Can Love Live? Afterword to Papers by Merav Roth and Dana Amir

The main purpose of this afterword is to use the innovative conceptualization of love and passion, drawn by Mitchell and elaborated on by Roth and Amir, to unshackle these feelings from their hazardous and alarming qualities and connotations. An attempt will be made to demonstrate how very often the patient’s and therapist’s abilities to surrender themselves to the feelings of love and passion that sprout in therapy, and, more important, to the inherent unknown components that are entwined deeply in these feelings, can both enhance the patient’s self-experience and vitality while enriching his or her emotional life and serve as a mutually created path to those parts of the self that had been formerly unapproachable.