Freud and the Ideal Self 233
tions, won out. Love, it turns out, was and is the overestimation of
the erotic object.
Freud assaults love from every side. The objective of psycho-
therapy in its last phase is to expose and then dissolve the patient’s
erotic illusions. The patient believes he can be cured through the
love of the therapist. He will be delivered from his misery by a fi gure
of authority, who can also sate the desires: id and superego will be
rendered content and wholeness achieved. But this is a lie. The pa-
tient falls in love with the therapist through the pro cess that Freud
calls the transference— and sometimes the therapist falls too; the
counter- transference is almost always part of analy sis. The patient
asks to be cured, which is to say to be made whole, and this is what
he does in life when he falls in love. He asks for wholeness, he asks
for the unity of being that passes beyond the everyday disjunction
he feels. But he is asking for too much. He is asking for the love that
the parent gives the child. Frequently the therapist invites the pa-
tient to consider the perception that he is always demanding this sort
of response when he falls in love, even in what is called adult life.
He is a creature of need, not a creature of desire. A human being
possessed by need is greedy, hungry for more, and prone to bitter
anger, sometimes rage, when perfect love is not forthcoming. The
human being who has moved on to desire hopes for understanding,
reciprocity, and partnership, but also knows that even in the best
of marriages those benefi ts will not always be available. The psy-
choanalytic patient must break his erotic illusions if he is to take up
a sane and productive life.
If he does not, love will always be bitterly frustrating. To the
Freudian way of thinking, a marital argument about the bud get or
the true location of the house keys often hides deeper content. You
spend too freely is sometimes a coded version of an injunction: You
don’t love me enough. You are not my Soulmate. And for this I am
enraged. You must be, must be. To which the Freudian patient has