By Shalini Masih
Spring unfurled itself tentatively as we, a group of psychoanalytic therapists, gathered to speak of love, not its blazing form but it’s quiet, clandestine form that pulsates in the corners of our work. It was Sheldon Bach’s (2006) paper that served as the vessel: a meditation on love as the unseen scaffolding of the therapeutic encounter.
Bach (2006) writes, “It may be that love, like beauty, is often easier to apprehend
retrospectively. One doesn’t always recognize it when it is present, but one senses its absence when it is gone.”
How strange, and yet how intimately familiar, it was to realize that love – this unruly,
tremulous force – threads itself into the analytic frame with the inevitability of breath. Hidden in the simple act of attention, folded into the gravity of an ending, suspended within the long, raw silences like a stammer between words and sessions, love reveals itself not in grand proclamations but in the unbearable gentleness with which we, therapists, hold hate, ambivalence, resistance and rupture. Bach (2006) entwines love’s attentiveness with the sacred, observing that “such close attention, unswervingly maintained over a long period of time, may come to resemble what we know as prayer.”
In our discussion, love shimmered: mutable, destabilizing, sustaining. One voice recalled a termination with a client whose theatrical gratitude evoked not pride but a primal mistrust – a visceral doubt in the veracity of love itself. Another spoke of a client’s whispered declaration, “Between you and me, we could conquer the world,” a spontaneous eruption of mutual recognition at the threshold of goodbye.
It is at endings, the group agreed, that love steps out of hiding. Terminations tear the veil, forcing both patient and therapist to reckon with what has been given and what must now be borne alone. Love, we felt, is not the absence of hate but the tender, ongoing labour of staying with the parts of the patient that also revolt and wound. I think of a mother’s hand steady even as her child thrashes.
We also spoke of the gaze as an elemental, precarious bridge. The love that binds the mother-infant couple permits entering the gaze and wilfully exiting it too. The gaze as an offering gift but also as something one needs to recoil from, a rhythm of reconnecting-recoiling, longing-aversion. The capacity to be seen without being consumed, to look without violating and to avert the gaze without guilt – this, too, was recognized as a kind of love, felt as perilous in its intensity. Back reflects, “We have learned that the normal infant is eager to gaze and that there is something very wrong if a child refuses to look…an originally loving interaction may over time become converted into a perverse activity that ends in pain and anger rather than pleasure and love.”
In the act of containing – not only hatred and rage, but also the furious flood of love—the therapist becomes something akin to a sacred vessel. While also supporting a capacity in the patient to feel love. Like the ancient rituals of prayer, the analytic frame becomes an offering: the steadfast return to the same hour, the same chair, the same simple beginning. An echo of the mother who swaddles the infant in the predictable touch of ritual that soothes. “The frame,” writes Bach (2006), “with its consistency and continuity, may take on a sacred quality…perhaps it is through the frame that our love is most powerfully expressed.”
What, then, is the analyst’s credo? – one voice asked. It is not a doctrine of mastery but a quiet vow: to enter the patient’s psychic wilderness without map or weapon, to be ceased by it as one is by poetry, to be changed by it, to love in ways that neither demand possession nor retreat into indifference. Echoing Bion’s wisdom Bach (2006) notes, “A key issue in doing successful psychoanalysis is how to enter into the experiential world of the patient…to enter into the patient’s psychic reality, which requires leaving behind as far as possible one’s own spheres, memories, values, and desires.”
And yet, as another voice reminded, some loves must remain half-veiled. Too much
exposure, too much revelation, before capacities to hold and feel love have evolved, can be as annihilating as too little. In the analytic space, love must sometimes linger in the shadows – felt, but not seized; trusted, left to float uninterrogated.
At this point in the discussion, I found myself recalling a moment from another reflection, one that arose while writing about Michael Eigen—an artist of the invisible. I once asked Mike, “How to escape love so powerful and haunting?” I asked how he survived love for his patients. Mike, at his cryptic best, responded: “How’d I get through it? Just lived through it.
Endurance? Enjoy the loving feeling and keep on keeping on…keep on being and
working…Time is important.”
I thought then of a patient I had loved, who at our parting said: “My need for you is becoming less. Through therapy I have learned what it is like to love without needing.” The sweetness of that moment still lingers on as the deepest testament to what it means to endure, to contain, and to offer love that is real without grasping.
We parted with the intention to stretch our conversation like a bridge between islands. Love, after all, is not a single act, but a labour or a trembling faith in the seen and unseen alike. And perhaps it is enough to know: somewhere, quietly, love unfolds, very much like spring.
How do we, in our work, experience the disturbances to our own narcissistic equilibrium?
What acts of love or resistance are demanded of us?
In our reading together, the therapist’s narcissistic equilibrium came alive as an almost sacred balancing act – a dance between selfhood and surrender. The group recognized that analytic work demands not simply technique, but a deep, often painful tolerance of disturbance to the therapist’s inner balance – our sense of identity, control, even moral purity. Bach (2006) demonstrates this as he writes, “Sometimes I would feel that I was the one being psychically tortured by the patient and was unable to put away my natural reactions and recover my narcissistic equilibrium. But I learned that the important thing was to keep trying even if I could not always succeed.”
Love in therapy, real and transference-bound, collides against the therapist’s own psychic thresholds. This love exposes us to being taken over, overwhelmed, invaded, even possessed. It demands an elasticity of the self: the capacity to endure being psychically moved by the patient’s pain, projections, longing, hatred, without collapsing into defensiveness or retaliation.
At one point one of us felt – “I said too much,” – a state we are only too familiar with in our work as therapists. This is when we sense our own intensity swelling in the room, it is a moment where narcissistic equilibrium wavers. Perhaps to love a patient is to risk appearing foolish, engulfed, porous, to allow the patient’s reality to become, momentarily, more vivid than one’s own. Here is an essential failure, for an alive psychoanalytic presence. Perhaps Freud struggled in this realm: his retreat into scientific objectivity was, perhaps, a defense against such psychic invasions. His desire to quantify, to pathologize love, shielded him from the unbearable vulnerability love demands, a vulnerability those rooted in existential thought risked embracing more fully. Even though he acknowledged love as
essential for cure.
To sum up, diving into this paper by Bach (2006), one learns how psychoanalytic work is not just about holding the patient, but about holding oneself in the midst of being undone, repeatedly, recovering again and again, from the small deaths of certainty, from the wounds that love and hate alike can inflict. And perhaps this is why the labour of love in therapy feels, at times, so prayerful: because it requires us to lose ourselves – and yet find our way back – over and over, without hardening, without withdrawing the gift of our attention.
References:
Bach, S. (2006). ‘Psychoanalysis and Love’ In ‘Getting From Here to There: Analytic Love,
Analytic Process’ (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203780695
Shades of Becoming 