forces, and by defending psychoanalysis at full strength against milder methods.