Erotic horror: desire and resistance in the psychoanalytic situation.

The emotions experienced during a sexualized transference are, though genital, hardly pleasurable. The phrase erotic horror describes something of what most patients find the experience to be like. Accordingly, I set forward the hypotheses that in direct proportion to the intensity of its need, the erotic transference is a form of negative transference deriving from past object relationships with exciting but frustrating objects; genetically, erotic transferences can be related not only to the oedipal phase but also to preoedipal phases of development, can refer to actual or fantasied seductions by either or both parents, and can involve both sexual and aggressive drives; the patient can also be an exciting but frustrating object to the analyst, evoking inevitable countertransference feelings in the analyst pertaining to both contemporary and past objects; the factor that most limits the elucidation of the patient's erotic transference is not the desire of the patient but the desire of the analyst; and only the correct interpretation, whether spoken or silently understood, mitigates the frustrated desire and resistance of both patient and analyst.