Love in the Therapy Room: Between Desire and Sacrifice

“Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.”

—Romans 13:10

The therapy room is a place of profound intimacy—a space where unconscious desires, unmet needs, and infantile longings re-emerge in raw and potent form. Love often becomes a central transference theme, not only as an object of longing but also as a site of confusion, distortion, and potential healing. But what kind of love are we speaking about?

In both life and therapy, love is not one thing. There is the worldly love that arises from the carnal mind—self-serving, grasping, seductive. This form of love, often confused with affection or passion, is rooted in the flesh, the ego, and the drive for gratification. It seeks to possess and be possessed. It operates through fantasy and projection. In therapy, it is the kind of love that fuels erotic or idealizing transference, drawing therapist and client alike into powerful enactments if not held consciously.

But there is another love—one written on the heart, not born of desire but of conscience. This love is aligned with what is “right” in the deepest sense: a love that does no harm. It is, paradoxically, a love that sacrifices the self in order to uphold the integrity of the other. In the therapy room, this love often looks quiet, even cold. It refrains. It withstands. It does not indulge. Yet it is precisely this restraint that constitutes its ethical and transformative power.

Transference, Temptation, and the Possibility of Harm

Clients do not arrive in therapy as blank slates. They bring with them the full weight of their internal object world—yearning, rage, need, and a lifetime of unmet attachment. Within this frame, love is often expressed as a desperate plea: See me. Touch me. Want me.

In intense therapeutic relationships, especially those influenced by AIT (Attachment-Informed Transference), clients may unconsciously test or provoke their therapist’s boundaries. These enactments are not manipulations in the conventional sense but efforts to recreate early relational dynamics in the hope of a different outcome.

But the risk is high. Erotic or idealizing transferences can awaken countertransferential responses that feel like love, even destiny. When therapists act on these impulses—even subtly—they enact betrayal. Abuse in therapy is rarely overt at first. It can begin as a compliment, a prolonged hug, an email sent after hours. Eventually, lines blur, and when the collapse comes, the client is often blamed for “pushing” too far.

Such actions are not love. They are exploitation masked as intimacy—fleshly love posing as care.

Love That Does No Harm: A Sacrificial Stance

What, then, does real love look like in the therapy room?

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm reminds us that “love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.” True love, in this sense, is never self-seeking. It is attuned to what the other needs, not what we want to give. It does not use the other to gratify our own unmet needs. It requires the sacrifice of ego.

This aligns closely with Paul’s injunction in Romans—to love as the fulfillment of the law, meaning to act in a way that causes no harm. But "no harm" does not mean passive neutrality. It often requires active suffering by the therapist: to hold erotic, hostile, or dependent projections without retaliation or indulgence.

A profound dilemma arises here: the therapist must love the client without being loved in return. At least, not yet. Many therapists unconsciously seek to be loved by their clients, to be seen as good or special. But if a client could love—truly love, meaning to recognize the therapist as a separate other and be at peace with that separateness—they likely would not need therapy in the first place. The capacity to love maturely is, in many ways, the outcome of successful therapy, not the starting point.

Boundaries as Love, Not Rejection

This is where boundaries come in—not as cold limits, but as acts of love. A child who becomes the “perfect child,” as Winnicott describes, is often one who never had clear, loving containment. They adapted to survive, suppressing their aggression and need for fear it would be too much for the parent to bear.

So too in therapy: clients will inevitably test the therapist's boundaries—not to destroy, but to find out whether the therapist can survive them.

“The patient needs to be able to do the worst thing and find that they are still loved… Only then can true change happen.”

—Donald Winnicott

It is not love to accept all behaviors without consequence. It is not love to endure boundary violations in silence. Love is not permissiveness—it is clarity. Boundaries are the expression of the therapist's ethical position and care. They say, I will not let either of us be harmed. I will not use you, and I will not let you use me.

Consequences are love. Structure is love. And yet, love is also forgiveness. When a client acts out—crosses a boundary, lashes out, withdraws—what then? The question becomes: Can the therapist forgive when the client returns? Can the door of the room, and the door of the heart, remain open for the one who asks to come back in?

This is where many therapeutic relationships collapse. Boundary-pushing is to be expected—it is not the failure of the therapy. The failure often lies in the therapist’s inability to forgive, to re-open the container, to metabolize rupture into healing. It is not weakness to forgive; it is the therapist’s highest form of love.

Holding the Tension: Eros and Agape

Psychoanalysis has long wrestled with the place of love in treatment. Freud famously warned against acting on erotic transference, yet he also acknowledged that analysis without love would fail. Ferenczi, in contrast, explored the therapeutic potential of tenderness, even mutuality, while later analysts like Heinz Kohut emphasized empathic mirroring as a healing force. But none of these bypass the essential ethical dilemma: love heals only when it remains conscious, boundaried, and sacrificial.

The love that heals in therapy is not eros but agape—a self-emptying concern for the other’s growth. It is the therapist’s capacity to become the container of the client’s unintegrated parts without requiring anything in return. This love does not seek gratification. It does not need to be seen or thanked. It simply remains, unwavering, in the storm.

Final Reflections

When a client enters therapy, they are not yet capable of mature love. The therapist must carry the burden of loving first—without being loved in return, without being seen, and without being understood. That is the crucible of therapeutic love.

To love in the therapy room is not to indulge, idealize, or correct. It is to stand firm in the face of unrelenting testing, to draw clear lines not as punishment, but as protection. And when the client inevitably crosses those lines—as they must—the question becomes: Will you still be here when I come back?

Love in the therapy room is not about feelings. It is about moral action, the restraint of desire, and the willingness to suffer for the sake of the other’s becoming. It is costly. And it is holy.

References:

Winnicott, D.W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press.

Fromm, E. (1956). The Art of Loving. Harper & Row.

Freud, S. (1915). Observations on Transference-Love. Standard Edition, Vol. 12.

Ferenczi, S. (1931). Confusion of Tongues Between the Adult and the Child. Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis.

Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self. International Universities Press.

Romans 13:10, Holy Bible, NIV.