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Registro: 1Ttulo:Dialogues on Sexuality In Development and
TreatmentAutores:Slavin, Jonathan, H. ; Oxenhandler, Noelle ; Seligman,
Stephen ; Stein, Ruth ; Davies, Jody, MesslerFonte:Studies in Gender &
Sexuality, 2004; v. 5 (1), p371, 48pISSN:15240657Tipo de
documento:ArticleIdioma:EnglishResumo:The evolution of a relational
perspective has done much to change psychoanalytic thinking about the
processes of mutual influence in human relating, including that between parent
and child, patient and analyst. Beginning with excerpts from Oxenhandler's
recent book, The Eros of Parenthood, this panel explores the dynamics of
sexual experiencing and sexual influence between parents and children and, in
parallel fashion, between analysts and patients. The discussion addresses the
ways in which the emergence and handling of powerful sexual forces can be
developmentally affirming or, depending on the ways they are managed,
violating, both in the family and in treatment.Nmero de
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Dialogues on Sexuality In Development and Treatment


Jonathan H. Slavin, PHD; Counseling Center Tufts University Medford MA 02155
jonahtan.slavin@tufts.edu
Noelle Oxenhandler, PHD; P.O. Box 985 Glen Ellen, CA 95442 noxenhandler@aol.com
Stephen Seligman, DMH; 3667 Sacrament Street San Francisco, CA 94118
seligman@itsa.ucsf.edu
Ruth Stein, PHD; 355 E. 72nd St., Suite 3AB New York, NY 10021
ruthstein111@aol.com
Jody Messler Davies, PHD; 441 West End Avenue, Suite 2C New York, NY 10024
daviesjm@aol.com
The evolution of a relational perspective has done much to change psychoanalytic
thinking about the processes of mutual influence in human relating, including
that between parent and child, patient and analyst. Beginning with excerpts from
Oxenhandler's recent book, The Eros of Parenthood, this panel explores the
dynamics of sexual experiencing and sexual influence between parents and
children and, in parallel fashion, between analysts and patients. The discussion
addresses the ways in which the emergence and handling of powerful sexual forces
can be developmentally affirming or, depending on the ways they are managed,
violating, both in the family and in treatment.
INTRODUCTION: JONATHAN SLAVIN
It is a psychoanalytic stereotype that papers and panel introductions begin with
Freud. But, notwithstanding the stereotype, he was the guy who started it all
and, whether we like it or not, or are even aware of it or not, almost all our
subsequent discussions take Freud's ideas as a point of departure, explicitly or
implicitly. This is especially true in the area of sexuality. Freud saw his
views on sexuality, in the developmental process and in the psychic economy, as
one of his most essential contributions. A reading of psychoanalytic history
suggests that he was also happy to believe that it was one of his most
disruptive contributions to comfortable Western thinking.
Freud was the first person to talk about the sexual dynamics between children
and parents. The notion of infantile and childhood sexuality directed at parents
was, at the time, and in some ways still is, one of his most controversial and
disturbing ideas. Of course, looking back from a vantage point of 100 years, we
can see the limitations in theory and in developmental perspective, as Davies
(1994) has pointed out, that sexuality was located essentially within the child
and the child's intrapsychic experience.
Freud was the first to talk about the sexual dynamics between patients and
analysts, as well. He dwelled less actively on this subject than on
developmental sexuality; he wrote about it most extensively in one paper,
Observations on Transference Love (1915). It is an extraordinarily rich,
complex, and perhaps even tortured paper. In my own reading of it, at this
pointI'm now on reading number 122I think the paper itself suggests one

possible reason Freud did not frequently return to discussing sexual dynamics in
the analytic process. Throughout the paper Freud is very aware of the peril of
the sexual potential in the treatment relationship. He takes as normal and
predictable the development of a patient's sexual feelings for the analyst. He
courageously tells us that we must not run away from these feelings, as they are
essential to restoring to patients their own sexual potential and liveliness.
But exceptionally aware of, and concerned about, the possibility of the
analyst's sexual responsiveness, he warns analysts not to take patients'
feelings personally; he is concerned that analysts' tender feelings can get
out of hand and lead down a slippery slope. Finally, with extraordinary insight
into the heart of what treatment is about, Freud reminds us that the purpose of
the patient-analyst relationship is not about what happens between them, but
about what the patient is able to take with greater freedom and self-possession
into her own life. Here, too, Freud is approaching things from what we today
would call a one-person perspective, a perspective that can be understood as
implicitly buttressed by the potential danger he felt might exist if there were
any possibility of seeing things as actually happening between two people.
Nevertheless, although much of the paper can be read as related to Freud's
awareness of, and response to, the danger of the sexual potential in the
analytic relationship, he ends on a provocative note. Freud (1915) states that
psychoanalysts, like chemists, are dealing with highly explosive, combustible
material that requires great care in handling. But, he asks ironically, when
have chemists been forbidden because of the danger, from handling explosive
substances which are indispensable on account of their effects? (pp. 170-171).
The evolution of a relational perspective in psychoanalysis has done much to
change our thinking about both the developmental and the analytic process.
Relational views recognize a process of ongoing mutual influence as inherent in
any human relating, including, most essentially, that between parent and child
and between patient and analyst. And the sexuality in these
pairingsparent-child, analyst-patientis the topic this panel explores here.
This roundtable begins with two short excerpts from Noelle Oxenhandler's (2001)
book, The Eros of Parenthood: Explorations in Light and Dark. These excerpts
serve as a backdrop to an honest, informal, and interactive discussion among our
panelists: Stephen Seligman, Ruth Stein, and Jody Messler Davies about the
dialogue of sexuality between parents and children, between adults and
children, and between therapists and their patients.
Noelle Oxenhandler
It is an enormous pleasure and relief to find myself in discussion with people
for whom the concept eros of parenthood is not shocking, or even the least
unfamiliar. Of course, I knew when I waded into this territory that it was very
edgy. Yet I was not quite prepared for the difficulty that Americans would have
with the concept as a whole, or even with the word eros. Just to give a few
examples: As I was walking into the NPR studio in New York City, I heard myself
being introduced on air as, Noelle Oxenhandler, who is here to talk about the
erotica of parenthood, as though I had arrived with a little suitcase full of
props. The book itself went into Books in Print as The Errors of Parenthood. It
was months before I could get them to correct the title.
In a nutshell, my central task in this book waswithout wanting for one instant
to minimize all that we have learned about the tragic reality of sexual abuseto
try to acknowledge and celebrate the existence of a healthy eros between parent

and child. And, much to my surprise, at a certain point while I was working on
the book, the figure of Goldilocks presented herself to me as a kind of guide. I
tried to push her away for quite a while, as she seemed like such a daffy
heroine. But, when I really thought about Goldilockshow she enters this house
in a dark woods, how she is disoriented, how she does not know what belongs to
her or what she can properly partake ofit struck me that the way she finds what
is appropriate is through experimentation. She goes a little too far this way, a
little too far that way; she goes too hot, too cold, too much, too little, until
again and again she lands on the just right. And, of course, again and again,
the just right is the child's portion. To find this portion became my quest in
the book.
To illustrate my quest, I am presenting two very short pieces from a chapter
toward the end of the book called Goldilock's Joy: Finding the Just Right. I
chose this first piece because I thought it might have particular implications
for the psychotherapeutic community. It is called The Forbidden.
A mother bends over her sleeping child. The child who has clung to her all
day, now appears astonishingly separate from her, a citizen of that enchanted
kingdom where children go when they sleep, leaving their mothers far behind. And
at the same time, here is that child spread out before her whose
self-containment in sleep she could so easily violate. Some parents do, she
knows. Even if she herself feels no strong impulse that must be suppressed, that
impulse is there to some degree. It's there in the stories that fill the air; it
is part of the human atmosphere. before her whose self-containment in sleep she
could so easily violate. Some parents do, she knows. Even if she herself feels
no strong impulse that must be suppressed, that impulse is there to some degree.
It's there in the stories that fill the air; it is part of the human atmosphere.
And quite apart from the stories, violation is there as an element of eros.
Erotic loveat whatever end of its continuumalways involves an element of
transgression, the overflowing of ordinary boundaries. At the very least
transgression is present as possibility, as what we refrain from, as what we
play with and balance on the edge of: the way a kiss can so easily become a bite
or a squeeze become painful constriction. The very permission that is granted
to physical love in certain contexts, as in the marriage, occurs against the
backdrop of prohibition.
This is true between parent and child no less than between adult lovers,
though the parameters marking off the permitted and the forbidden are quite
different. It's actually my job to wash his penis! my cousin exclaimed to me
about her new baby boy. Latent in her exclamation of pleasure and a certain
amazement was an awareness of all the penises in the world that it is not her
job to wash, as well as the knowledge that there are some ways of touching her
son's penis that do not fall within her job description.
But let's leave, for a moment, the charged atmosphere of the nursery and
turn to a less threatening scenario.
A friend comes to visit and, ignoring the heavy mugs in the cupboard, I
serve tea in delicate porcelain cups. They are Russian cups, from St.
Petersburg, with a pattern of navy blue and white with gold rims and fluted

edges. Part of what makes the experience of drinking tea from them special is
the awareness that they could so easily break. Such awarenessthe sense of how
easily an impulse, a clumsy gesture, a lapse of attention could disrupt the
momentis part of the savor of the moment. A similar awareness underlies the
beauty of ballet, the Japanese tea ceremony, virtually any highly formalized art
or ritual.
That is why laughter hovers so close to such activities. All it takes is one
false movethe violinist, who (as a friend reported to me once), standing for
applause, revealed his fly to be unzipped. Through that narrow openingan
unzipped flyan entire, an inverted, world of desire and impulse, so far from
the world of practice and discipline, tumbled out onto the stage. Someone let
out a single chuckle, and within seconds an entire audience of several hundred
serious, highly educated concert-goers was convulsed with laughter. reported to
me once), standing for applause, revealed his fly to be unzipped. Through that
narrow openingan unzipped flyan entire, an inverted, world of desire and
impulse, so far from the world of practice and discipline, tumbled out onto the
stage. Someone let out a single chuckle, and within seconds an entire audience
of several hundred serious, highly educated concert-goers was convulsed with
laughter.
Yet the immanence of such laughter within the rapt listening of the concert
hall is not an enemy of the listening; it is an aspect of the listening, a part
of what makes it so uniquely rapt. Similarly the experience of watching Tibetan
monks in the painstaking creation of a sand painting is inextricably mixed with
the knowledge of what will come: the blurring of borders and the great sweeping
of sand that follows.
Then I go on with a number of examples of activities in which there is some
inherent delicacy or danger.
Coming down the stairs with my baby daughter in my arms, I sometimes had the
thought I could so easily drop her. This thought was not accompanied by a
feeling of desire to drop her, but still the experience troubled me. I had the
notion that a good mother wouldn't be capable of thinking such a thought. Now
I believe that such thoughts are simply part of the experience of holding in
one's arms the exquisite fragility of an infant. I believe that the experience
of being a good enough parent often includes, if one is being honest, the
palpable, if ghostly awareness of all the things one imagines one could so
easily have said or donebut didn't.
And now back to the nursery, where a mother bends over her sleeping child.
She stands there for a long moment, holding the edge of the blanket that her
child has thrown off in sleep, gazing at his limbs that, flung this way and
that, seem in their very stillness to vibrate with the small-boy energy that
will burst out of the bed in the morning.
What if, however fleetingly, she does feel the pull of a forbidden impulse?
Perhaps she has a sudden desire to climb into the bed and clasp her arms around
him, as tightly as a lover might.
Or, stirred by his beauty and the soundness of his sleep, she imagines pressing
her lips to his, startling him awake. Or, moved by something about him that
appears so guileless as he lies there, his mouth slightly open, his chest rising
and falling under her gaze, she has an urge to wake him up and confide in him,

telling him certain important truths about herself, entrusting him with the
story of her own deepest longings, her secrets, her fears.
Here are the extremes:
She can act on this impulse in the most literal way.
She can recoil from the impulse, burying it in unconsciousness, or perhaps
adding it to her reservoir of self-indictmentsWhat mother would have such a
thought?
Or?
Or what?
Where is the middle ground between blatant act and sheer repression?
In Milan Kundera's (1986) novel Life Is Elsewhere, a mother gazes at the face of
her young son, Jaromil, and finds herself in the grip of an improper thought.
[And here comes a long quotefor which I paid a great deal of money to
Kundera!]:
It was turning dark, Dad was not coming home, and it occurred to Mama that
Jaromil's face was full of a gentle beauty which no artist or husband could
match; this improper thought was so insistent that she could not free herself of
it; she started to tell him about the time of her pregnancy, how she used to
gaze imploringly at the statuette of Apollo. And you see, you really are as
beautiful as that Apollo, and you look just like him. They say a child picks up
something of the mother's thoughts when she is pregnant, and I'm beginning to
think it's more than a superstition. You even inherited his lyre.
Then she told him that literature had always been her greatest love. She had
even gone to the university mainly to study literature and it was only marriage
(she did not say pregnancy) that prevented her from devoting herself to this
deepest inclination. If she now saw Jaromil as a poet (yes, she was the first to
pin this great title on him), it s a wonderful surprise, and yet it is also
something she had long expected.
They found consolation in one another, these two unsuccessful lovers, mother
and son, and talked long into the night.
The improper thought was so insistent that she could not free herself of it,
and from this improper thought, she glides, as if pulled by a powerful
underground current, into an outpouring that is not so much about Jaromil as
about herself. Some might say that this mother is a world away from the mother
who gets into the bed and commits an actual act of physical incest with her
child, but I would locate her at one end, albeit the far end, of the spectrum.
For in this scene the mother is not for the child, but the child for the mother.
She is using her child to fulfill her own needs needs that in her case do not
express themselves as literally sexual, but that press heavily nonetheless, and
that violate his status as a child. For she is asking him to compensate for the
inadequacies of the grown men in her lifehis face is full of a gentle beauty,
which no artist or husband could match. Drawn to this gentle beauty, she uses
him as confidante, entrusting him with the story of her life s greatest longings
and disappointments. In doing so, she makes him the bearer of her subjectivity,

the keeper of her past, the redeemer of her unlived life.


What if she hadn t moved so quickly from the power of the improper thought to
the spilling out upon her son? What if, right there where the channel narrowed
and the current grew so strong, she had kept her sights wide? This is a perfect
example of a moment when a mother might permit herself to entertain the impulse.
When, instead of being the impulse, merging with the improper thought, she
might have found a way to express her desire to overflow, to swallow wholewhile
holding back.
When I ask myself what this might look like, what presents itself is some
version, whether verbal or nonverbal, of Oh,
I could eat you! For this is an exclamation that captures both the too
muchness and the restraint. It s an exclamation whose magic resides in the
conditional tense, for I could eat you implies I won t. And this in itselfthe
could, the wouldopens up a middle ground. It gives voice to a strong desire and
in that sense, gives permission, even as it reins in the desire.
Oh, the things I would tell you if you were a grown man!, a mother says,
sitting next to her son in the gathering dark. And then she squeezes him
tightly, perhaps a bit too tightly, before getting up and turning on the light.
When I sent that in to my editor, she said, Don t you mean turning off the
light? And I said No! That s the whole point: Put the light on!
This second excerpt is very shortit takes just about half a minute to read.
Again, you will see that I am using the Goldilocks mode to help me find the just
right. This piece is called My Daughter s Dance.
It s evening, and in that rushed slot before suppertime, I head for my
daughter s room, with a load of her clean laundry. The wicker basket balanced on
my hip, I pause for a moment before knocking. Music leaps from her door. Don t
try to catch a flying thing.
Come in! she calls. I enter, feeling a bit like a shy, clumsy charwoman in
the den of her worldly and exotic mistress. It s clear that I ve entered in
midscene: Clothes, jewelry, and shoes are strewn about, a candle is lit, and a
stick of fruity-sweet incense is burning.
Look at me, she commands, and I set the basket down on her bed.
She turns the music louder. Don t try to hold a bird that sings. She resumes
her dance, and I see that it s a pas-de-deux, a dance for girl and mirror.
Moving around the room, she keeps coming back to touch base with the mirroras
once she did with me in her toddler s explorations around the kitchen or the
living-room floor. Then I was the ground-zero, the still-point from which she
gathered strength to move in ever-widening circles through her world. I feel a
pang for her: will the mirror reveal flaws to her that are invisible to me? So
far she seems to be holding her own. Gazing into the glass, she tosses her hair
behind her head in a gesture that imitatesor does it incubate? confidence. She
begins to sway to the music, undulating her hips in a way I didn t know she was
capable of. As a child, I knew the range of each of my doll s movements,
precisely what the joints could do or not do. But my daughter s repertoire of
movements has already taken me by surprise. I feel slightly awkward again, as
though I don t know quite who I m with. Her lips are pushed forward in a dreamy,

glamorous pout that seems to belong to someone else. The look in her eyes is
complicated, like a child s gaiety being blown at me through a sultry exhalation
of smoke. move in ever-widening circles through her world. I feel a pang for
her: will the mirror reveal flaws to her that are invisible to me? So far she
seems to be holding her own. Gazing into the glass, she tosses her hair behind
her head in a gesture that imitatesor does it incubate? confidence. She begins
to sway to the music, undulating her hips in a way I didn t know she was capable
of. As a child, I knew the range of each of my doll s movements, precisely what
the joints could do or not do. But my daughter s repertoire of movements has
already taken me by surprise. I feel slightly awkward again, as though I don t
know quite who I m with. Her lips are pushed forward in a dreamy, glamorous pout
that seems to belong to someone else. The look in her eyes is complicated, like
a child s gaiety being blown at me through a sultry exhalation of smoke.
Dance with me, she says, grabbing my hand. I feel a sudden anxiety. My
undulating, preteen daughter has grabbed my hand and asked me to dance. This is
one of those moments for which I have no map. I could give into the anxiety,
slip my wrist out of her grasp, murmur something about supper burning, and march
out of the room with my empty laundry basket. Or I could decide to stay.
Tightening her grasp on my hand, she twirls me around the room, spinning me
out and reeling me in. She laughs: she s captured her busy mother and brought
her under a spell. I always did love to dance. It s been a long time since I
did, and the beat of this tune is strong enough that I could let myself go.
Don t try to catch a flying thing.
How easily I could give in to my own pas-de-deux and do the dance of A
Mother and Her Youth. She catches my eye with a look that brings me back from
the verge. I see that for her, the dance is now a pas-de-trois, a dance for
Girl, Mother, Mirror. In fact, she s using me as another mirror. Look at me,
look at me, her body says without words. I m turning into a woman before your
eyes. I let my heartbeat slow. Now it s my turn to reel myself back in and
consent to being used by her. For I am not just a mirror, but a stand-in, for
some as yet, I suspect, only dreamily imagined Other, or succession of Others.
used by her. For I am not just a mirror, but a stand-in, for some as yet, I
suspect, only dreamily imagined Other, or succession of Others.
It s one of those bittersweet momentsgrowing ever-more frequentwhere I can
feel her shedding me like an outer skin, and at the same time know that what
makes it possible for her to do so with such abandon are the deep layers of
connection between us. I think of the moment when I first touched her, skin to
skin. There already was the play of surface and depth. They handed her to me,
and I held her cheek against my cheek. I felt, for the first time, the outer
layer of the one who had been so deep inside me, and whom I already felt I
deeply knew.
Remembering that moment, I realize I m not just any stand-in, I m the
stand-in par excellence. And, actually, stand-in isn t quite the right term; the
heat I feel from her is realwhich is why it made me slightly anxious when she
grabbed my hand and told me Dance! Rather than marching out of the room, I had
to stay with my anxiety in order to understand that she really was dancing with
me and that she was not dancing with me. She was using the sparks from our
connection to send heat in a different, if for now mostly imagined, direction
away from me.

Now I let myself go back into her dance, but I do so on her terms, holding
myself in check, even as my hips begin to swaya bitand I can see from the look
on her face, which is dreamy, mirthful, rapt, and ever-so-slightly wicked, that
whatever this moment is for which I have no map, I m doing it right.
Stephen Seligman
I could not agree more that we should open up the question of parents sexual
feelings toward their children. Noelle reminds us that this has been a forbidden
area. But it is something that most parents are affected by, and many more
parents are aware of than we realize. There is so much risk when these feelings
go too far, of course, but the risk should not mean that we turn our attention
away until something devastating occurs.
There is a broader issue implied here: therapists do not pay enough attention to
patients feelings about their children. There are few, if any, relationships
that have the impact that becoming a parent has, both internally and externally.
Parent-child relationships are about as compelling as any relationship, but we
do not think very much about this in our clinical work.
Parenting evokes the past to an extent that is unique in interpersonal
relationships. Analytic relationships and marriage-type relationships may have
similar effects, but the return of conscious and unconscious memories in those
relationships is, in a way, not ordinary. Yet we spend much more time in our
treatments following them. Parenting is unparalleled as an occasion to repeat,
redress, and reinflict the wounds and graces of the past, as Fraiberg (Fraiberg,
Adelson, and Shapiro, 1975) and many others have shown.
It is common knowledge that parenting evokes core conflicts from the past,
especially for parents of young children. It is the kind of thing people talk
about on the playground or at dinner parties. We say, You know, I remind myself
of my mother when I m with my son, or My daughter s adolescence brings out my
own uncertainties about what s appropriate sexually, and so on. So much is
evoked in what is really a natural processin explicit and implicit memories, in
affect, and also, as Noelle says, in the body. It is unfortunate that analysts
do not use these opportunities more effectively.
My own experience has been that patients are tremendously gratified when their
therapists acknowledge and understand the dynamics of their parenting. Here is
an example, drawn from this week in my practice. One of my patients is in the
process of moving her family to another state because of difficulties between
her ex-husband and herself. She moved many times as a child because her father
was in the military, and this current move is an occasion for us to talk about
how she feels that she has to numb herself, to detach, since saying goodbye when
she was a child was so trivialized as just another inconvenience. At another
level, we have begun to explore how the present situation allows for a reworking
of the terrible feeling that her parents did not pay any attention to her
feelings, and left her feeling quite unrecognized and stranded. Her zeal to
protect her children from her erratic husband reflects her sensitivity to such
feelings, and in her analysis it brings forward the possibility of reflecting on
them in a way that was not possible in her childhood.

Meanwhile, I have been acknowledging that she is treating her children as she
should have been treated. Overall, there is a matrix of new experience, in which
her caring for her children, my appreciation of her caring, and the overall
protective atmosphere of the therapy are amplifying the effects of both of us to
promote a new integration of an emergent sense of love and protection. At the
level of psychic structure, there is a complex transaction in a series of dyadic
fields in which the patient is both identified with the unprotected children
(both her children and herself as a child) and the possibility of a protector
(both her in the present and me as a caring analyst). All this leads to a
special synergy.
Let me now return to the central point in Noelle s book: How well, and frankly
and affirmatively, she captures the sensuality of child rearing. She writes
eloquently about the sensory experience of the beauty of the child s body, with
its extraordinary forms and textures. So much of what goes on in the early years
is at these sensuous levelsof skin contact and just looking and listening to
all the remarkable shapes and sounds that flow constantly, within those
extraordinary choreographies that emerge over time. All this links into feeling
at deep levels, in a way whose direct sensuality is really paralleled only in
lovemaking. Noelle has made a fundamental contribution in bringing out the
incredible power and particular passion of that aspect of the parent-child
relationship.
The formidable resistance to being open about these matters has taken various
forms, and psychoanalysis has had an ambivalent role here. Certainly analysis
has opened up the discussion of sexuality, especially of infantile sexuality,
and this subject was originally the most heralded aspect of Freud s revolution.
Freud (1905) himself remains the most extraordinary writer about erotics and
their vicissitudes, in the interpersonal as well as the intrapsychic arenas. We
may take all this too much for granted a century later.
On the other hand, even as it has opened up the issues, psychoanalysis has
participated in the resistance to fully regarding parent-child sexuality. The
most prominent analytic traditions have gone too far in separating the erotic
from the interpersonal, presenting erotics as something prior to the
interpersonal or split off from it. Many analysts, including Freud, have
underestimated the extent to which the erotic is generally fundamentally
intertwined with the interpersonal, especially in childhood and most especially
in infancy. The baby comes into the world full of life, evoking the most
powerful feelings, ready to recognize the face, ready to suckle the breast,
ready to respond to high-pitched voices, knowing the mother s body, with all its
smells, sights, sounds, and textures. There is something within that matrix in
which the sensual emerges, and we should start there. There s no need to posit
some other first cause. I agree that there is something special in the desire of
what is left over, what is not complete, but I would not want to go so far as to
call this the erotic and the rest something else. To do so would be a misleading
implication of Freudian drive theory. There is a splitting off of the erotic in
the dual-drive approach, which does a kind of violence to the delicious
interplay of parents and children.
The Freudian splitting off of the erotic into the a priori drive reflects, in
part, the flaws of the retrospective strategy of Freud s approach to childhood

and to infantile sexuality in particular. If you read back from adulthood, where
the erotic is so fraught with anxiety, ambivalence, disappointment, hostility,
and distaste, then it will seem necessary that the childhood structures have the
same dimensions. But much of what we see in adulthood reflects what emerges
later in development; it is not something that is infantile at its root.
Also, as has been well noted, Freud is reading from pathology and then
overgeneralizing. Freud s account is one of posttraumatic sexuality. Even in the
best of circumstances, the oedipal resolution is a kind of trauma. I am not a
nave interpersonalist, but I think that we would do better to start our
thinking with different basic sexual motivations and states of mind-body, rather
than with a single basic energy from which these arise. The Freudian instinct
theory captures certain of them, but not necessarily at the most essential level
that it claims. It might not be the best formulation of where the erotic starts.
Along these lines, I would add that there may be too great a tendency to base
the theory of the erotic on the forbidden. It is not that forbidding the erotic
does not shape and amplify it, including that delicious heightened excitement,
and we should never minimize the complex inversions of shame, disgust, anxiety,
privacy, and excitement that are so often prominent; but there is something
direct that goes on in the body-to-body, sense-to-sense contact itself that
deserves to be called erotic. Maybe it is just a terminological question, since
we all agree that there is something new that happens in the complex fields of
Otherness, prohibition, and desire, and maybe I m just being too vanilla today.
But I am inclined to conclude that the folding in of prohibition as basic to the
erotic may reproduce the very repression that analysis has demystified. I
suppose that I am more of a Marcuseian (Marcuse, 1955) than a Foucaultian
(Foucault, 1978) on this point.
Thinking of the erotic as basically intertwined with the interpersonal affects
how we think about the sexual abuse of children. I would not start from the idea
that incest is, in the first place, the breakthrough of a primitive impulse. I
am more inclined to regard it as a perversion of parenthood, where a split-off
impulse-object/instinct forms and preempts the other psychic possibilities.
(This idea is not totally inconsistent with the Freudian scheme, but it is at
least a different spin.) This is my clinical experience, and I think that one s
assumptions in this regard make a difference, as well as having theoretical
significance.
An experience from my own analytic training illustrates this point. I was in a
case conference with a zealous Freudian analyst, quite brilliant but quite
single minded. The patient in the case came back to analysis after having taken
four weeks off when his daughter was born. When he mentioned his love for and
pleasure with his newborn, the consultant said, And, of course, he wants to
sleep with his daughter. He did not mean that the new father wanted to have his
daughter stay in his wife s and his bed for a while, which he was actually doing
and enjoying, but that he wanted to have sex with the baby.
I found myself quite troubled by this suggestion, not because I am uncomfortable
with this kind of idea, but because it missed the important business at hand,
the genesis of parental love, including its sensual dimensions. I mentioned this

incident to my own analyst, and he said something quite thoughtful, When you
love somebody that much, how could you not find yourself full of passion?
His comment points to the special interplay between passion, excess, delicacy,
tenderness, and fragility in love, including in physical love and especially in
the love of a parent for a small child. It may well be that in the Freudian
dual-drive theory, delicacy and fragility are displaced into theorizing about
the destructive drive, which leads to some suppression of their centrality. It
is true, of course, that, under the most passionate conditions and especially in
the love of a parent for a child, there is indeed great potential for things
turning out badly and for other serious risks, as is well known by analysts.
These dynamics can take all sorts of forms, in infancy, childhood, and
adulthood: abuse, neglect, overstimulation, understimulation, unhappy marriages,
confusions of all sorts, and so on. I cannot see how the idea of destructiveness
captures what is basic to all these, but even if it does, the destructive
outcome is not the motivation; it is the danger.
What I am saying is that the dual-drive theory splits off the risks of passion
into something called destructiveness. It configures these problems in a
particular way, and, by putting the destructive motivation first, it turns the
unfortunate outcomes that are common but not ubiquitous into a primary cause.
The dangers that delicacy and fragility indeed lead to someone getting hurt,
even badlymay become misdescribed as a primary destructiveness. This may well
be an instance of Freud s turning a type of trauma into a universalizing theory.
The same problem is illustrated in the classical Freudian emphasis on
overstimulation, which has waned but still persists today. What appears to be
overstimulation from the point of view of drive-discharge models actually looks
like a kind of neglect when the body is not split from its interpersonal
surround. It would be better to think of overstimulation as something like
excitement without sufficient help regulating it and its attendant affects. It
is not the quantitative dimension in itself that matters in the first place, but
the intersubjective context of the bodily experience.
Overall, when we look at the sensual dimension of what happens between parents
and children, we can see the whole interplay of stimulation, excitement,
connection, disengagement, holding, releasing, looking and looking away, and so
on. All this is at the center of what babies and their parents are doing
together, especially at heightened moments and especially in the evolutionarily
charged field of parents taking care of their children. It is not the same as
the erotics of lovemaking between two adults, but there is quite a bit in
common. Noelle s exceptional vignettes capture this to a degree that is
unfortunately rare in our literature.
Let me take this issue up from another perspective, which reflects the problems
of splitting off the sexual from the sensual context in theorizing about
infantile sexuality. At the risk of digressing, I would now like to talk about
certain similarities between the Freudian approach to erotics and the classic
story of the Christ child and to go a little further with the critique of the
Freudian narrative. The Christ story highlights the love between parents and
children in the most exquisite way. I need not remind you that the basic
narrative turns on a son beloved of his mother, who found transcendence as she
sacrificed her own sexuality to bear this child, and on God, the father, who
gave his son to the world, with the son s dying a most exquisitely painful and
sensual death. (See the recent Mel Gibson film for an extraordinary rendition of

this.) The (often ecstatic) sublimation of the erotic is obvious in many of the
Renaissance depictions of both Jesus and Mary and of them together. Think of the
lush and exquisite senses of skin and of the gaze in Michelangelo s Piet, for
example. In those classic Western European depictions, at least, Jesus is often
exceptionally sensual, yet someone whose existence contains and prohibits sex
itself.
We might well read this configuring of the Christ story as an alternative
narrative of the dynamics of intergenerational sexuality, including both
procreation and erotics, and compare it to the Freudian oedipal account. Here,
the extraordinary love of parents and children, including the intergenerational
tension, is configured in a particular way, different from the oedipal approach
but with many of the same elements. Sensuality is evacuated, denied, purified,
and replaced by the passions of the spiritual. Yet it saturates, if negatively,
the very moments that are most spiritualized-the Passion of the crucifixion and
the mystery of the Immaculate Conception.
In the first, the physical body is in magnificent, transcendent, redemptive
agony; and in the second, conception is elevated to something so exquisite that
it cannot be imagined but is instead erased and then given a name that links it
to exquisite death, the Holy Ghost. Women are idealized and marginalized, the
Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene personifying two ends of the spectrum of purity
and redemption from the corruption of the erotic. Overall, the frailty and
sensuality of the body are linked to death in a transcendent mix, one that
formulates the spiritual in the place of a God who is parent, child, and
conception itself. The ordinary generational distinctions are collapsed in the
transcendence of the compelling religious vision.
One is tempted to call this way of ordering erotic elements perverse, but that
would not be quite right. That would be imposing the Freudian order on the
Christian. But the Christ story, like its antecedent in the Abraham-Isaac story,
follows neither the Freudian rules nor those of ordinary reality. Instead, it
sets up its own rules. Each of the grand ideologies, of which psychoanalysis and
Christianity are among the grandest, makes its own constructions of the problems
of the passionate love between parents and children. Like so many religions, the
Christ narrative takes the ordinary passions of what parents and children do for
each other, sensual and otherwise, and elevates and contains them in an
expropriation that is both suppressive and exceptionally seductive.
I hope that this is not too sketchy. I mention it to say that the Freudian
narrative of the erotic has something of the same quality. It is a magnificent
account that highlights one aspect of the erotic and puts some others to the
side, to provide some sense of coherence and to organize and substantiate
various authorities and hierarchies, both social and conceptual. It does seem to
me, though, that when you juxtapose the Christian narrative with the Freudian
narrative and read them both from a critical psychoanalytic perspective, the
Christ story decenters the Freudian one, just as the Freudian decenters it.
Freud s (1927, 1939) reading of the Judeo-Christian narrative as a displacement
of the oedipal story may hold, but it also offers a strategy that shows how both
accounts displace and suppress certain elements of the sexual field while
reifying others. (Grotstein, 1997a, b, has taken up this issue in another

context.)
Both accounts, of course, marginalize women, suppress, women s sexuality, and
consign women to deeroticized motherhood. There is an idealization of the
infant-mother tie in both theories, as in so many cultural visions. Freud s idea
of a first moment of pure union in the primary narcissism of the oceanic feeling
has more parallels to the Virgin Birth than may be immediately apparent. Both
denude the mother s subjectivity, not to mention her sexuality and present the
baby s beginnings in transcendence beyond language and otherness.
Even though there are substantial reasons to treat the maternal as special, this
is not the whole story. Critical feminist theorizing has broadened this picture.
Adrienne Rich s (1976) stunning inquiry into maternal hatred blew apart the
shroud of the depersonalizing idealization of the mother s nurturance by looking
instead at the erotics of hate in mothering. Along the same lines, Oxenhandler s
(2001) work adds the subject of maternal eros to those that we need to look at,
as we pay attention to ordinary things that parents, and especially mothers, go
through. She thus adds to the myriad feminist voices helping us see how much our
hegemonic accounts marginalize and exclude.
Ruth Stein
Coming from the study of affects, I was struck by Freud s (1905) assertion that
all comparatively intense affective processes, including even terrifying ones,
trench upon sexuality (p. 203). This was one of the sources for my interest in
sexuality. In a series of papers, I attempted to grant sexuality sovereignty,
give it its own, sui generis place and status, and differentiate it from the
sexual drive we think of when we caricature Freud, as well as from early, fused
mother-child relations we think about when we try to explain sexuality in
clinical practice. Sexuality is a rich and enigmatic phenomenon that is not
transparent and easy to grasp.
In this context, I wish to touch on a point that both Noelle and Stephen make
when they speak about skin sexuality, about the sensual in sexuality, and about
the balance between the forbidden and the permitted, or between transgression
and responsibility in rearing children. Noelle s deliberations on this point
deep and felicitous, as when she says that, when a parent allows herself to feel
an impulse toward her child, she can entertain and even fully experience the
impulse and at the same time find ways to zigzag between two poles: between a
mad kind of closeness backgrounded by primitive wishes, and a knowing sense of
boundaries. The sense of responsible parental love would feel and monitor this
movement, which includes also real inhibition and even a sense of guilt. The
model of moving back and forth between two poles, between mother s (or father s)
innermost primitive desires, and her sense of rightness, as well as her fears,
is that of desiring-and-containing. It is a transitional and reflective movement
premised on parental love, and parental love is more than just caring or more
than just attachment.
I wish to make two points. One bears on transgression, the other on the kind of
sexuality that is not attached, that is, not relational.

I believe that sexuality is enhanced, even defined, by transgression. Look at


the etymology of words that pertain to transgression, such as prohibition,
proscription, forbidden, and you see the picture. The words resonate with the
imperative that says, Go for it, and stop yourself, get it, withdraw from it.
As Noelle says, we enjoy our tea party because we know that the exquisite China
cups are fragile, and their brittleness enhances our mute pleasure. We know
that, when we have a sexual experience, when we are in an erotic mood, we
overcome (we shatter as Bersani, 1986, likes to say) some boundaries that we
set for ourselvesor that are set for usin everyday life.
In this sense, sexuality is otherother than normal conduct, other than
propriety, other than reason, other than robust grantedness. We shift into a
different realm when we are sexual. Georges Bataille (1986) saysand some of us
tend to forget that sexuality is a place where we enter an illusion of
continuity with all that is not us, and where we bypass that severance of
ourselves from others and from life when death comes. Sexuality s otherness
provides an overcoming of separation, separation from others and from life. But
to experience the otherness of sexuality, one has to shed not only one s
clothes, but also one s normal behaviors and manners. It could be a question of
why sexuality should bear the mark of secrecy and prohibition. Why should nudity
be such a significant event? Evidently, sexuality is implicated in
transgression. Noelle says, Transgression is an overflowing of boundaries.
Transgression is when your love is so much you want to eat your child. This
thought can be very threatening if one is not secure, as a person and as a
parent, and joyously acceptable if one is.
When my son was bornand this is a confession that reading Noelle permits me to
makeI experienced what was perhaps the happiest event of my life. During days
of total bliss and merging with my baby his and body cycles, I once had a
thought, similar to yet different from Noelle s thought What if I drop my
child? I thought, My son is a birthday cake, which is being cut into pieces to
eat. Interestingly like Noelle s thought, this thought, which came up in my
imagination as an image of a chocolate-brown cake cut into slices, was curiously
cut off from emotion, desire, or anxiety: it posed itself in hyperreal clarity
and luminosity. This picture, very geometrical and perfect in it forms, did not
have anything human and therefore disturbingly emotional to it. Perhaps it was
what we call a pure instance of obsessional thought. In its isolation, it must
have been an alienated expression of some profound wish, such as I love you so
much that I could eat you up; in the face of this voracity, let me geometrize
you, let me unaffect you. And more: Since you are boundlessly sweet and loved
and bring me joy, let me put you squarely (and roundly) in a particular space
and form. Let me cut you and bound you and master you, since you are so sublime
and unfathomable. Such a snippet of hallucination reveals erotic love so
complex and multifaceted as to be representable only in partial and strange
(primary-process) ways.
The other sense of transgression is that of transgression against the feeling of
sin. In this sense, the realization that there is something prohibitive and
forbidden that goes against our nature, at the same time as we identify with it,
is precious. I think that parents who abuse their children are disinhibited in a
terrifying way that is difficult to ponder (more frighteningly imponderable than
the birthday cake). It is dreadful to imagine the kind of disinhibition a parent

is in when she or he exploits her or his child sexually (see Davies, 2003).
My last point has to do with the nature of primitive sexuality before it is
attached, or when it is not-attached, nonrelational. When Freud (1920) wrote
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and wanted to find out more about life and
death, he did not refer to intentions; he did not look for relations between
people; he did not even go to sensations. He went after something else and chose
a word that has been mostly discarded in psychoanalysis, namely, excitations.
Excitations are not stimulus-response events; excitations occur on the surface
of the body, on skin, when the reaction of the body is disproportionate to what
has been done to the body. Excitations occur and remain when we do not or cannot
just respond to some stimulus; they occur when tensions build up on the surface
of the body. They are moments when there is a surplus of intensified tension.
The movement of excitation dances on the skin surface.
Libidinal life has this dimension of surface. This is what I wish to emphasize
here: our most basic eroticism is not intentional or relational but is a certain
pleasure that Freud called the pleasure of our erotogenic zones, which is a
pleasure that is felt and called forth on the skin and in the mucous membranes
that line our body apertures that connect us to the world. These erotic events
do not have to do with the phallus and the vagina, or with man and woman in an
air-conditioned bedroom. They have to do with the life of the body itself. The
language of erotic events is not penetration into some depth, nor the language
of intersubjective intention. It is a language that is very rich, resonant,
evocative, paraverbal. It is also a language that is embarrassing, for it is a
language of slobberings and touchings and caressings and lickings, and it has a
life of its own.
The sexual excitation is of a special kind: it is such that, even when the
openings of the body are penetrated, and even when the orifices and organs that
penetrate are interchangeable, even then there is no penetration into something
deep. It is surfaces that are touching and rubbing, caressing and smoothing each
other. It is always contact with another surface, even if the surface is
concave, as is a body orifice. This is an aspect of the excess I am trying to
think about in my work. Sexuality, say Freud (1905) and Laplanche (1972), occurs
when there is an excess. This can come about when baby has finished sucking, or
finished feeding, and feels, Oh, there is a potential for pleasure. There is
something that lingers after I am filled with good milk, after my interior is
engorged. Baby then uses this kind of pleasure to create his sexuality. Of
course, there is the mother who seduces the child, and there are different kinds
of seduction possible and going on. Noelle expands our attention to the child s
seducing its parents, and to the mother s conveying her idiom of eroticism to
the child. At the same time, there is a certain kind of sensuality between the
lines of Noelle s contribution that is this kind of primitive, polymorphously
perverse sexuality I am talking about.
Jody Messler Davies
Oh dear, so much. As I read Noelle s remarkably eloquent, beautiful, evocative
passages, I was reminded of a thought I had about five years ago when Division
39 decided to organize their entire spring meeting around sexuality. If I
remember correctly, the title of that meeting was something like Sexuality: 100
Years Later, A Second Look. I remember at the time fooling around with some
friends and saying they really should have called it Sexuality: 100 Years

Later: One More Time, This Time with Feeling. I think that Noelle has given us
two passages, an entire book, that goes a tremendous distance toward putting
back the beauty, the feeling, the eroticism, the sensuality into our conception
of sexuality; and it is, I think, this sexuality about which we really try to
speak to our patients, not to mention our children, every day.
I thought that Noelle s two passages captured something very essential about the
mutuality and bidirectionality of parent- child, child-parent sexuality, and for
me those two pairings are inseparable. In the first passage Noelle describes to
us what we have come to in the history of psychoanalysis: if we take the bad
Freud out of it, to continue the metaphor, a particular kind of oedipal
sexuality, that is, the way in which sexuality, eroticism, sensuality, comes
literally to life in the parent-child relationship. It is not that we put
sexuality there, but somehow, in some way, in the bodily contact between parent
and child, when the erotic charge between them can be sustained at an optimal
level, there is a way in which we potentiate sensuality and eroticism. We ignite
it, give it a kind of life. That life, I think, exists for both the parent and
the child, and there is a synergy that both sustains and contains it.
Also captured in Noelle s passage is the question, (and here I disagree somewhat
with Ruth) of whether there is a form of primitive sexuality that actually
exists outside the intersubjective experience. For me, the essence of what I
call sexuality exists in that intersubjective space, and, in fact, in the kind
of bodily excitations and hyperarrousals that are somehow prior to or outside of
the kind of actual or fantasied or imagined interpersonal matrix I would not
consider to be sexual.
For me it is the intersubjectification of those bodily excitations and
sensations, in actual or fantasied interaction with others, that actually turns
unrepresentable bodily sensation into something we would consider erotic.
Between parent and child there is a deeply intersubjective awakening of
sexuality on both sides. The child becomes for the parent something that is
other than the partner; their pairing is something quite different from the
sexuality that exists with the partner. The child is a part of the parent. The
child is the parent s chance to live and love and be erotic again, in a new way,
a chance for the parent to shed all the past traumas that have affected her own
life. There s a hopefulness, almost a giving birth to a new self. Sometimes it
crosses gendersthe child can become the bisexual embodiment of who the parent
would most want to be in a playful way, I think polymorphous perversity, in the
best sense of the word.
I thought it was interesting that Noelle chose to highlight that the parent s
experience was of a sleeping child. By making the child a sleeping child, Noelle
oversimplified the complexity of the parent s experience, in that, in our own
experience, most of the time, we have to deal with all of that sexuality with a
child who is very much awake and responsive and interacting. In that context, we
do not have quite that freedom to indulge our own most passionate and erotic
fantasy and to process, reflect on, and contain it. The majority of time there
is not an opportunity for the kind of reverie that Noelle captures so
evocatively. We are most often in interaction with our children. There is most
often, therefore, a kind of experiential split between the actual interaction
between parent and child and what is going on within the mind and the internal

experience of each. This split is used to create a feeling of modulation and to


keep that excess in some way to ourselves in a more bounded experience.
I think the second passage reflects the other part of what happens to
parent-child sexuality, which in some ways represents the trickier part for most
parents. At some point we have to let go of this wonderful experience of a
mutually idealizing love affair with the child. We have to let the child turn
away from us as the primary recipient of all of that wonderful love and
adoration and idealization, and we have to watch the child turn to the outside
world. I have often thought that the Oedipus complex, as conceived of by
classical analysis, is really not the child s complex but, at least when it goes
wrong, it is the parent s complex; it is the parent s inability to let the child
move out of that state of mutual idealization and erotization of the
parent-child relationship.
It reflects, I think, the parent s inability to hold the rejection, contempt, or
both that is often turned against us when the adolescent child is attempting to
emerge from a period of mutual idealization and begin to look outward to a world
of other objects that does not include us. It involves the pain of watching our
children s sexuality really come alive in the outside world, while we re at a
stage in life when perhaps our own romantic life is more muted, less satisfying,
not as new or available or exciting as it once was. This can be a very painful
moment in development for parents, certainly in some ways more than it is for
the child who is embarking on an exciting, new, and passionate adventure. I
think it becomes problematic for children when the parent cannot contain that
rejection and contempt in a good-enough way, and in a sense set the child free
to explore the outside world of erotic relationships. For me, then, there are
two dilemmas that must be negotiated. The first is the balance between erotic
overstimulation and hyperarrousal versus excessive repression and erotic
deadness; and the second is the balance struck by the parents between exciting,
potentiating, and being at the center of the child s burgeoning sexual
experience while at the same time knowing how not to be too much at the
center, knowing when and how to set the child free for postoedipal adventure and
exploration.
I think, given all this, if we reconstrue sexuality as something that is
interpersonal, mutual, existing between two people, then contemporary
psychoanalysts have a very serious problem. Jonathan has written about this,
several of us have written about this, and it is captured in Freud s (1915)
paper, which Jonathan opened with. The issue I am referring to is this.
Sexuality was a big enough problem for psychoanalysts 100 years ago, but we had
the luxury then of believing that transference was something that existed in the
past, not really in the present. It was projected into the present. It was a
reenactment of something that happened in the past. It was not really about
analyst and patient; it was about the patient s experience with earlier objects,
and it was also a distortion. Transference was, by definition in those days, a
distortion.
Freud details all the ways in which the sexual feelings between patients and
analysts should not be taken too seriously. These feelings, according to Freud,
are really not about the analyst, but stem instead from feelings about past

objects, projected into the present and experienced toward the analyst. They are
distortions and projections, and the analyst should be neither flattered by them
nor responsive to them. In a fascinating turnabout, however, Freud ends the
paper by saying something like you know, that s the truth, but on the other hand
it s really not the entire truth. It s not the whole truth. In fact he says, we
actually deceive our patients a bit in describing the situation in this way.
Freud goes on to say that because all love is essentially a form of transference
from earlier objects, there is indeed something between patient and analyst that
is closer to other love relationships than we would like to believe. There is a
kind of analytic love, Freud claims, that is not all that different from other
love, but but he never tells the analyst exactly what to do with that more
problematic form of analytic love.
Now, if we move contemporary psychoanalysis into the intersubjective, rather
than the classically intrapsychic, understanding of transference and recognize
that transference is each individual s unique way of organizing experience, that
there is a real relationship between analyst and patient, that we are not
necessarily dealing with distortions but, rather, with a multiplicity of
potential ways of constructing ambiguous experiencesexuality becomes a problem
with which we have yet to grapple fully. If we want to grapple with it in all
its complexities and yet maintain appropriate boundaries at the same time, it
seems to me we have to develop a language for talking with each other and with
our patients about sexuality as it arises in the clinical experience. We need a
lexicon that is clear and not in excess, too much, in the way that Steve is
talking about excess for the child. We want our language of sexuality with
patients not to flow over too much into the area of excess. We must recognize
language in sexuality to be performative; talking about sex can in some ways be
even sexier than having sex. We have to develop a dialogue with each other about
how we are exactly going to do that.
My own efforts in this direction have been to keep alive, in a decidedly
reconfigured way, the notion of an Oedipus complex. I think that the Oedipus
complex has fallen under difficult times for several reasons, most particularly
an emphasis on early preoedipal infant development and a distrust of any
developmental crisis that was historically linked to a normative heterosexual
outcome. But I believe that the Oedipus complex is worth salvaging. For many
years analysts were warned over and over and over again about doing anything
that could be construed as oedipally gratifying to the patient. That was a
horrible idea. At least when I was in training, answering questions, laughing at
a patient s jokes, accepting even token gifts were off limits, for no reason
other than that they were considered to gratify the patient s oedipal fantasies.
The conversation seemed to begin and end there. The developmental possibility
that a patient or a child could be an oedipal victor was considered to be the
worst possible thing that could happen. Being an oedipal victor, winning your
Oedipus complex was going to subject you to a lifelong pursuit of unavailable
objects, and you would never enter the adult world of genital sexuality.
I think, in fact, that all of us, optimally, developmentally, need to be oedipal
winnerseven oedipal losers. We have to have both experiences, and the absence
of either experience becomes deeply problematic. Of course, to be only an

oedipal loser is far worse than to be only an oedipal winner, but somewhere in
there we can all have both experiences. It is possible for everyone to be an
appropriate oedipal winner, but sometimes a patient has not had this experience.
It is very easy, too easy, I think, to answer to this dilemma by employing Glen
Gabbard s phrase slippery slope to recommend avoiding any discussion of sexual
feelings that may arise in the course of treatment. The problem I have with the
idea of the slippery slope, not to be overly flippant about it, but I think it
really applies, is that, if one wants to learn to ski, there is no way to do
that if one does not get up on the slope. Patients come to psychoanalysis
because their lives are embroiled in sexual inhibitions, anxieties, problems;
one has to be able to deal with all of these.
Why do I think everybody has to be an oedipal winner? Well, if we go back to
Noelle s passage and to my idea that the kind of sexuality that exists between
parents and children is really of a different sort, as Steve described, it is
not that most people actually want to have sexual intercourse with their
children; it has much more to do with a kind of eroticism, passion, sensuality,
vitality, bodily kind of contact and fluidity, and the narcissistic infusion of
parent and child in each other in a kind of heightened, romantic, passionate
way. That love is very different from the love that most partners have for each
other, and, I think very early developmentally children come to realize this
difference.
Children in an optimal family situation (and I am talking about an optimal
situation) come to realize that the love that each parent has for them is
somehow not greater, not lesser, but different from the love that the parent has
for the partner. I think there is a sense that most children have, in more or
less healthy families, that in some way there is a greater love that their
parents have for them than for the partners. These are moments when children
feel the full experience of their own sort of erotic narcissism, their own power
to attract, to control, to seduce, to be the center of the world, the center of
attention. And then something happens. Noelle poses the question, What keeps us
honest? When we are at the brink, what keeps us from going too far over in the
other direction?
I think what keeps us at the brink is not some painful and perverse boundary
between parent and child, but the hope that the parent also has a sexual life
that is apart from the child, a sexual life that is alive and vital and powerful
and significant, in a way that is far greater than the love for the child, but
in a different way. The child in the course of any given hour, day, week, month
of life at home has moments of being both the center of a kind of eroticized
world of attention, romance, and personal sexual agency, but also experiences
profoundly sad, disillusioning, and painful moments of knowing that there is
something going on in the parental relationship from which the child is
excluded.
If we begin to reformulate the idea of the Oedipus complex in this waythat it
is mutual, that it is between parent and child, and that it is essentially the
developmental site where the child learns to sustain passionate desire in the
face of disappointment and frustrationOedipus becomes too essential, too
formative to throw away. Let me add that I do not think the Oedipus complex has
anything to do with sexual orientation. I believe that the essential aspects of
the kind of oedipal constellation I am describing can go on in any configuration
of heterosexual or homosexual partnership. In fact, I think it has to.

Of course, different constellations will highlight different qualities and


textures, but there will be, in every family constellation, a significant
tension between the parent-child romance and the parent-partner romance. This
tension will become highly significant developmentally. I think that there will
be these experiences of oneself as a winner, a self-organization of oneself as a
healthy, vital, sexual, romantic, passionate winner, and an alternative
self-organization of oneself as a sexual loser, one who is not always
triumphant, one who has to sustain frustration, loss, disappointment, and the
disillusionment of relationships. Then we have an Oedipus complex that moves
into a kind of contemporary framework. And I suggest that, rather than being the
site where sexual orientation is determined, the Oedipus complex, in this
reconfigured way, becomes an absolutely significant and essential developmental
phase where the child develops the capacity to sustain the frustration of his or
her own erotic narcissism, to sustain disappointment without also experiencing
the collapse of the potential for desire and for engaging in desirous
relationships. Again, I think the fate of that capacity to experience desire
grows out of the experience of being both the oedipal winner and the oedipal
loser.
What does that mean, then, for us as analysts if we have patients whose
experiences of being an oedipal winner or loser have been frustrated or
foreclosed? And what does our role become and how do we negotiate that very
slippery slope of reawakening that early experience in an analytic relationship
without going over into those experiences of potentially retraumatizing excess?
DISCUSSION
Jonathan Slavin
It is an oversimplification, I am sure, but it is not easy to digest these
beautiful and substantive presentations in a short time. In any case, it seemed
to me that Stephen Seligman raised the flag of what we might call the bad
Freud, which I understood to be the idea of a concretized sexuality that
preexists the personal, that exists in some reified way outside the relational
matrix. This bad Freud was the Freud that erased the relational and
intersubjective that so disturbed dissenters in psychoanalysis over most of the
last century. In her comments, Ruth Stein gives us back a piece of the bad
Freud as something to value. She took the bad Freud, the one-person Freud,
the dry Freud, the sexuality outside the relational matrix and reconstructed it
as something that we absolutely must take into consideration. Jody Davies then,
to my mind, made a lovely integration of the so-called bad Freud and, for want
of a better term right now, the good-bad Freud, that is, the sexuality that
exists within and yet comes from outside. It seems to me that sexuality, which
can be seen as coming from within and yet from outside, is an extraordinary
paradox, but I am not sure we need to resolve it, at least for now, in one
direction or another. In any case, identifying this paradox would be my way of
hearing, and putting into context, aspects of the three comments we have heard
related to Noelle s reading.
Noelle Oxenhandler
I could not conceive of separating the erotic dynamic between parent and child
from the interpersonal context. That is why, in the book, I begin with the
concept of attunement, which I appropriated as the prime navigational tool all
the way through the parent-child relationship. I did this precisely because it
releases the inquiry from the fixation on the explicitly sexual so that what
might otherwise appear as a very tiny sexual transgression actually might be
understood as a very significant failure of attunement (as in the Milan Kundera
passage that I read), and vice versa. I think the point is very well taken that

those two must not be separated, and it certainly was not my intention to do so.
Stephen Seligman
I want to make it clear that my critique of some of the Freudian strategies is
not intended to diminish Freud s majesty, especially in this area of eros. He
invented the terms that are still governing the discussion, and his formulations
are, of course, the strongest that we have.
Freud gave us a series of endlessly generative categories, to be deconstructed
and constructed, taken to their limits in the way that Jody did. I do appreciate
Noelle s correction; it seems right to me. Still, I think that we might go
further in sorting out how our view of childhood eros is colored by our own
adult vantage point. I want to emphasize continuities from early development
into adulthood today, and also to move away from an overemphasis on the oedipal
in our theorizing, even as this extraordinary construct is given its due. This
is partly stimulated by reading Noelle s direct accounts of eros in the
parent-child arena.
One of the Freudian categories that is suggested by this discussion is primary
narcissism. This concept opens a window into Freud s approach to transcendence,
which is evoked for me by comparison with the Christ story. There is something
in early sexuality that, for Freud, is transcendence. He reads this into the
mother-child relationship as a sea of transcendence. Later, this early sexuality
becomes fraught with the perils of the oedipal. I think that Freud s
overemphasis on the oedipal reflects, among so many other things, his
ambivalence about transcendence. He is detached from transcendence in a way,
quite suspicious of it as a scientific man, as a Jew, and as a witness to
fascism, but quite aware of it nonetheless. I think that this may have led him
to be haunted by it, but still to relegate it in his theorizing, in his distance
from the mother-child arena, in his alienation of femininity, and, overall, in a
pathologizing approach to the unconscious (certainly Jung made this critique,
although I find myself quite unsympathetic to Jung s way of reworking it).
Ruth Stein
Now, in relational psychology, we are at the stage of further refinement of our
thinking on sexuality. I think that sexuality, or eroticism, is deeply
intersubjective, that there is a mutual pulsating and looking into each other,
falling for the other, and feeling each other. In a sense, one could say that
there is no deeper, more intense, or more intensely lived intersubjective event
than sexuality, which runs from the most primal to the most sublimated, loving,
or refined attraction between people. This might be the main field, the
mainstream, a field Jody is cultivating, when she speaks about child and
parent and the mutual loving or engendering that happens in erotic experience
between two human beings.
I am trying to convey a different dimension, which is not intersubjective and
yet does not hinge on a sexual drive that is preexistent and immutably
hard-wired. Sexuality is very much implanted in the body; it is sensed and then
fantasized. And that sexual life is an enormous aspect of self-experience. This
thought infused my debate with Stephen Mitchell, when he accepted my suggestion
that transcendence can be generated by sexual self-experience; that it has to do
with one s particular body; and further, and paradoxically, not totally with the

inside of one s mental life, but with the outside. That sexuality is an
experienced sensory-scheme experience that is very deep and unique, so I would
put this on one side, and I would put on the other side what Jody is talking
about, what we could call oedipal celebration or oedipal sublimationto which I
would add the painful, and sexualizable, oedipal renunciation and transgression.
And I would make a fuss about that dimension of sexuality that is not refined,
that belongs to ourselves at all times.
Jody Messler Davies
Ruth, I think we re starting to disagree less and less. I think that, as we
refine, we are moving. I think this kind of colloquey is fascinating, but that
some of the disagreement is in the language. I would certainly agree, and I d be
curious to know whether you agree or disagree, with what you are saying now. The
problem I have is that I think that, when you say the essence of sexualityand I
think now we are beginning to talk about adult sexualitythe essence of
sexuality is outside the intersubjective space. Couldn t we say that the
beginnings of sexuality exist outside the intersubjective space?
Let s just throw around some words. What is the difference between excitation
arousal and sexuality? I suggest that what you are sayingand I absolutely
agreeis that the experience of physical excitation and arousal begins, in the
deepest sense, in the body. It is depersonalized, not part of the
intersubjective space. The fate of that excess and essentially unrepresentable
arousal is that it must become representable, and as it does it becomes more
intersubjectivized and attached to significant objects in fantasy. I maintain
that it is through the process of intersubjectification that excitation and
arousal become erotic and sexual. The child s mission is to weave a psychic
structure that can contain, sustain, and hold those states of excitation.
We have, then, this polymorphous, erotic perversity that represents the body in
the mind. In this sense the most heightened moment of adult sexualityat it is
most erotic, at its most sensual, passionate, and intense (and this is part of
the quandry of sustaining that kind of romantic, intense, sexual passion in a
long-term relationship)occurs when we are able to bring the Perversity, with a
capital P, of the bodily excitation that exists outside the object relationship
into the deepest moments of intersubjective intimacy. The most intensely erotic,
sensual, and sexual moments happen when Perversions, let us say, become
perversions (with a lower case e), in the sense that we have part-object
relationships in the context of an intimate intersubjective whole-object
relationship. That, for example, is what captures the difference between the
kind of playful sadomasochism that can infuse a sexual relationship with a kind
of intense passion and the horrifying sadomasochism that can be debilitating,
abusive, and humiliating. And maybe it is part of what captures Steve s question
about the nature of actual child abuse; what differentiates Steve s idea that
child abuse is a Perversion of parenthood from Noelle s passages, from a kind of
healthy pedophilia. That is a bad word, but I am talking about the truly
erotic experience that parents and children have that is not dangerous. It is
normal and wonderful and alive.
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
Muriel Dimen
I would like Ruth Stein and Jody Davies to disagree more. In our world,

sexuality is constructed as other, as the other place, der andere Schauplatz


that the Lacanians refer to. I believe that knowing this Otherness is a very
important way to know sexuality, and it does tend to be erased in our relational
push. Otherness has an important dimension: sexuality s extraordinariness, which
we overlook often and which I have tried to write about. In this otherness is
found abjectionI am borrowing now from Kristeva (1982)which is an aspect of
narcissism as experienced in the primal relationship and is itself
extraordinarily disturbing and painful. Ruth refers to one edge of abjection,
the embarrassing slobbering and licking that happen in sex. We need to recall
that dimension and not smooth it out by our rational language and
conceptualizations.
Barbara Pizer
What I am thinking about relates to the erotics taking place in a kind of
movement from a two-person to a one-person dynamic. I am referring to those
occasional moments when we have worked with a patient toward a deeper
understanding of some process or problem and suddenly the patient gets it in
her own private subjectivity. She reaches beyond us and grasps something outside
of our conceptual horizon. A peculiar thing happens to us then. Our spirit, our
mind, and our body are unexpectedly integrated into a kind of physiological
pleasure that has to do with the patient s new discovery, and we find ourselves
wordlessly participating in it, or with it. I think it s important here that we
make a distinction between experience and behavior. It is not that we do
anything or necessarily say anything when that happens. I am talking about
what Winnicott might have called an ego orgasm.
I can think of variations of that paradigmatic moment outside the consulting
room where one is less of a cocreator in the original experience and more of a
witness to it. There are those times for me when I watch my husband playing with
our grandson. Here I am, totally outside their play, and yet everything in me
gathers togethermy mind, my body, my spiritin a very sensual and sexual
experience that belongs only to me. I don t do anything with it, except enjoy
it myself.
Irwin Z. Hoffman
Clearly, sexual experience between parents and children and analysts and
patients is the kind that is not consummated sexually. It is a certain kind of
sensuality or sexuality that does not have that kind of expression. There is
another whole domain of social life in which such relationships exist, in which
closeness is not associated with literal sexual consummation of the
relationship; so I am wondering if you have thought about what the optimal
quality of sexuality might be in such relationships. All these experiences can
be viewed as ends in themselves; that is, they are important as part of the
affective connection between parents and children, between analysts and
patients, between friend and friend, and so on. At the same time, certainly with
respect to parents and children and analysts and patients, these experiences
have that other means-to-an-end dimension too, which is to promote healthy
sexual development leading to intimate sexual relationships. Right?
Have you any thoughts about how one might formulate, put into words, the optimal
quality of nonconsummated sexual experience that would serve as grounds for,
inspiration for, and catalyst for the consummated sexuality of an intimate

relationship? How would you conceptualize the change, if there is one, from the
traditional paradigm on establishing grounds for healthy development of genital
sexuality? Has anything changed in our contemporary thinking about sexuality in
relationships that are not literally sexual?
RESPONSE TO QUESTIONS
Jody Messler Davies
I would like to comment briefly on the questions raised by Muriel Dimen,
although clearly my response is only some beginning musings and not as fully
elaborated as I would like. I agree with Murieland Ruth Stein because I think
this is her wish as well that in our relational theorizing we must not lose the
sheer primal physicality, the dripping, oozing, sucking, licking, and wet bodily
Otherness of sexuality. But here I think we tend to conflate two developmental
tasks. Ultimately, the primal bodily experience of what I have called
protosexuality must become represented in the mind, although it is probably
irreducible and such representation will be incomplete; perhaps it needs to be
incomplete to sustain the erotic. Nonetheless, the incomplete task of mental
representation and signification will bring the physical into the mental, and
this is the place where I believe that eroticism and sexuality proper begin. But
here the mental representation of sexuality is different yet again from the
representation and signification of other intensely emotional and primarily
physical states.
Consider, for a moment, the ways in which a child learns to deal with rage and
how this learning differs from attempts to contain and grapple with sexuality.
When a very young child is in the midst of a temper tantrum, that experience is
at the outset, physical. The difference is that the child learns to contain and
ascribe meaning to the experience in a largely interpersonal context. We are
taught to sit with our children when they are throwing a tantrum, to keep them
safe, to keep them from hurting themselves and others. We speak to them quietly.
We give them a wordangerto represent what is happening. They connect this word
to what they are feeling in their bodies, and over time, with multiple tantrums
and increasing age, they come to understand that, if their experience has a
word, then it must be an experience that has been had by others. The word anger
connects them to their own physical experience and to the world of others as
well. They slowly learn, by way of parental input, what makes them angry, how
they can express that anger, and how they cannot. The containment goes on
interpersonally. The too muchness is shared between parent and child until the
child is able to take over the task on her own. The parent has significant input
into how this process proceeds and how it becomes mentally understood, even
elaborated in fantasy.
How different is sexuality? We do not sit with our children when they are
masturbating or in other states of heightened sexual arousal. I am not
suggesting that we should. But we are, nonetheless, not present to help them
interpret what is going on inside their bodies. They have no words to contain
those physical states; they have no parent to hold the excess, the too
muchness of their excitation. There is no word offered to connect body with
mind and no word to connect the child s experience to the experience of others.
It is through private, highly elaborated fantasizing and daydreaming that
sexuality comes to be contained and represented. The child makes sense of her
bodily excitations in a deeply private way, with cognitive capacities specific
to very early developmental stages, and these fantasies become paradoxically
both a source of further excitation and a means of containment and satisfaction.
As such they are often saturated with a kind of secrecy and shame that explains

a piece of what we might consider to be the darker side of eroticism and


sensuality.
Now some thoughts on Irwin s question. I think I have already answered how my
own formulations differ from more classical ones. But let me try to capture
something of that optimal experience of the sexual dimension that leads to more
sexual vitality and vigor outside the analytic relationship. I think here the
analogy between parent and child and analyst and patient breaks down to some
extent. Although I agree with Steve that parents seldom fantasize having actual
sexual intercourse with their children, and that, when they do fantasize, it
represents a perversion of their parental function, analysts have often
described actual sexual fantasies about their patients; and I suspect that such
fantasies are even more prevalent than our literature suggests. I have described
elsewhere (1998, 2003) and in great detail what I believe transpires between
parent and child, so I would like to focus my remarks here on what I believe to
be optimal in a very broad sense between patients and analysts.
I believe that analysts must have access to their sexual fantasies and images of
patients and must not be made so anxious about them that they foreclose them and
are denied this valuable source of understanding. Because so much of the sexual
exists outside verbally encoded linguistic experience, because so much is
sensory, bodily, and imagistic, the sexual may find its way into the analyst s
experience within particular modalities. Unbidden images, unexpected physical
reactions and states of arousal, inexplicable bodily reactions may all become
important pieces of countertransferential experience in the realm of the sexual
and erotic. They are experiences that the analyst must be open enough to
receive.
On the other hand, how the analyst is to use these experiences could fill
volumes of future psychoanalytic writing. What is used and processed privately,
what is brought to supervision, what gets brought to one s own analysis,
ultimately what, if anything, should be shared with the patient are all
questions that remain open and alive and will be much debated in coming years.
The other dimension of the sexual tension between patient and analyst, which I
believe occurs on some level in almost every intensive treatment, is that the
analyst holds in mind a healthy appreciation of the satisfied sexual being that
the patient is and might yet become as the analysis proceeds. This dimension is
paradoxical and, in fact, relies on the essential paradox to contain it. The
analyst must appreciate and enjoy the vital, alive, sensual person that the
patient is or could potentially be for someone else, and yet both patient and
analyst know that, to achieve this appreciation, the analyst must draw on his
own sexual and erotic experience with the patient. In large part, it is the
anxiety that stems from this only partially conscious awareness that must be
analyzed. In this case the analyst, like the parent, knows that his own
imagination will find life in the patient s or child s experience only later on
and with someone else. In this sense, a fertile parent-child romance, or
patient- analyst romance, thrives on its utter impossibility, and the
potentiation of the romance is optimized by the parent s or analyst s capacity
to communicate both the playful erotic delights and the necessity that those
delights will become, over time, transformed into extrafamilial or extranalytic
postoedipal relationships.
Ruth Stein
The bodily poignancy in sexuality is tightly linked with abjection (Kristeva,
1982), which Muriel Dimen uses in her work and which she rightly reads as

looming in my descriptions of the baby s and the lover s licking and


slobbering over the wet surfaces of the beloved. Abjection encompasses affects
of disgust, repulsion, embarrassment, shame, excitement, and so on (see Dimen,
2002; Stein, 2002).
Abjection is what is at the boundary between the living and the dead, between
the body and the outside, its skin and its inside. Abjection is the experiential
side of being cast off limits. We harbor potential shame and disgust with our
unavoidable body, its thingness, its existing in-itself in shameless
thereness, what Sartre called its facticity.
In addition to the profound psychoanalytic conception of disgust as a reaction
formation against pleasure, and shame against exhibitionistic impulses, I
suggest that abjection, the source of disgust and fascination, is the hovering
between the alive and the dead, the wonderfully mysterious and the obscene.
When I desire, I desire the other s subjectivity, his freedom, his
unpredictability. I wish to have him as free agent, yet I wish him to submit to
me in desire. Since I can never grasp the other in his objective facticity, in
his body which exists in-itself, I have a problem: How can I ensnare, as
Sartre (1943) says, the other s freedom within this facticity? I have to
cajole the other s subjectivity, his experience, to dwell in his body, I must
arouse the other s soul to play on the surface of his body (for Freud, 1923,
the ego is the bodily projection of the body s surface) and be extended all
through his body. If this happens, then by touching this body I should finally
touch the other s free subjectivity.
By erotic looking, by caressing the skin, and, yes, by licking and perhaps
slobbering, I aim at filling the surface of the other s body with a
consciousness of my interest in his embodiment, in his embodied subjectivity.
The slobbering and licking can be wonderful when experienced with desire, from
within the experience, or it can be obscene and disgusting when experienced from
the outside, with no desire to animate and transform the body and its
sensations.
The erotics that Barbara Pizer points to as a movement from a two-person to a
one-person state of the patient that is witnessed by the analyst implies a
witnessing so involved that I hesitate to call it a first-person perspective. It
seems to me to be a process whereby the patient goes beyond the analyst s
horizon or frame of mind and lets the analyst share the attainment and arrival.
The patient thus procures for her analyst an experience of wholeness that
contains physiological pleasure as wellwhat Winnicott (1989) calls an
ego-orgasm.
The other example, where Barbara herself uses the word witnessing, shows her
vicariously participating in a loving scene taking place between a grandfather
and his grandchild, her husband and her grandchild. This is a witnessing of a
good primal scene, or, as the Kleinians would say, a good feed. It is a
sublimated primal scene, a sublimated feed, as when the patient feeds the
analyst back on her accrued experience of understanding and insight, providing
the latter with an experience of integration.
Barbara s mentioning Winnicott s ego-orgasm set me to thinking about Winnicott s
linking orgastic activity, play, and fantasy. In connection with ego-orgasm,
When a patient would reveal fantasy material in regard to the transference,
Winnicott (1989) would invariably ask about the accompanying orgastic body of

feeling (p. 26). But whereas for Winnicott ego-orgasm is the calmer derivative
of some bodily upheaval so intense as to be called, metaphorically, orgasm,
Barbara uses the notion of orgasm to describe intense identificatory
gratification with the other s ego-orgasman intriguing and compelling use.
I find Irwin s the most difficult question to answer. It really needs to be
developed along more time and space, but we could say that Noelle s book is a
poetic-phenomenological attempt to answer this very question. Let me here take
up only Irwin s last, more theoretical question. Basically, the classical view
holds that oedipal sexuality is experienced (or has to be experienced) by the
child only to be renounced at the end of the line. If the renunciation and
mourning go well, the child grown to adulthood will subsequently make good
object choices that will render him or her happy in life. According to this
view, the parent should withhold his or her sexuality so that the child is left
free to contend only with its own sexual instinctual drives and not have to
undergo the trauma of the adult s overwhelming and frightening sexuality.
What has changed with the relational turn is that today we conceive of the
parent sand analyst ssexuality as something that is conveyed to the child or
patient indirectly, obliquely, nonverbally. It is, in Laplanche s (1970, 1992)
language, an enigmatic message, the transmission of the parent s sexual idiom,
history, beliefs, predilections, experience. It is a subtext accompanying overt
behavior and verbal formulations, and it can become intensified at certain
moments of intimacy between parents and children and analysts and patients. Thus
Bollas (1999) writes that a mother s failure to libidinize her child s body
results in hysteria. This puts the concept of sexualization in a new light: it
is valorized as necessary. Today we are more aware of the erotic, of varieties
of parental seductions and libidinizations that are vital for enhancing
children s erotic intelligence, their confidence in their sexual being, what
Irwin prefers to call healthy sexual development leading to intimate sexual
relationships. Such notions as enigmatic message, the sense of possibility,
sameness with difference (in mother s ways of participating in erotic moments
with child), all convey this more complex awareness of what is going on
erotically between parent and child.
We can add to this different philosophy a greater awareness of the child s trust
in parents and parental figures, and a greater awareness of the subjectivity of
the child as a whole. Hand in hand with this, in erotic love, as Oxenhandler
(2001) writes, Transgression is present as a possibility, as what we refrain
from, as what we play with and balance on the edge of. For a most poignant
description of the sameness and difference of mother and little daughter erotics
and love, I refer you to p. 227 in Oxenhandler s book.
Stephen Seligman Responds
These are, of course, very complex and evocative questions. For me, they evoke
the very wide variation on these issues among cases, but also among analysts. In
my own clinical work lately, I have come to follow the evolution of my own
erotic countertransferences as providing essential information about the
evolving variations of the overall affection and its risks in the analytic
relationship, especially in its most delicate stages. My quite preliminary
thought is that the analyst s capacity to tolerate erotic countertransferences
tracks along with the resilience of the evolving
transference-countertransference love. In one form of things going well all this
finds expression in a certain kind of analytic passion. Analytic erotics are not

necessarily a matter of defense, repetition, or exercise in the forbidden.


The correlate of this is that in certain evolving transferences, sexualization
wanes when the dependence and affection are more tolerable. This is not a new
observation, of course, but I find it useful to frame the need for the analyst
to contain the erotic countertransference-transference as a matter of a
regulatory, holding function, a protection against too much, too little, too
demanding, too rejecting, and so on. It is a key part of securing the delicate
relationship. This is, of course, not to exclude all the other meanings that we
are used to discussing. Jonathan (Slavin, 2002) and Jody (Davies, 2003) have
taken this subject up quite thoughtfully.
CONCLUSION: JONATHAN SLAVIN
I began this roundtable mentioning the stereotype of starting a psychoanalytic
discussion with Freud. As much as I want to avoid compounding that stereotype, I
think, nevertheless, that we have to return to Freud to capture something
essential for our discussion.
No summary could do justice to the level of thinking and range of issues that
have been offered by the panelists and enriched by comments from the audience.
But I want briefly to address three issues that have come up in our panel
related to Freud s contribution about sexuality.
The first, to which I no doubt contributed by my earlier, slightly offhand, but
nevertheless intended, comment about Steve Seligman s highlighting the bad
Freud is the danger we face in psychoanalytic discussions of conflating Freud s
ideas with much of the thinking that followed him. I remind us of this not to
make an apology for Freud, nor to suggest that Freud is immune to criticism.
Rather, it is useful to remind ourselves that his thinking is so complex, and
evolved so significantly over the course of the time he wrote, that it is easy
in the thicket of it all to focus on some aspects, maybe the best targets, and
overlook something of the complexity.
What happens, for example, if we think of Freud s (1915) paper, Observations on
Transference Love, not as a definitive, canonical exposition of sexuality in
the treatment relationship, but as a work in progress, an effort to think
something through by writing it out, an effort undertaken not by a sage or guru,
but by a man bedeviled by a phenomenon arising in his work (sexual feelings)
that scared the daylights out of him. After all, in that paper Freud does refer
to the patient s sexual feelings as a spirit from the underworld (p. 164).
Seen in this context, Freud s declaration, over and over again, that the
patient s sexual feelings are not real and not meant for the analyst, begin to
sound like attempts to assert a truth that just will not stick.
What is remarkable, to my mind, is not this position, which a rigidified
classical point of view took as the final word on the matter, but, rather, that,
in midpaper, Freud changes his mind, as Jody Davies pointed out. After
counseling that we must be truthful in the analytic process, Freud acknowledges
that, after all is said and done, the sexual feelings that arise in treatment
cannot be said to be ungenuine. It is a big admission, considering that he spent
a good part of a paper trying to slam the idea down. And I am not quite sure I
agree with Jody; I think he does attempt to address what an analyst is supposed
to do in the face of these newly acknowledged real feelings. As Freud (1915)
puts it:
For the doctor, ethical motives unite with technical ones to restrain him

from giving the patient his love. The aim he has to keep in view is that this
woman, whose capacity for love is impaired by infantile fixations, should gain
free command over a function which is of such inestimable importance for her;
that she should not, however, dissipate it in the treatment, but keep it ready
for the time when, after her treatment, the demands of real life make themselves
felt [p. 169].
I find this a remarkable passage, given its time. It highlights Freud s view of
the liberating possibilities of psychoanalysis and the very initial (and very
current-sounding) emphasis on the idea that what really holds the frame are
the overall goals and vision of the processthe aim of the analyst not just of
understanding the unconscious, but of work to free the patient s sexual
agencyrather than specific technical rules.
Second, as we think about sexuality currently in more relational terms, as our
panelists and audience members have consistently articulated, it may be
important not to relegate Freud to a corner of the discussion about what
sexuality represents, which a simple characterization of the bad Freud might
suggest. Freud consistently emphasized an expansive understanding of sexuality,
of sexual drive, of libido. He did this not simply in his articulation of
psychosexual stages of development, but by extending sexuality from a
circumscribed genital connotation to the erogeneity of the body and thence to
the very basis for gender identity. Moreover, we should not lose sight of the
fact that he extended it also relationally. For example, Freud (1912) wrote:
We are thus led to the discovery that all the emotional relations of
sympathy, friendship, trust, and the like, which can be turned to good account
in our lives, are genetically linked with sexuality and have developed from
purely sexual desires through a softening of their sexual aim, however pure and
unsensual they may appear to our conscious self-perception. Originally we knew
only sexual objects; and psychoanalysis shows us that people who in our real
life are merely admired or respected may still be sexual objects for our
unconscious [p. 105].
Finally, this has indeed been an incredibly nuanced and profound discussion
about a subject that we humans have no doubt spent our entire existence as a
species trying to capture and representin art, in literature, in music, in
dance, as well as in the efforts of our minds to construct understanding. What
is striking to me is how this discussion has avoided oversimplification. Each
panelist, while perhaps emphasizing one or another perspective or a pole of this
issue, retained a hold on the complexity, indeed the mystery, pulling his or her
colleagues back from too much emphasis in one direction or another.
But what is the balance that we are trying so hard to keep, or perhaps redress,
in respect either to an unrestrained drive theory or to a radical
interpersonalism? What is it about sexuality that bedevils us, as it unfolds in
this discussion?
It is in response to this question that I feel most compelled to return to
Freud. Not to Freudian theory, as it was narrowed, concretized, and perhaps even
trivialized after Freud during the better part of the last century. I do not
propose to return to that. Rather I propose to return to what, in my view, is
essential in Freud s contribution.
As I see it, our panel is wrestling, struggling, with the very essence of the
paradox and complexity of sexuality, which is the center of Freud s contribution

to the subject. For Freud, sexuality was exactly what Ruth Stein and Muriel
Dimen, as well as other panelists, emphasized. It is the bodily, the driven, the
sensations of lips, tongue, mouth, anus, genitals, the bodily erogeneity.
Butand here I am forced by the need for clarity to place into separate
sentences a thought that ought to be said in the same breathFreud s ingenious
contribution was to understand the immense, lifelong impact this bodily,
biological, and driven experience has on our minds, our psyche, and on our
relational lives.
If Freud s sexuality was simply or primarily a drive based, bodily experience,
as can sometimes be evinced in the classical literature, we as analysts and
psychologists would not be bothering with it. It is only because sexuality is so
fundamentally, paradoxically, inextricably biopsychological that it represented
for Freud, and remains for us, a central aspect of our developmental and psychic
experience.
It is immensely difficult to hold this paradoxical complexity without fleeing
into a mechanical, drive-based bioreductionism or a superficial relationalism.
Yet our panelists have managed this task incredibly, leaving us, in the end
where I think we ought to be, to quote Noelle, in a just right place, exactly
where we should be, appreciating the complexity of our own human endowments and
capacities with a sense of wonderment and of the ineffable. And with a thirst
for more.
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