A careful reading of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince and of Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree uncovers a joint fantasy: real parental devotion leads to a self-annihilation of the parent. This fantasy appe­ars directly in von Trier's film, Dancing in the Dark, and is ironically illuminated in a short story of the Israeli author, Etgar Keret. In sub­limated ways, a similar fantasy appears in psychoanalysis too, in de­velopmental models which focus on the child's needs but bypass the parent's subjectivity, and in clinical models which expect the analyst to merge with the patient, become merely a selfobject, and abandon one's separate subjectivity.
The dilemmas involved are traced, starting with Ferenczi's work, in which a tension appears between a wish for total dedication to one's patients, and a growing awareness of the unavoidable mutual conflictuality in the analyst-analysand dyad, and the crucial role of its working through. Other authors whose work is discussed include Racker, Winnicott, Bollas, Benjamin, and theorists who attempt to re­concile Kohut's legacy with intersubjective thinking, such as Stolo-row, Bacal and Tonnesvang.
The developmental model outlined sharply differentiates parental devotion from masochistic self-sacrifice and self-annihilation, and conceptualizes the growth of the child's self as anchored in interac­ting with parents who are attentive both to the child's needs and to their own needs. Regarding analytic treatment, the presence and ava­ilability of the analyst as an autonomous individual is emphasized, combined with tolerance to the varying uses the analysand has for the analyst, based on personality structure and on phases of the analytic process. The analyst's subjectivity should never be imposed when unwelcome, but budding intersubjective capacities should be met and encouraged.