Freud, Psychoanalysis, and the Therapeutic Effect of Agapic Love

Abstract

Last year, when reading Freud's letters to Jung, I came across a most interesting passage in which Freud claimed that the “talking cure” (i.e., psychoanalysis) was the result of love—not transference, counter-transference, or another neologism of psychiatry. That is, Freud said to Jung, the cure in psychoanalysis is affected by love (McGuire, ). I meditated on this for a long while: It is interesting that Freud—whose wife was a bat kohen, daughter of a priest/rabbi—and Jung, the son and grandson of Protestant Christian ministers, would have such a soteriological dialog at the beginning of the psychoanalytic era.This remark on love was not just a one-off observation, either. The minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society affirm this line of thinking: “Our cures are cures of love” (Haynal, 1994, p. 24). Clearly, Freud and his contemporaries were talking about agape, the kind of love God has for humanity, not eros, a physical desire for another person.There is much written in contemporary psychiatric literature about fears of boundary crossing in mental health (Gabbard, ); Jung's documented erotic relationship with medical student and patient, Sabina Spielrein, may be the causa causans of this concern. But, these fears—correct concerns about untoward involvement in sexual relationships with patients—have obscured the real importance of what Freud and Jung were talking about back in the beginning of their movement. More than 100 years later, it may well be time to revisit the early dialogue of the founders of psychoanalysis and hear them in their own words once again.