Welcome to PEP Web! Viewing the full text of this document requires a subscription to PEP Web. If you are coming in from a university from a registered IP address or secure referral page you should not need to log in. Contact your university librarian in the event of problems. If you have a personal subscription on your own account or through a Society or Institute please put your username and password in the box below. Any difficulties should be reported to your group administrator. Username: Password: Can't remember your username and/or password? If you have forgotten your username and/or password please click here and log in to the PaDS database. Once there you need to fill in your email address (this must be the email address that PEP has on record for you) and click "Send." Your username and password will be sent to this email address within a few minutes. If this does not work for you please contact your group organizer. Athens user? Login here. Not already a subscriber? Order a subscription today.

(1994). Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 14:535-557

What Angel Would Hear Me?: The Erotics of Transference

Jessica Benjamin, Ph.D.

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic

orders? And even if one of them suddenly

pressed me against his heart, I should dissolve in his

mightier Being. For Beauty's nothing

but beginning of Terror, we're still just able to bear,

and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains

to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible.

And so I contain myself, and choke down the call

of depth-dark sobbing. Alas, who is there

we can make use of?

The inspiration for this paper is the opening passage of Rilke's Duino Elegies. Although Freud committed psychoanalysis to the process of demystification, it is not only in that spirit that I transpose the figure of the Angel from the sacred to the therapeutic. Rather, I wish to summon up that aspect of mystery which remains alive in psychoanalysis, in the erotic force of the transference. For the terrifying and powerful figure of the Angel seems to express something of the awe and danger Freud first discovered in the rel

[This is a summary or excerpt from the full text of the book or article. The full text of the document is available to subscribers.]