SEXUAL ISSUES IN CLINICAL PRACTICE FORUM ARCHIVE
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Re:More about transference
deborah lott · 4/29/99 at 9:22 am ET
I hate to harp on my book but I really feel that if you read the chapters on love and sexual transgressions
you will get a different take on your own experience.I think those women's experiences will resonate
with your own and help you to make sense of what's going on. I agree that some therapists use the
excuse of boundaries or clinical distance to de-humanize the relationship and to avoid any real emotional
contact. Not every therapist interprets the role as requiring an insensitivity to the patient's financial
hardship. BUT I think in the long run the boundaries protect the client. Otherwise the therapist's needs
start to muddy up the picture. When therapists stop charging the client at all or allow a huge debt to
develop, They are at risk of violating other boundaries. By all accounts, every study that's ever
attempted to look at it, when women sleep with their therapists the results are disastrous for the women.
That doesn't mean it felt that way going in. On the contrary, a number of the women I interviewed felt as
you do, that sleeping with the therapist would be the greatest thing that could ever happen to them, that
it represented a dream come true, an unprecedented fulfillment and even a sort of reunion. As if the
therapist's love somehow meant more than the love of some other man. But I have to ask you to
question whether the emotional expectation you have about sleeping with him would be realistic if you
had it about any other man you've ever slept with. What I'm trying to say is that if it seems better than
life, larger than life, as if it will be somehow curative in its own right, as if the sex has a charge beyond
that of sleeping with the usual mortal, give the benefit of the doubt to the possibility that some sort of
special phenomenon is at work here. And the longing that comes up in therapy (and believe me I do not
write solely as a researcher but also as a woman who slept with her therapist and continued to have
sexual feelings for a subsequent therapist, despite the fact that the first experience was like a bad acid
trip) is very powerful stuff, but I have come to believe that it's not based on a realistic assessment of the
therapist as a potential love-object in the real world. One woman in my book who slept with her
therapist after having incredible expectations for what it would be like and what it would MEAN, felt as
if she were watching him deflate, watching all the air go out of him even while they were still in bed. As
for how uncomfortable it was to tell him; that's probably because therapy may be the only situation
where you declare your feelings openly to someone and he doesn't have to respond in kind. In fact, he
intentionally keeps you from knowing what he's REALLY thinking and feeling. But imagine what would
happen if he said, "yes, I'm attracted to you, but we're not going to act on it." Would that be helpful on
any level? Or if he said, "I don't allow myself to get attracted to my clients because that's not part of the
contract in here." Would that help? I think the best therapists help the woman to feel free to declare her
love, even help her to celebrate the fact that she's capable of such an intense love, perhaps help her take
a certain unabashed pleasure in her own loving feelings but that's really difficult because unrequited love,
and therapy is kind of a set-up to induce the development of unrequited love, I believe, is inherently
painful. But, on the other hand, the women in my book who became comfortable talking about the
loving fantasies they had about their therapist, if they could drop the agenda of actually sleeping with
him, and just use the feelings as a road to self-knowledge, found the experience incredibly liberating. Let
me know how all this strikes you. Have you been having these feelings for a long time in the therapy?
Can you trace them to anything the therapist said or did? Is he single? Does he talk about his own love
life with you? Besides the eye contact is there anything else he does that feels like flirtation or courtship?
I don't think that you are misreading intimacy as sexual attraction, I think they speak exactly the same
language. A famous therapist and infant researcher named Daniel Stern said there's only two groups of
people our society "allows" to make prolonged eye contact -- lovers and mothers and babies -- and
also therapists and clients."
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