“I want to be a parasite in your body”. On a particular case of transference love.

by | Vol 25 (2) 2007

In this case study of a thirty year old woman, we address the question of a particular form of transference love. Freud pointed out that the therapeutic functioning of a psychoanalytic cure relies on transference and that the development of this transference is based on our passions: love and hate. The position of abstinence adopted by the psychoanalyst creates, inevitably at times, a situation of unrequited love. The way in which the patient handles this structural impossibility of her love demands transforms her analytical adventure into a painful existential experience which allows us to question the very meaning of the (psychoanalytic) experience.

Related articles

  • Lacan, Alcibiades and Freud: On Love and Transference

    This essay examines why Socrates uses the Symposium of Plato to better understand transference in psychoanalytic treatment. The reason is found in Freud's argument that transference is true love and that Eros is the subject of the Symposium. Can Socrates be seen as a precursor to Freud? Lacan's answer is no. The knowledge of Socrates is not the knowledge of Freud. According to Socrates, love is oriented to what is good and the love for the individual is sublimated into…

  • Transference and Constellation as Institutional Psychotherapy

    Reflecting on the past seventeen years, the author describes the vicissitudes of the notions of transference and constellation in the history of La Traversière. He does so on the basis of a consideration of the history of psychoanalytical theory on the work, via transference, with psychotic patients. In this sense, his story forms a plea for the recreation and safeguarding of the conditions under which we can work with dissociated transference by means of the constellation meeting, as introduced by…

  • A case of erotomania

    Psychiatric classification of erotomania yields a variety of possibilities, situating erotomania along a continuum with personality disorders on one end and the schizophrenic disorders at the other end. The "Postulat Fondamental" of de Clérambault breaks with this tradition. With Freud and Lacan it gives rise to a structural analysis. In considering the relation to the Other, it facilitates the differentiation between erotomanic (psychotic) and neurotic (hysterical) structures. In this case special attention is given to the fragile libidinal balance, a…