Reflections about the nature of analysis, of the analytic space, and of going beyond its limitations. A reply to Gunther Bittner

Certainly, there are moral and ethic standards for analysts. Every therapeu tical relationship is always an asymmetrical one. Therapist and patient are not partners with equal rights in the sense of a real relationship. The: r ule of abstinence itself constitutes the psychoanalytic situation, which is cancelled at the moment of its violation. Abstinence is considered in its core as the demand, to put back the own needs of the analyst in favour of t he well-understood needs of the patient for self-knowledge and autonomy. It is the necessity of allowing feelings of countertransference and at the sa me time avoiding their realization that creates the symbolic space in analy sis. Further, the question arises, whether behind the sexual needs of the p atient in regression emotional deficits in early childhood are hidden which in case of the realization of sexuality would be grossly ignored. It would also miss oedipality in its floating and playful character which itself fo rbids realization with a child, when mistaken for mature genitality.