DESIRE ON AND OFF THE COUCH

The concept of desire is potentially useful and underutilized for elucidating and understanding psychoanalytic material and informing psychoanalytic technique. It can be employed as a lens for viewing and clarifying diverse clinical phenomenon and other mental productions. One way of defining desire as a conceptual framework as applied to psychoanalytic theory is to refract it into three components: (1) love (emotional desire), (2) sex (physical desire), and (3) passion (other manifestations of desire). These different aspects of desire are manifest in and of themselves and as enhancements of one another. Focusing on each of them as manifest in the transference/countertransference relationship in analysis can facilitate a patient becoming more aware of psychological conflicts and working them through in analysis. This paper presents and discusses a case study in which these different aspects of desire are employed and analyzed.