On Making Reparation to the Analyst's Idolized Countertransference: Commentary on Paper by Dana Amir.

Dana Amir's paper, “The Chameleon Language of Perversion,” provides an opportunity to consider the discourse of perversion on two fronts: as a stalled mode of representation in the articulation of desire (Freud, 1905) and as an elusive harbinger of normative discourse in the psychoanalyst's countertransference. By drawing us into the intricacies of perverse communication, her paper invites us to elaborate a relational perspective on perversion that accounts for both qualities of discourse. I use clinical vignettes to argue that by holding the double meaning of countertransference, as discourse that aims for affect to be contained and represented and as a way of knowing endowed by the analyst's occupation of normative discourse, the relational analyst may coaxperversionfrom inert scene into the domain of object representation, making reparation to the idolized countertransference (Khan, 1989) so as to vest chameleon language with intersubjective capacity for recognition and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]