Dangerous Liaisons: Introduction

This introduction is to a panel of papers on the analyst's experience of extreme states of danger and self-destructiveness in analysands. The provocations and clinical opportunities afforded by sexual practices, passivity, self-mutilation are considered. The demands on the analyst to enter, contain, and examine the enactments in treatment and outside it are also considered. Tensions between attunement to pathologizing theory, self-care, and self-control (in analyst and analysand) are explored.