Through a series of expansive essays, this book explores the centrality of love in psychoanalytic practice. Starting with the immersion of the analyst, this book reimagines several aspects of the psychoanalytic process, including transference, countertransference, boundaries, embodiment, subjectivity and eroticism. To love is to cultivate to be…

Psychoanalysis, as essentially vitalizing, is a playspace for taboo subjects within clear and safe parameters. Interweaving loving, being and perceiving, this book provides challenging new perspectives on the analyst’s subjectivity, receptivity and its immersive influence on analytic process.

These essays refine theoretical understandings of the irreducible and omnipresent nature of love in psychoanalysis, thereby offering clarity to psychoanalysts, psychodynamic therapists and scholars through the often-prohibited love and eroticism, here viewed as indispensable to psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Table of Contents

Part I – Transference

1.  Transference, real or unreal
2.   Paradox in the psychoanalytic stance
3.   The historically fetishized couch
4.   Changes in the frame
5.   Safety, danger, couch, chair
6.   The analyst as objectified other
7.   The analyst as subjective object
8.  The analyst as subject
9.  Where is psychoanalysis?
10.   The nature of boundaries
11.   Sexual boundary violations and theoretical orientation
12.   The inadvertent pluralist
13.   The art of the boundary
14.   Stance and attentional set in analytic listening
15.   Directed attentional set
16.   Diffuse attentional set
17.   Stance, set, transference

Part II – Love

1.   The erotic field
2.   The maternal erotic transference
3.   From a foreclosed void to usable space
4.   The fate of feminine signifiers
5.   Le visage de la mère
6.   Identificatory love and object love
7.   The promise that seduces desire
8.   The phenomenal experience of touch
9.   Embodied countertransference
10.   What, where is home

Part III – Being

1.   The unbearable multiplicity of experience
2.   On empathic resonance
3.   Embodiment and the perversion of desire
4.   Perversion and its qualities of being
5.   Transitional perverse scenarios
6.   Psychic positions, healthy and perverse
7.   Reverie, countertransference, retranscription
8.   Mutual influence in contemporary film
9.   To be in it with
10.   “Yes and ….” dreams

Reviews

“Celenza brings our contemporary field once more in touch with love, in all its many splendored psychic manifestations. With creativity and exquisite attunement [she] draws together many of her exciting theoretical and clinical ideas into a beautifully written text, alive with arresting case examples. Her book should be a part of every core curriculum in psychoanalytic training institutes and in teaching trainees across all the mental health disciplines.”

Rosemary H. Balsam, author of Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2012), Winner, Sigourney Award for Excellence in Psychoanalysis

“This volume really contributes to a useful advancement of the psychoanalytic instrumentarium in a traditionally hostile and dangerous field. Celenza has been able to [adopt] an authentic scientific attitude with a natural, happy integration of competence and humanity. Her work reads so well and with pleasure. It is clear, touching, substantive and convincing.”

Stefano Bolognini, Bologna, Italy; author of Vital Flows Between Self and Not-Self (forthcoming, Routledge)

“Reading this book is the literary equivalent of having dinner at the best tapas restaurant in town. Celenza offers us 37 very brief essays on the subject of love in all the guises. The length doesn’t limit their substance. The result is a highly stimulating collection that will delight clinicians, patients, teachers and scholars alike.”

Donnel Stern, author of The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal (Routledge, 2018)

“Interwoven with gripping clinical vignettes, Celenza translates sophisticated theorizing into a vitalized and relevant real-world grounding. With gripping clinical vignettes, these intriguing essays are faithful to her Italian origins. I highly recommend this remarkable book to all professionals in the field and those who work in the humanities, curious to know more about contemporary psychoanalysis.”

Giuseppe Civitarese, Pavia, Italy; author of Sublime Subjects:Aesthetic Experience and Intersubjectivity in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2017)

]]> https://www.andreacelenza.com/erotic-transferences-a-contemporary-introduction/ Fri, 25 Oct 2024 16:53:31 +0000 https://www.andreacelenza.com/?p=535 by Andrea Celenza, PhD.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to this key, yet challenging aspect of the psychoanalytic process. Despite emerging frequently in the psychoanalytic process, Andrea Celenza highlights the sparseness of literature on erotic transferences and a tendency to desexualise psychoanalytic theorizing, which she posits is a result... read more >

by Andrea Celenza, Ph.D

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to this key, yet challenging aspect of the psychoanalytic process. Despite emerging frequently in the psychoanalytic process, Andrea Celenza highlights the sparseness of literature on erotic transferences and a tendency to desexualise psychoanalytic theorizing, which she posits is a result of the inherent threat erotic transferences can pose to the analyst. By providing a thorough overview of the topic, clarifying terminology, and providing vivid case examples, Celenza seeks to redress this omission. Throughout this volume, she discusses the interplay of power and gender, along with chapters on the temptation of disclosure and the disturbing prevalence of sexual boundary violations. Providing practitioners with the tools to deal with the intense feelings that inevitably arise with erotic transferences, this book is vital reading for all psychoanalysts at all levels of experience and seniority, psychodynamic practitioners, instructors, candidates, and trainees.

Epistemologically, Celenza takes an intersubjective, social-constructivist approach and, therefore, describes clinical manifestations that reflect this underlying foundation. On a clinical level, she takes seriously all of the psychoanalytic approaches to emergent phenomena, including neo-Classical, neo-Kleinian, Object-Relational, Relational, and Post-Bionian Field Theoretical systems. The latter especially permeates her understandings of the role of countertransferences as this vantage point provides an essential channel for unconscious communication. All of these perspectives are organically interwoven into pertinent case illustrations.

This book is part of a series by Routledge comprised of dozens of books that will serve as concise introductions dedicated to influential concepts, theories, leading figures, and techniques in psychoanalysis. All volumes are characterized by “clarity, accessibility, and depth.” The purpose of the series is to offer compendia of information on particular topics within different psychoanalytic schools. These books make intricate ideas comprehensible without compromising their complexity. The aim is to make contemporary psychoanalysis more accessible to both clinicians and the general educated public.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. What are erotic transferences?
3. Maternal erotic transferences
4. The erotics of power
5. Are erotic transferences gendered?
6. Comfort and containment of erotic language and feelings
7. Erotic transferences and sexual boundary violations

Reviews

“Andrea Celenza explores in this seminal book one of the most difficult – and not surprisingly least visited – theoretical/clinical areas of psychoanalysis from its beginnings to the present. With her long specific experience in observing and treating these often highly problematic transference configurations, she succeeds in clearly describing their variety and complexity. Erotic transference is thus transformed, in many cases, from insurmountable obstacles to treatment into valuable opportunities for ever deeper and more effective analysis at the heart of human sometimes dramatic relational experience.”

Stefano Bolognini, MD; IPA Past-President; author of Vital Flows Between Self and Non-Self: The Interpsychic, (Routledge, 2022).

“Erotic transferences are ubiquitous. However, they are often denied, buried, projected, dismissed, overlooked, feared, or hidden in the darkest corners of the psyche. In this outstanding tour de force, Andrea Celenza brings them out of the darkness and into the daylight. In so doing, she enlightens her readers while also providing the reader with a brilliant guide. I highly recommend it to clinicians and educators alike.”

Glen O. Gabbard, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Baylor College of Medicine, author of Boundaries and Boundary Violations in Psychoanalysis (American Psychiatric Publishing, 2016).

“I thought I knew a lot about this topic, but I learned many new things from this lucid, accessible and stimulating book. Andrea Celenza is right that psychoanalysis has been desexualised. As one of the foremost experts on sexual misconduct, she now places that phenomenon in the much larger and more positive context of the erotic dimensions of psychotherapy. What she writes will be essential reading for therapists of all schools and at all levels of experience.”

Prof. Andrew Samuels, author of A New Therapy for Politics? (Routledge, 2019) and From sexual misconduct to social justice (Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1996).

“Andrea Celenza brings together in this contemporary volume her years of expertise in the areas of sexuality and erotic life within psychoanalysis. Written in an accessible style, this book will be a valuable resource for both clinicians in training and those already in practice. Celenza’s evocative depiction of both the challenges and the creative potential of engaging the erotic in clinical work will stir deepening reflection on this crucial, yet neglected topic.”

Dianne Elise, PhD, author of Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field (Routledge, 2019).

“In Erotic Transference: A Contemporary Introduction, Andrea Celenza delves deeply and courageously into the often-avoided place of sexuality and the erotic in psychoanalysis.  Skillfully defining the various forms of erotic transference, Celenza looks the desexualization of our field in the eye, as she addresses our transgressions, fears and vulnerabilities. A powerful and important volume that brings sexuality and eroticism back into psychoanalytic theory and practice.”

Galit Atlas, PhD. Faculty NYU Postdoc, author of Emotional Inheritance: A Therapist, Her Patients and the Legacy of Trauma  (Little, Brown Spark, 2023).

“Andrea Celenza brings back to the fore what psychoanalysis started on, repressed sexuality. The need for such a book, examining in depth the multiple causes to a desexualization in psychoanalytic theory, in spite of its continuous presence in the interplay of transference and countertransference, is critical for addressing the centrality of the body as reflected in the mind in the psychoanalytic process. This book does a great service to our profession.”

Rachel Boué-Widawsky, PhD, IPTAR, Clinical Assistant Professor at NYU Medical School, Associate Editor of Journal of Psychoanalytic American Association.

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This book is about erotic desires and fantasies, how our sexuality expresses our inner being and defines the ways in which we engage in the psychoanalytic situation. I am using erotic life in its broadest sense – the way we desire and love or desire to be loved on all levels, including within our sexual being.  We are drawn to the hidden and mysterious; we are tempted to push boundaries, even in the most permissive contexts. Erotic experience exemplifies this urge. What is the nature of this push, this urge to get beyond the immediate and concrete? What are we looking for, what does it feel like? These are some of the questions that pertain to the present exploration into erotic life in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic situation.

In large part, this book addresses the ‘desexualization’ of the psychoanalytic field and proposes several reasons for this phenomenon. It is, in part, an attempt to explain and correct this desexualization, along with offering recommendations to practitioners for dealing with erotic material when it arises. For example, it has been said that psychoanalysis is all about sex; except for sex – that’s about aggression. This book aims to ‘put sexuality back in psychoanalytic theorizing’ in both early formulations (as in the maternal erotic) and to delineate a place for pure erotic longing, along with the illustration of the variety of forms of homo-erotic and hetero-erotic desires. My focus on the erotic nature of the therapeutic situation is an effort to reclaim sexuality as one of the many nexes that are of central concern to our patients. At the very least, I am asserting that erotic transferences of whatever shape, should make their way into every thorough-going analysis or therapy.

Throughout the book, the framework of felt-experience (embodiment), multiplicity, and contradictory gender theory is employed to propose ways in which binarial constraints (e.g., feminine and masculine) may be transcended. I propose that symptoms, inhibitions, and anxieties often result from the individual’s unconscious overcommitment to one pole of the masculine/feminine binary, rather than a more balanced reckoning with the social and cultural demands associated with each.

The book is written in two parts, with clinical, theoretical, and technical discussions in each chapter. Part I presents the varieties and meanings of erotic transferences and countertransferences that are common in clinical situations. Each chapter focuses on a different manifestation, along with thorny technical dilemmas that confront the psychoanalytic clinician. Case illustrations of erotic material are used as examples of phases in treatment as well as moments of defensive impasse. These include the management of aggression, underlying merger fantasies, the uses of countertransferences (in multiple forms), and the dilemmas surrounding self-disclosure.  There are cases of both genders and the likely scenarios that emerge when the analyst is female are emphasized.  Process material is examined from both classical and contemporary perspectives in terms of theoretical understanding and technical considerations. Countertransference difficulties, including the handling of erotic countertransferences are discussed.

In Part II, the chapters focus on ‘perverse scenarios’ with the aim of reconceptualizing and restoring the term perversion into the clinical lexicon. By viewing perversion as a quality of relating rather than a specific action or behavior, the term is both narrowed and reformulated so that it may be (paradoxically) more broadly applied.  I define perversion as characterized by the impact of its constriction and constraint, the hidden and unbidden (Stoller, 1986).  Fundamental to the construction of perverse modes of relating is a means/end reversal (Stein, 2008), i.e. the use of constructive means for destructive purposes (either to the self or the other). Finally, I discuss the clinical observation that perverse modes of relating by males are often aimed at a perceived dangerous subjectivity of the other while females tend to perceive a dangerous subjectivity within. These dangers can be understood as organizing, delimiting, and unconsciously choreographing the dual capacities of receptivity and potency. Perverse scenarios can be viewed as unconscious enactments that serve to manage and control some imbalanced reckoning with this binarial construction and the ways in which the polarities have come to define one’s embodied and gendered subjectivity. Finally, I propose a schema of perverse scenarios that categorize 1) the localization of perceived dangers (within oneself or in the other), 2) the context (either dyadically or triadically conceived), and 3) degrees of severity (where a rigidly enacted perverse scenario may come to serve a transitional function as the individual’s capacities for growth expand).

Table of Contents

Introduction:  Transcending Binaries

• Encountering Sexuality/Being
• The Binary is Not Even Binary (Receptivity/Potency)
• Becky
• Discussion

Part 1:  Erotics Embodied: Varieties and Meanings of Erotic Transferences 

• Desexulization in the literature and practice
• Intimacy Embodied
• Eros Embodied
• Erotic Transferences and Countertransferences
• Gender Embodied, return perversion & phallus
• Opposite Gendered Selves

Chapter 1: Maternal Erotic Transferences and Merger Wishes

• The Maternal Erotic
• Longing for Sameness and Merger Wishes
• Julia

Chapter 2: Maternal Erotic Transferences: Engaging the Mother Within

• The De-sexualized Maternal Transference
• Michael
• Unrequited (Analytic) Love
• The Temptation of the Maternal/Containing Transference

Chapter 3: Erotic Transference and the Role of Aggression

• Michael, continued
• The Sexualization of Aggression
• Murderous Wishes
• Continuing Resolution
• Discussion
• Aggressive Erotic Moves

Chapter 4:  The Guilty Pleasure of Erotic Countertransference:  Searching for Radial True

• Comfort and Sexuality
• Contacting Me: The Little Girl Inside
• The Development of Erotic Countertransference
• Multiplicity, Lost Selves, and Opposite-Gendered Selves
• The Opposite Gendered Self: Contacting ‘Not Me’
• Discussion

Chapter 5: Erotic Countertransference Revelations

• The Undisclaimable Analytic Frame
• Maintaining the Frame in the Heat of the Moment
• Comfort and Clarity with Erotic Language
• Verbal Disclosure of Erotic Countertransference
• Necessary Conditions of Erotic Countertransference Disclosure
• Final Thoughts

Part II:  Perverse Scenarios Revisited 

• Introduction
• The Reformulation of Perverse Scenarios
• The Perverse Quality of Relating
• Means/End Reversal
• Motives of Perverse Scenarios
• Localization of Perceived Dangers in the Self or Other
• Contexts of Threat
• Degrees of Perverse Relating
• What is Not Perversion?
• Levels of Perverse Modes

Chapter 6:  Female Perverse Scenarios: The Objectified Self

• Embodiment
• From Embodied to Objectified Self
• The Body as Fetish
• Clinical Concerns
• The White Swan as Objectified Self
• The Fetishized Self or Other

Chapter 7:  Sadomasochistic Relating: What’s Sex Got to Do With It?

• Introduction
• Clinical Illustration
• The Eros in Sadomasochism
• Conclusion

Chapter 8:  Fetishes, the Anal Universe and Other Fantasies of  One Person Relating

• Introduction, foot fetish
• The Man with a Boot Fetish
• Behind Her Back
• An Anal Universe
• Conclusion

Conclusion: Positions of Subjectivity:  The Ineluctable Construction of the Self

• Positions of Subjectivity

Reviews

“Erotic Revelations is wonderfully revealing, shedding light on the hidden dimensions of embodiment in erotic transference while recasting the uses of the gendered metaphors of receptivity and potency that have polarized human sexuality and development. Celenza offers a spirited, masterful engagement with the old binaries of psychoanalytic tradition that should both deepen and enliven daily practice; she challenges us to liberate ourselves and our patients from those binaries while deploying them analytically in a way that is true to our method. Brimming with insights and illustrations, deftly tacking between theory and clinical practice, Erotic Revelations is a profoundly satisfying and stimulating read.”

Jessica Benjamin, PhD, Author, Shadow of the Other

“In this provocative new contribution, Andrea Celenza courageously explores some of the most controversial areas in contemporary psychoanalysis. With detailed clinical examples she challenges the reader to think of eros, gender, and perverse scenarios in complex, multi-determined ways that transcend binary distinctions or reductive classical formulations. I highly recommend it to all psychoanalytically-oriented clinicians.”

Glen O. Gabbard, MD, Author, Love and Hate in the Analytic Setting

“An original and scholarly linkage of ‘sexuality as sexuality’ to the wider issues of relationality and meaning with which many clinicians are more comfortable. Celenza never ducks the difficult issues for clinicians when experiencing and working with sexual pressures… The book will be appreciated by many kinds of therapy professionals, not just psychoanalysts (who will recognise an author at the height of her powers).”

Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex, UK