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The “tender feelings” that arise in patients undergoing psychoanalysis were described by Freud as “transference love.” However, their dependence appears to be more in the realm of passion than love. Starting from the Freudian hypothesis about the helplessness of human beings at birth, the author argues that the first emotional ties felt by a child have the features of passion and that the attribution of omnipotence to parents (which cannot be dissociated from the child’s vital dependence) makes this primal passion the source of all subsequent ones. To enable the child to escape from the servitude-idealization that arises from their primal dependence, the parents’ capacity for love (in other words, their capacity to give life to a creature other than themselves) is critical. In the analytic situation, therefore, it seems more appropriate to use the term of passion about transference, and to reserve the term “love” for when the psychoanalytical relation is based on the recognition of the singularity and the freedom of the patient.