What is it about?
I describe the clinician’s analytic activity as akin to that found in choreography, where the structuring of a dance or of a session each expresses an inner impulse brought into narrative form. I link the embodied art of dance to the clinician’s creative vitality in contributing to the shaping of the movement of a session. In offering my formulation of an analytic eroticism, I hope to expand the terrain of what might traditionally be viewed as erotic transference and countertransference.
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Why is it important?
Just as photography captures and preserves a series of images, choreography creates and preserves a series of images of the human body in motion, infused with the vitality of libidinal energies. Clinically, when the creation of a symbolic narrative moves into the verbal while retaining this embodied, affective component, transformation of psychic pain is possible. The aesthetic capacity to keep this embodied vitality alive in the analytic relationship is the quality I refer to as analytic eroticism.
Perspectives
I focus on the erotic dimension of the mother-child relationship from birth onward, as well as on the erotic dimension of the developing mind. I look at the parallel erotic dimension in the psychoanalytic treatment process; in so doing, I am adding an erotic dimension to analytic field theory. I theorize primary maternal preoccupation, reverie and containment as resting within, and only made possible by, a mother’s deeply embodied connection to her libidinal self; her erotic sensibilities provide the “juice” for her complex emotional engagement with her infant. A full formulation of the analytic field must include awareness of the centrality of the erotic in both the maternal matrix and in that of the field. This erotic-aesthetic dimension potentiates the creative interplay of the analytic process.
Dr. Dianne Elise
Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Moving from Within The Maternal, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, February 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0003065116688460.
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