The Painful Vicissitudes of the Patient's Love: Transference-Love and the Aesthetic Conflict

What is it about?

One of the essential elements in psychoanalysis, promoting growth of the mind, is the analyst's capacity to contain the pain of the aesthetic conflict (Meltzer, 1988) and bear the patient's primitive, often adhesive, dependent and ruthless love. The aesthetic conflict emerges in the presence of the love object and not in its absence. Mental pain seems to overwhelm the patient/infant as he is confronted by the fact that the love object, arousing an ecstatic and sublime sense of oneness is also enigmatic, ambiguous, separate, and outside his omnipotent control. This overflow of ecstasy and the pain of impending separateness can only be borne if adequately contained by the object herself. When the object is experienced as inaccessible to this primitive love, the patient/infant may recoil into autistic encapsulation, or try to penetrate forcefully through intrusive identification. The dialectic interplay between primitive love, idealization, and mature love is stressed, and illustrated in the analyses of two male patients.

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