Love & Psychotherapy (3/5): The Therapeutic Relationship, Erotic Transference

Freud himself was much more personable in his early work with clients. In a letter to Jung, he described psychoanalysis as, ‘a cure through love’, while Carl Rogers stated that the core conditions could be encapsulated as a kind of ‘non-possessive love’. For me, the very fibre of the therapeutic frame is compassion and love.

In this week’s blog I want to share two stories: one which illustrates the centrality of love to the therapeutic relationship, and one which considers how holding the boundary of the frame in issues of erotic transference can also be a reparative act of love.

Maria, a refugee, attends for therapy at a clinic I volunteer at in the North of England. She has walked for seven miles in the rain with her baby on her back. I know that, after our therapy, she is going to walk the whole seven miles back. At the end of the session, I take the bus ticket which the organisation gives me as part of ‘reimbursing my costs’, and I give it to Maria. This gesture sparks a discussion in group supervision about boundaries.

In her 5 Relationship Model, Petruska Clarkson discussed the importance of the therapist offering a corrective, reparative or replenishing parental relationship (or action) where the original parenting was deficient, abusive or over-protective. Maria had previously been tortured and abused by men on her journey to the UK. Asked many years later what was helpful about the therapy, she said in public that it was the love and humanity of the therapist.

Managing erotic transference

But there are also times when we demonstrate our love for our clients best by holding to strict boundaries in the therapeutic relationship – most notably in the presence of erotic transference.

I had been seeing Mary weekly for six months when, one day, she announced that she had decided to stop seeing me as her therapist… so that she could start seeing me romantically. She was furious when I tried to explore this development with her and indicated that such a relationship would never be possible. As she left I just managed to say, “I will be here at the same time next week if you would like to come back”.

The following session, which Mary did attend, became deeply focussed on how she had experienced the last one. It emerged that Mary had been abused as a child, and later a teenager. She had developed a relational coping mechanism in which she was able to take back power by enticing men.

The therapeutic relationship is a fertile ground for erotic feelings to emerge, mirroring or providing what was missed in the client’s relationship with his or her first caregiver. Rather than seeing erotic transference as something ‘problematic’, or ‘an aspect of the negative transference’, I have come to view it more and more as an informative dynamic, and an opportunity for the client to be supported in understanding their own process and relational patterns. Although Mary initially experienced my response as a shaming rejection, ultimately in holding to the boundaries of the therapeutic relationship I had been able to provide her with a reparative act of love.