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In this response to commentaries by Bernstein and Frankel, I suggest that there has been a shift in the psychoanalytic Zeitgeist with regard to ethical transgressions. At the time my case transpired, analysts' authenticity was prohibited, and >misdemeanors< were met with overzealous judgment. Contemporary theory and practice has come to appreciate the analyst's subjectivity, and the mutual press of the >impossible profession.< But in doing so, it has begun to occupy another polarized position. Instead of imposing moralistic judgment, we are tending to overcontextualize the analyst's acts and displace the analyst's agency onto the patient. Another position is suggested here.
Discussing an intensive case study of female sexual dysfunction, this paper studies mutual deregulation and disintegration as it unfolds in the transference–countertransference dyad. I propose that ethical transgressions are potentiated in analytic dyads in which the analyst's hope for either solitude or mutuality is foreclosed. This hope can be foreclosed by the particulars of the therapeutic interaction as well as by the theoretical and clinical aspects of analytic training. The deregulation that both precipitates and follows such transgression can be healed (in the analyst, in the analysis) only by the restitution of the therapist's agency, the reduction of paranoid-schizoid guilt and shame, and the location (in the analyst) of depressive, >I-Thou< remorse.