Impasse Recollected in Tranquility: Love, Dissociation, and Discipline in the Analytic Process

Abstract

This paper offers an intimate account of a long-term analytic process and a detailed presentation of one pivotal session to illustrate and explore the issues of love, dissociation, and discipline in a therapeutic relationship. Organized around the concept of impasse, this paper presents a relational perspective on the potential in transference and countertransference love to facilitate or curtail the forward progress of therapeutic work. Love may bring life or impasse to a person in analysis. One key to the dynamics of therapeutic love and impasse is the problem of weak dissociation (Stern, 1997) and the impact of the analyst's noticing, or not noticing, a moment in the onrush of familiar clinical process that is ripe for questioning. A new concept is introduced and elaborated in this paper that relates to the resolution of preoedipal and oedipal transference love: The paradoxical analytic triangle.