Abstract
Kristeva’s profound and comprehensive understanding of maternal eroticism allows us to examine the ways in which a negative maternal transference, structured through the work of the abject, can be viewed as a maternal erotic transference in its devitalizing form. Through the use of a clinical case, the revitalizing experiences of maternal eroticism within analytic process facilitate the emergence of a maternal erotic transference in its vitalizing form. The lack of erotic dimensions in maternal transferences, it is argued, may be viewed as present absences, and the development of a positive maternal erotic transference as an achievement. André Green’s visual-spatial metaphor of foreclosed space is extended as an imploding force wherein abject signifiers do their devitalizing work. In contrast, the usable space of a healthy psychoanalytic process is viewed as the envelope around which abject signifiers emerge, becoming available for psychoanalytic work. A transformation related to the author’s experiences with her dying mother is shown to have expanded her containing capacities, including new areas of patience and receptivity. These dynamics are placed within the context of a multiverse conception of maternal eroticism, including the analyst’s disciplined receptivity, viewed as an eternal signifier of the maternal.
Keywords
In 1931 Freud called on female analysts to gain access to preoedipal transferences in analyses with their female patients. Over the past century we have seen a profusion of clinical reports from female analysts involving theorizing in the preoedipal domain. At the same time, erotic transferences (presumably oedipal) seemed to remain the purview of male analysts. Until recent decades, clinical lore promoted the mistaken idea that female analysts do not (perhaps cannot) evoke erotic transferences; it was surmised that, at least with male patients, this was related to the intolerable helplessness associated with dependency longings in the maternal transference (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1976; Lester 1985; Person 1985; Kernberg 1994). As I have noted elsewhere (Celenza 2006, 2014), female analysts (and male analysts as well) can collude with this clinical lore by taking refuge in a de-eroticized maternal transference-countertransference. There may be several reasons for this defensive move, including discomfort with erotic material in the transference-countertransference interplay (Coen 1994; Gabbard 1994; Davies 1998; Celenza 2014; Elise 2019) and/or various kinds of discomfort in combining the maternal 1 with the erotic.
Such de-erotization and specifically desexualization have been identified in psychoanalytic theorizing of the maternal. Balsam (2012, 2019) addresses the neglect of the female body in the psychoanalytic literature; Litowitz (2014) wonders if the mother’s body has been denatured in object relations theories; Fonagy (2008) identifies a desexualization in contemporary relational theorizing; and Green (1995) noted a more general absence of clinical interest in sexuality, as if its presence were “‘beyond’ sexuality, or . . . ‘before’ sexuality” (p. 872).
In recent decades a recognition of the maternal transference as erotic is emerging in the literature (see, e.g., Chasseguet-Smirgel 1970, 1976; McDougall 1986, 1995; Kulish 1989; Wrye and Welles 1994; Benjamin 1995; Elise 2002, 2015, 2017, 2019; Dimen 2003; Harris 2005; Fonagy and Target 2007; Balsam 2012, 2014, 2019; Salomonsson 2012; Kristeva 2000, 2011, 2014a,b; Celenza 2014; Litowitz 2014; Widawsky 2014; Wilson 2014; Atlas 2016). These authors and the discussions they have inspired mark an important shift in analytic theorizing.
Maternal Eroticism
The popular conception of eros and the erotic qualities of life are typically associated with love and sexuality. In ancient mythology, however, Eros 2 is associated (directly and indirectly) with a complex and contradictory set of intense affective instincts and drives, beyond love and sexuality. Eros is the god of passion, defined as the sufferance of or submission to intense feeling (love or hate). The erotic in psychoanalytic theorizing and maternal eroticism is similarly complex. In his later work, Freud (1920) expanded his vision of the erotic to the life instincts more broadly conceived. 3 In a profound and comprehensive understanding, Kristeva (2014a,b) 4 describes maternal eroticism as a multiverse, intending to return to the erotic its biopsychical complexity (p. 71). She, along with Balsam (2003, 2012, 2019), explicitly addresses the neglect of the material body in psychoanalytic theorizing, emphasizing bodily details and the importance of femaleness (distinguished from femininity), situated and experienced (by the child) in the anatomically sexed body of the mother. 5
In her complex, incisive theorizing, Kristeva (2014a,b) complicates the multiverse of maternal eroticism by invoking the term reliance. She describes the experience (and state) of maternal eroticism or reliance as at once a vitalizing passionate vocation, a devitalizing (separating or discharging) force, including associations with the abject, and a tenacious, revitalizing instinct.
Maternal Eroticism as Vitalizing
Kristeva (2014b) describes maternal eroticism as a vitalizing, passionate vocation that holds, links, binds, adheres to, and is committed to the life of the child. It lives in a paradoxical frontier where “a consciousness emerges into the “‘psychic revolution’ of materiality” (p. 75), in the space between subject/object, where “the Thing is delivered from its state of Thingness and releases another living subject to the world” (pp. 75–76). To provide these components a real-world grounding, we can see the vitalizing energy a mother offers her infant (on both psychic and bodily levels) in the invitation to be, through being delivered, seen, and touched. Instinctively, the good-enough mother (Winnicott 1960) says to her infant some version of “Hello! Yes! I see you!” in a reflexive, lilting, high-pitched tone, all the while stroking, physically holding, and rhythmically soothing her baby. This is the mother’s invitation to be as well as to have (her) as an object of love. 6 She invites the baby’s presence as both body and being, however undifferentiated and nascent.
With its libidinal force (tenderness) as its basic (but certainly not only) affect, maternal eroticism, or reliance, is “a fabulous investment in the state of emergency in life” (Kristeva 2014b, p. 77). Similarly, Elise (2019) refers to the erotic as embodied affective energies including “libidinal vitality, tempestuous passions, unruly urges, vigor, ardor and a stimulating, vibrant frame of mind” (p. 1).
Kristeva focuses her attention on early, preverbal periods, referring to binding or linking in the realms of the “sensorial, physical, or mental” (Kristeva 2014b, translators’ note 5, p. 71), denoting the mother as “the incarnation of the semiotic, which she calls Khora,” the preverbal sensorial surround, representing “vocal and kinetic sensations from the preoedipal primary process” (Widawsky 2014, p. 62). Leaning on Winnicott (1960), Kristeva includes holding and nurturant functions, while echoing Laplanche (1997, 1999): the mother is “the first agent of seduction . . . and a transmitter of unconscious fantasies to the infant” (Widawsky 2014, p. 62).
This is the conscious and unconscious seduction by the mother, with all its excitations and inflections, the mother’s enigmatic message conveyed in the khora’s sensory surround (especially from her body) through touch, gaze, and tonalities. The baby “takes in” the mother even when the mother transmits mixed messages, perhaps does not invite the baby in, or obstructs and frustrates the baby’s seeking, pleas, needs, and demands.
The mother is a complex bodily force to the baby, mysterious and erotic, serving as a launching pad for seeking closeness with or being repelled by others. “The body of the other is not perceived as an object, but rather as inhabited by a secret perception, by a sexual schema that is strictly individual (Merleau-Ponty 1945a, pp. 158–159). “The body [of the other] is enigmatic. . . it is connected with [a] personal life and is like the habitat in which the human being seeks closeness and union with others. . . . corporeality . . . [is] our surface of contact with being” (Merleau-Ponty 1945b, p. 229; cited in Moya and Larrain 2016, pp. 744–745; emphasis added).
To see other people is to experience their being, to perceive their way of relating to others and the world. When we touch them, we don’t just touch their body, we touch their being. The act of touching reminds us that we are embodied (Celenza 2011). The baby’s complex experience with the mother’s body will be internalized and bear its imprint, referenced as a template for experience with others throughout life.
Wrye and Welles (1994) are notable in their description of how the erotic is implicitly experienced in the maternal body and maternal activity. The mother’s nonverbal, body-based ministrations, including looking or gazing, vocal tonalities, and various kinds of touching—the stroking, sucking, licking, being inside the other, and the overall enveloping nature of the maternal touch—combine to be versions of erotic desire. These body-based ministrations defy physical boundaries as mother and baby take each other in. Irigaray (1989) artfully speaks of this (specifically for girls, though I suggest this applies regardless of the infant’s sex): “The girl has the mother . . . in her skin, in the humidity of the mucous membranes, in the intimacy of her most intimate parts, in the mystery of her relation to gestation, birth and to her sexual identity” (p. 133; quoted in Perelberg 2018).
Through body-based ministrations and the primary caregiver’s empathic recognition and love, the maternal figure initiates and for a time stands as the baby’s entire relation to the world. From an intersubjective perspective, then, the first signifier of the erotic 7 is derived from the infant’s experience of its body as held, touched, gazed at, stimulated, soothed, frustrated, and rejected by the maternal figure.
Maternal Eroticism as Devitalizing
Kristeva (2014a,b) reminds us that maternal eroticism is also de-vitalizing, as the mother separates and “discharges.” The mother is a mother who can say “no”; maternal eroticism includes the mother who separates, absents herself, and causes the baby to confront loss. In these ways, Kristeva notes that maternal eroticism is also fragile in the sense that it can be invaded, frustrated, obstructed, and reduced, devitalized by the work of the death drive. After all, the baby is originally ejected through the violence of labor, in which the mother risks her and her baby’s lives.
Yet the mother’s ejection of the baby from her body, creating a separation between them but also giving the baby its life in the world, is a momentous gift from the mother. The baby is vulnerable to the mother’s misattunement, frustration, and obstruction, as the life and death components of maternal eroticism function in dialectical relation. It is through the forces of separation, frustration, disappointment, absence, and loss within maternal eroticism that baby and child are vitalized, just as through absence the child is able to think, create, play, and thereby constitute itself. As Balsam (2014) notes, “we must abject the maternal, Kristeva says, the object which has created us, in order to construct an identity” (p. 95).
In both its vitalizing (binding) and devitalizing (unbinding) components, then, maternal eroticism (especially in tolerable measure) dialectically conveys, communicates, and offers the child experiences that promote its thinking, its creativity, and its own erotic capacities. It is through identification with her lust for life, and with her potential for destructiveness and frustration, along with the challenges of separateness, that the mother transmits to her baby its own lust for life and anxieties or dreads vis-à-vis life’s challenges.
The Work of the Abject in Devitalizing Maternal Eroticism
Prolonged or traumatic experiences of separateness, absence, and loss can create a sense of emptiness, a dreaded void or deadness, what Kristeva (1980, 2014a,b) calls the abject. 8 For Kristeva, normal developmental challenges, if traumatic, may “manifest the paroxysmal disasters of . . . abjection, . . . a ‘normal’ psychosexual element of maternal eroticism” (Kristeva 2014b, p. 76); “maternal eroticism renders . . . the life and death drives both problematic and available, and places them together in the service of living as an ‘open structure’” (2014b, p. 71).
Kristeva locates these experiences in the mother’s body. The abject is prelinguistic, an almost reflex reaction to all that is disowned or repulsed by the psyche. The theory of abjection Balsam writes, “concerns disgusting and horrific materials . . . . representing unmentionable elements of the self that are vigorously to be kept subliminal” (p. 94); she quotes Kristeva’s words (1980): the abject “is death infecting life” (p. 4).
The abject can be concretized through its association with familiar extruded but representable objects (e.g., blood, germs, guts, feces, vomit). These concrete phobic objects can be used as displacements for abject traumatic experiences that then come under one’s fantasied omnipotent control. Parts of the mother’s body (e.g., genes, blood, guts, vagina9,10), as well as associated psychological and behavioral ministrations (e.g., her gaze, touch, or voice), as concretized displacement objects, can thereby be psychologically managed: phobically avoided, controlled, or even fetishized.
Here Green’s work of the negative (1986, 1999) 11 and Winnicott’s failure of transitional phenomena (1953, 1971a) are relevant to Kristeva’s “work of the abject” as the child experiences various kinds of psychic spaces that foreclose the capacity to think and play. The work of the negative, in its double meaning of, at one pole, a fertile, receptive transitional space (as in Winnicott) and, at the other, a foreclosed void, is consistent with the dual aspects of maternal eroticism, the life and death drives, respectively.
There are a variety of intriguing clinical and theoretical understandings that address the de-eroticization of maternal signifiers in particular, especially as these are tied to conscious and unconscious experience. Wilson (2014) notes the lack of theorizing in the realm of the maternal and calls it a “shrinking of effort. . . in the face of the [Lacanian] real, especially of the real as flesh, the feminine, the maternal” (p. 105). The mother is the mother of primary union, fundamental difference (to my reading, prior to sexual or gender categories) and in the face of the specter of death. We reflexively turn away from frightening, horrific aspects of life that resist symbolization.
We could extend Winnicott’s and Green’s visual-spatial metaphors of different types of psychic spaces, placed on a continuum, and integrate this metaphor with the work of the abject. Functioning as a verb and because of its frightening, horrific nature, the work of the abject can be defensively concretized, so that repellant objects can be phobically avoided, psychically managed, as the abject comes under fantasied omnipotent control. By extension, then, it is in the foreclosed void of the negative, visualized as the imploding force of a black hole, where signifiers of the abject do their devitalizing work.
The fear of the abject, unconsciously located in the mother’s body, can make the confrontation with the mother as a desired object of internalization a tremendous threat, the mother’s body becoming the site of problematic signifiers of the abject. Both the desire of the child to take in the mother and the mother’s ability to give herself to her child (i.e., to transmit) are processes that can come to represent unconscious encounters with potential threats or even death. Desire for the mother can thereby be devitalized, defensively disowned, or even deadened.
Because of its fragility as an open system, Kristeva implies, and Balsam directly asserts, that it is the theory of the abject that explains the erasure of “fecund femaleness” (Balsam 2014, p. 94). We could say that maternal eroticism is prone to de-eroticization by carrying within it the seeds of its own destruction. This may be especially true if/when the work of the abject diminishes or altogether deadens erotic and sexual affective experience.
Revitalization in Maternal Eroticism
Kristeva (2014b) describes yet another component of maternal eroticism or reliance, the revitalizing component, as the mother who suffers and endures. The mother can recapture the child’s bereft fall into the void in her reunion and repair with the child, thereby revitalizing experiences of separateness, loss, and absence. In her fierce “refusal to collapse” (p. 77), maternal eroticism endures and tenaciously holds up the vitalizing components of life. Maternal eroticism has a “capacity to accompany the living, through the threat of mortality and even death” (p. 78). 12
This transformation of destruction, the resignification of the abject, is the revitalizing activity of reliance or maternal eroticism. In Kristeva’s words, “In order for psychization to be finalized, and for biopsychical negativity to ensure the creation of links, maternal eroticism lets the death drive loose in the vital process, all while binding [reliant] the two together: the maternal transforms the abjects (which the death drive has re-jected into the not-yet space of mother-child) into objects of care, into survival, and into life” (2014b, p. 76).
Winnicott’s conceptions of the holding function of the analyst, and of surviving destruction in transitional space (1953, 1971a), as well as the positive pole of Green’s work of the negative (1986, 1999), reference such containing functions of the analyst. Extending the visual-spatial metaphor, these usable spaces might be viewed as creating an envelope around which signifiers of the abject emerge and are held, becoming available for analytic work. As signifiers of the abject are retranscribed through the love and care of the analyst’s vitalizing interventions, signifiers of the abject become endowed with vitalizing features. These, then, can become objects of play, having been transformed into transitional objects.
Maternal Eroticism in the Analytic Situation
Many components of Kristeva’s reliance coincide with the offerings of the analytic situation, a fundamental provocation for maternal transferences. There are positive features that contribute to the safety of the setting, offering our patients experiences toward revitalization, “a listener, a receiver, as much as . . . an object” (Widawsky 2014, p. 65). Winnicott’s expression of the holding environment (1960) is included here, as is Laplanche’s more general reference (1999) to the analyst’s binding work derived from the life instinct. In line with this theorizing (but without direct reference to the erotic per se) is Winnicott’s “potential space” (1953, 1971a), referring to the good-enough mother’s facilitation of the child’s capacity to think and create. Green (1986) refers to the analyst’s provision of a framing structure, much like the mother’s holding the child in her arms. Bion’s negative capability (1970) might be viewed as the mental level of this framing structure, providing an affirmative space for whatever the patient brings.
Manifestations of the erotic dimensions are inherent, implicit in the analytic situation. Metaphorically, it could be said that the treatment situation encompasses both containing and penetrating functions of the analyst, a taking in and penetrating into interplay (Celenza 2014) that can capture the ways in which the erotic is conveyed in a mutual regulatory fashion. The erotic carries within it a vitalization in receiving stimuli and fueling forces, both of which invest in life. Analytic process can be experienced as both penetrating and enveloping, incisive and holding, a firm receptivity that retains, envelops, and holds the other in one’s mind (Celenza 2010, 2014). These metaphors reflect the ways analytic process does its revitalizing work.
Further, erotic transferences manifest the analysand’s vitality, in its most intense, sometimes sexual form. While erotic transferences were once perceived as resistances to treatment and certainly can function defensively, contemporary theorizing views the emergence of erotic transferences as natural, healthy, and promoting of the analysand’s creativity, while its avoidance is deemed a defensive resistance (Davies 1998; Elise 2019). We could say that erotic transferences (and erotic countertransferences) are vehicles for the revitalizing work of the analytic process.
Petra
In our first telephone call, in which Petra requested analysis, she let me know that she did not want to look at me, ever. Indeed, she entered each session gaze averted and rushed to the couch, so as to quickly turn away. As she would lie there, she placed her hands over her eyes and face. She did not want to see me age, she explained. Consciously, her fear of my aging was related to the terrible deterioration of her mother when Petra was twenty-two years old. She watched her mother suffer with a blood disorder that eventually involved cognitive dementia. Her mother’s blood was the site of her disease, coursing through her body, her platelets in short supply, failing to nurture her brain.
Petra chose to lie on the couch immediately, turning away as her hands remained covering her face. Her posture reminded me that some patients can use the couch to hide rather than reveal (Celenza 2005). Petra had spent the last years of her mother’s life in close proximity to her, ministering to her as she coped with a gradually encroaching dementia. By the time Petra started treatment with me, she had researched her maternal female relatives and found a preponderance of brain-related diseases that caused many of them to die while still relatively young. (Male transgenerational transmitters of such disease did not cross her mind.) Though she surrounded herself with these female biological facts of her family tree, she consciously tried to keep them out of her awareness. I did not realize until much later in the analysis that seeing me age carried with it a fear not only that I would become demented (and unable to hold her in mind) but that she would be the contaminant who gave the germ to me. Feelings of closeness arising in the treatment process seemed to trigger these obsessive worries. Would her germs penetrate me? Was seeing me dangerous to Petra? Was my receptivity to Petra dangerous to me? Looking, gazing upon, and seeing immediately conveyed powerful channels to project damage and thus were dangerous, contaminated, and contaminating modes of connection, as the transmission of germs seemed to go both ways.
Petra is a psychiatric nurse, married and in her early thirties at the time she began treatment. She and her husband had begun talking about having children, prompting Petra to enter treatment when she began to experience significant anxiety, almost to the point of panic. She assumed this had something to do with the prospect of motherhood, but could not say how or in what way. She had always thought she wanted children.
Petra had grown up in a middle-class family who lived well beyond their means to present a wealthy appearance to the outside world. This required frugality in the home, so that money could be spent primarily on ostentatious displays to others. Unsurprisingly, Petra requested a reduced fee from me, which I could see was the beginning of an enacted scenario related in some way to her childhood experience with money. I agreed to a modest reduction to meet her halfway. This is how we began our work, the beginning of what I hoped would be a four-times-weekly analysis. This came to be after months of gradually increasing sessions, as she found separations from me and the analysis more and more difficult. This occurred despite Petra’s inability to verbally acknowledge a growing attachment between us.
Petra told me she had few female friends. She had experienced eroticized relationships with both male and female teachers—the erotic longings for a beloved female teacher horrified her and raised questions in her mind about her sexual orientation. Erotic longings toward men softened these worries. At the beginning of our treatment, Petra told me she was uncertain about being in analysis with me because she wasn’t sure she could trust me. She linked this to my being a woman and added, “There’s something about women.” Sensing an important area for exploration, my queries did not yield further fantasies or feelings at this initial stage. Though I suspected important links between this ambiguous statement, the absence of female friends, and fantasies linked with her early experience with her mother, she was unable to offer much beyond an idealized picture of her mother (as wholly empathic) and puzzlement about her friendships. The specter of her erotic attachments to female teachers also loomed large in the back of my mind. Within this early phase of the maternal transference, I also did not know if Petra’s mistrust was linked to me as biologically, anatomically female or to my femininity (whatever this might mean to her).
In the early years of the analysis, Petra often brought up the issue of her reduced fee, stating a wish to pay my full fee. In the first year of our work, I adjusted and readjusted her fee—she would pay my full rate for a period of time and then reverse this for another stretch. I viewed whatever enactment might be occurring around the fee as a playspace in which to learn more about Petra’s experience of my needs and her impact on me.
An example of this play occurred one day when she once again suggested paying my full rate for the next several months due to an anticipated surplus in her savings. When we examined her fantasies around this, she revealed a fear that she was draining me of my resources, depleting my strength, and that I would become ill. At a deeper level, I thought she wished to see, touch, and know me, but feared the damage she might cause.
The Maternal Erotic Transference in Petra
Maternal figures, through various maternal transferences, tend to arouse intense early anxieties associated with desire, along with a passivity and helplessness in relation to an all-powerful, enviable other (Chasseguet-Smirgel 1976) and/or unconscious associations with the abject (Kristeva 1980, 2014a,b). Unresolved mourning related to traumatic disappointments and/or loss of the mother can indicate faulty internalizations of the maternal figure. Resting in the psyche as pathological introjects, these indicate internalizing attempts to cope with traumatic loss in real life. These can be circumscribed and erupt in specific symptomatology in an otherwise high-functioning individual (as in the case of Petra) or become pervasive, with a more generalized impairment in functioning (see Perelberg 2018).
Introjections or incorporations are types of internal psychic presences that exert an influence on the body and mind in an undigested, raw manner in order to preserve the object and then may be experienced as a living thing inside. This inner presence can attack from within, from the inside out, as it were. Varying in quality and meaning, these introjects represent ego-dystonic or unassimilated part-objects (introjects) that have been internalized from traumatic experiences, often with the maternal figure. (The differences among identifications, introjections, and signifiers of the abject are further elaborated below.) In some cases, introjects may become associated with signifiers of the abject. This is a good example of the ways in which female qua female (i.e., the mother as anatomically female, her sexed body) can become a site of devitalizing, pathological fears and horrors, where unconscious signifiers of the abject may emerge, thereby becoming accessible to analytic work.
As Kristeva (1980) states, the abject “is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject . . . finds the impossible within; . . . constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject” (p. 5). For Petra, the unconscious fantasy of her mother as a living (and potentially destructive) presence inside took the form of an illusory genetic predisposition to her mother’s blood disease. Her intense anxiety led to a concretization in the form of fears of Petra’s own decline and potential destructiveness to me (and presumably her anticipated unborn child). On a conscious level, Petra described her mother in largely idealized ways, as empathic, attuned, and loving. The absence of female friends stood in stark contrast, as did her conflicts with me. At this time, she directly expressed intense mistrust, especially as hostile fantasies of my motives (e.g., surrounding my fee) surfaced, fantasies directly associated with my being a woman. This transference played out in the up-and-down negotiations around my fee, which we soon discovered revolved around an alternating sadomasochistic dynamic: a reduced fee resulted in fantasies of my imminent demise unconsciously caused by her depleting me and, alternatively, fantasies of her own depletion caused by me during times when she paid the full fee. The latter can be seen in the following exchange:
You must feel I’m an easy target for you. I need you, I’m so anxious, you know it and you know so much about me now. I’m trapped in this process, trapped with you! I even sometimes think that you’ll make me stay forever . . . trapping me and not wanting me to leave for your financial gain. But what good does it do me, anyway?
You worry you’ll be trapped in a bottomless pit, that I have trapped you with my greed and selfishness. All for me, nothing for you.
I’m afraid to tell you about things I’ve spent money on, clothes I buy, where I go on vacation. Like you’d object and be furious that I’m spending money when I don’t always pay your full fee. But now I am! And I can’t stand it! I think you’re greedy and want to take anything I might have. How am I supposed to get better, anyway?
You fear there’s something inside, you or me, that could destroy us both.
We can’t both be losing in this bargain. I know I sound so money-obsessed, but it’s this thing about you being a woman. A taker. Devious. Yet I know this isn’t true.
Through her various projections, it is possible to discern Petra’s fear of her own longings, her desire to stay in the analysis, to let herself depend on me, in short, to take in what I could give. For example, her fear that I would want her to stay forever (for my financial gain, at her loss) was a reversal and negation of her own desire to stay forever (for her gain, at my loss). After all, who brought up the issue in the first place? During these early months, she could not express these desires directly to me, and her reversals were fiercely held, leading her to believe that she hated me. The intensity of these convictions exposed the passion fueling her fears, and she worried whether she should stay in the analysis with such a greedy, exploitative, and manipulative person. It was during this time that Petra reported occasional masturbatory fantasies where I punished her for the pleasure she was experiencing.
Unsurprisingly, Petra wondered whether the analysis was going to help her, since she thought her intense doubts about my trustworthiness and “bottomless self-interest” were bad signs. Yet she never missed a session and found the weekends increasingly difficult to tolerate. I told her I understood how she was experiencing her fears, but that I viewed her ability to tell me about her feelings, however intense and negative, as paradoxically demonstrating her trust in me and her ability to use the analysis. In my countertransference I could feel her growing attachment, and her fiercely held negations, the looking away and fearful aspects of her countenance, only affirmed for me how important I was becoming to her.
Unbeknownst to me at this time, Petra was wearing a special sweater as she lay on the couch, allowing the sweater to touch the upholstery. She would then bring the sweater home, sleep with it under her pillow, and carry it with her during the day. She eventually told me about this secretive, concretized taking me in, and explained that she did this so that she could feel comforted between sessions. She told me she was consistently doing this, unable to wash the sweater for fear of washing off my scent and presence. I asked her if she wanted to take something of mine from the office, to have something symbolic of our work together and representative of our relationship. She was surprised by my reaction, wondering why I wasn’t put off, insulted or even repulsed by her. She said, “Oh come on! On a scale from one to ten, you have to tell me how pathological this is!” When I responded with an emphatic “Zero!” she looked at me seemingly for the first time. She took an item off my bookshelf and placed it in her purse, arguably enacting an erotic move of containing me by placing the precious object in her “purse,” seemingly solidifying the erotic nature of this exchange.
The Meanings of Taking in, Gazing, and Touch for Petra
A number of questions are raised by this material. What did Petra have, in this concretized form, and what was being enacted between us now? How did she translate and internalize the confusing and mysterious messages of her mother’s sexuality presented to her through her mother’s ministrations? Though there is no scientific basis for this, Petra wondered if the gene for her mother’s illness is a sex-linked trait, as if linked to femaleness and transmitted through touch.
In these early years of analysis, for Petra, touching me (in displacement, through various transitional objects) and seeing me were sites of both conflict and potential resolution. Petra spoke of contamination—does she make her patients sick, she wondered, will they make her sick, and she worried about making me sick. Germs were a regular character in the field (Ferro 1999), and she was alert to my voice sounding congested. She worried if I sneezed or coughed, if I was late, or, worst of all, if I forgot something. She talked about a “pit in her stomach” that she chronically sensed, along with an anxious dread of being overcome by it. She worried if she would transmit this sense of dread to me. At times, I imagined Petra poised at the edge of an abyss into which she feared I had already fallen, a fact I was hiding from her.
The Work of the Negative and the Abject in Petra
There are many related conceptualizations in the literature that speak to the subjective experience of emptiness, a sense of void or hauntedness, as our analysands report chronic feelings of dread or doom. This sense of dread or emptiness can complicate experiences of taking in elements of the outside world as the sense of danger is externalized. Petra describes her fears of contamination as an indescribable, yet chronic pit in her stomach, like an empty space that threatens to overtake her, culminating in fears that receptivity to others might expose her to contamination or that she will contaminate others.
When is an abyss a threatening void, and how can this void be transformed within the usable potential space of analysis? The abyss or dreaded void that Petra describes is aligned with Green’s work of the negative, reflective of traumatic foreclosures that deny separation and loss. The empty void in the child’s phenomenal subjective experience threatens the child with intolerable loss, unresolvable enigmas, and confusions; it is the unthought known (Bollas 1989) like a dread or haunting. It is preoedipal, nonverbal, and unbounded, harboring ghosts that echo annihilatory chants. Kristeva’s abject lies here, perhaps in disowned fragments, subliminal or unrepresented.
As noted, Petra wanted yet felt guilty about her reduced fee. She raised the subject frequently, offering to pay more, which she would then do for a time, only to request a reduction again in a few months. She feared draining me, depleting my strength, and making me ill. I suggested to her that pennies and platelets are precious objects that need to be tracked and saved. We surmised that cents (c-e-n-t-s) and sense (s-e-n-s-e) were the poetry of her unconscious.
The enacted play surrounding the fee allowed us to explore meaningful props in Petra’s unconscious. These included precious yet phobically avoided part-objects (e.g., germs, money, dying platelets), signifiers of the abject, heretofore meaningless, awesome and horrifying things in the process of acquiring significance. I see Petra’s focus on germs, money, and blood as representing her anxieties about death and destructiveness, constructed through the work of the death drive (devitalization through the abject) and the work of the negative (Green 1999), all linked to fears of her capacity to harm (me, her patients, her family). Pennies and platelets seemed to be symbolized displacements to an arena where the concretized signifiers of the abject, the introjected part-objects of destruction, became (in fantasy) capable of being tamed, controlled, and possessed, and in the process acquiring a sense of permanence. I suggest that these concretizations, around which Petra obsessively worried, reflected the presence of pathological signifiers of the abject that lived in the abyss of her unconscious, as if in foreclosed spaces swirling in an implosive black hole.
Identifications, Introjects, and Signifiers of the Abject
Internalization processes, especially in response to absence or loss, are ways in which the psyche constitutes itself; they are the structures of subjectivity. These structures differ in varying degree, especially in the extent to which they are more or less ego-syntonic or, by contrast, are repressed, disavowed, repudiated, or otherwise foreclosed. Identification represents the harmonious form of internalization, as compared to intro-jects and incorporation (Schafer 1968; Laplanche and Pontalis 1967; Akhtar 2009). 13
Disavowed “things” that are sensed as foreign, unwanted, or “not-me” fragments (including those outside the signified) are by definition not identifications but introjects. Here foreclosure, eradication, repression, repudiation, and/or dissociation are implicated in internalization processes.
I aim to preserve these distinctions among internalization processes. To be specific, the psychoanalytic definition of identification is “psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect, property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially, after the model the other provides. It is by means of a series of identifications that the personality is constituted and specified” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1967, p. 205).
Through this definition and the distinctions among internalization processes, it is possible to see that identification as the central unconscious process for coping with loss (and for the constitution of identity) does not require a repudiation, devaluing, or disowning of the characteristics thereby assimilated. Rather, a repudiated signifier is by definition not an identification but an introject. Here foreclosure, eradication, repression, and/or degradation are implicated in internalizing processes (as in introjection and incorporation).
In contrast to identification, introjection (and its end-product, introject) are defined by “the organized cluster of memory traces . . . remain[ing] unassimilated in the total self –image. . . . Identifications, unlike introjects, do not feel like a ‘foreign body’ in the self and are more likely to be ego-syntonic and in harmony with the individual’s self-image” (Akhtar 2009, p. 150).
It is reasonable to conjecture that disavowed or otherwise unwanted signifiers can be internalized as pathological introjects, a site of conflict, dystonicity, and disavowal where the individual is in some measure at war with herself. Signifiers of the abject are one type of introject and, by virtue of representing a part of the mother’s body, are introjected part-objects. In Petra’s case, the germs, blood, and dying platelets (associated in her mind with being anatomically female) were signifiers of the abject, introjected and feared as potential contaminants to herself and others.
From Signifiers of the Abject to Transitional Objects
Through the analytic process, the analyst offers the analysand a usable space within his or her holding function as the analyst confronts, endures, and survives the patient’s attacks (Winnicott 1971b). This is an expansion of the patient’s experience of maternal eroticism through its revitalizing effects. Petra’s attacks were projected self-attacks that indicated the devitalizing work of internalized, contaminated signifiers of the abject. As I endured her attacks, I knew that sometimes the containment was beneficial by itself, through my active and sustained listening, holding, and survival in line with Winnicott’s survival/destruction dialectic, and also as a component of maternal reliance, erotic in “uniting the container and contained, vitalizing the field of clinical engagement” (Elise 2017, p. 52).
There are at least three components of the analyst’s presence in which signifiers of the abject are transformed into benign identifications: patience/receptivity, endurance/survival, and retranscription. 14 Patience/receptivity enlarges the analyst’s containment function by virtue of waiting over time while listening and being receptive to emerging anxiety-provoking aspects of the patient’s inner world. As time passes, the otherwise foreclosed, metaphorically imploding space expands through the analyst’s faithful expectation that important phenomena (both intrapsychic and intersubjective) will emerge. Through the analyst’s patient listening, the space in the analytic process is enlarged 15 to invite and contain the analysand’s fantasied toxic signifiers of the abject (and other dysphoric or disavowed “not-me” symbols).
The analyst demonstrates her strength in her invitation to the analysand to bring these parts of herself into the space. The analyst’s capacity to endure and remain sturdy in the face of the patient’s attacks (and other forms of feared toxicity and destructiveness) counters the analysand’s fears of destruction or contamination. The analyst’s survival (Winnicott 1971b) is crucial in transforming the feared destructive potential associated with signifiers of the abject into benign presences. This strength and endurance, including bearing and suffering with the patient’s symptomatology, are aspects of maternal eroticism, present the analysand with healthy attributes for identification, and directly counter the fantasied toxicity and destructiveness.
A third component of transformation takes place by virtue of the analyst’s interpretations (either verbally or through direct actions) when confronted with signifiers of the abject. When the analyst is able to invite abjected introjects into the analytic process, either verbally, nonverbally, metaphorically, or in concretized form, signifiers of the abject can be detoxified through the analyst’s sensitive handling (literally or figuratively), conveying alternative meanings to the analysand. Here the analyst also conveys a willingness to accompany the analysand into threatening/feared areas in her mind. Through the analyst’s presence, resignification and connection with the analysand, the signifiers of the abject are revitalized, becoming objects of play rather than objects of destruction. These loving and caring actions (e.g., touching, holding her objects, the invitation to play with them) actively detoxify the feared destructiveness within them.
All of these components of the analytic process, patience/receptivity, endurance/survival, and retranscription, offer the analysand alternative channels and attributes for healthy identification. The analyst’s ability to hold, endure, sustain, and survive projected attacks has this transformative power, as if to convey that maternal endurance and sustenance can withstand and overcome the toxic effects of destructive attacks. As signifiers of the abject become endowed with love and care, they are detoxified and transformed into benign inner presences. These then become identifications with the vitalizing components of maternal eroticism, transforming the phenomenal psychic experience of threat, diminishing their fantasied destructive power in both phenomenal and intrapsychically structuring ways. Through these vitalizing effects, the capacity for affect tolerance is enlarged and deepened. The transformed transitional objects become available for play and are capable of soothing.
Throughout the treatment with Petra, I offered her a type of containment that directly countered her pathological introjects. For example, I never retaliated, my sturdiness remained steadfast, nor did I psychically disappear or become paralyzed when she spoke of my greediness and her hatred of me. She would now say, “I’m dumbfounded that you let me say these things and you don’t get defensive! I feel so grateful, but now I feel guilty too.” Each time I welcomed her “things,” touched them, let her things touch my body, and survived, I detoxified the germs, as if to convey that my maternal reliance was stronger than her feared germs and blood. This led to an increasing ability to open herself emotionally to me, herself, and others.
Back to Petra
In the first years of the analysis, Petra talked about her early childhood as surrounded by her mother’s presence and care, physically affectionate and empathic to her emotional well-being. This idealized picture was linked to memories of sitting on her mother’s lap, hugs abounding with lots of touching. This directly contrasted with Petra’s manner of relating to me, where she seemed unwilling, unable or afraid to look at me or take me in in other ways. I did not know if the placement of her hands over her face was designed to prevent her from seeing me (as she had said) or to prevent me from seeing her.
Zeavin (2019) makes a useful distinction between an internal good mother and an internal idealized mother, the latter implying an active, unconscious need to keep her mother good, evidence that something bad threatens to mar the maternal imago. Such an internalized dynamic was indicated by Petra’s anxious attentiveness to my well-being, and by her attempts to reassure herself that she had not harmed me, that I was unblemished and would not harm her.
Later in the analysis, a shift occurred in Petra’s internal world as she relayed an incident when she was twelve and had witnessed a physical fight between her brother and a neighbor. Petra’s mother had allowed the neighbor to enter their home, whereupon he began to taunt her brother, a teasing that ended in a serious physical altercation. When her brother was badly beaten and rendered helpless, the neighbor left of his own accord, with Petra and her mother standing by, paralyzed and in shock. The neighbor was never confronted, nor did Petra’s mother tell her husband or the police. Worse, her mother implied that Petra may have been the reason the neighbor wanted to visit, a comment that implied something about Petra’s sexuality. She remained confused by this insinuation and never understood why her mother failed to report the incident to her father or the police. This was not a new memory, but in the après-coup of the analytic process, the memory now reflected a retranscription of linked images of her mother. This retranscription unmasked the idealized maternal introjects and elaborated her memories of her mother as sometimes not present, even failing her, and capable of persecuting her.
It was during this time that my own mother became ill, a long process of decline eventuating in her death. Cancerous tumors had broken through her skin and at times would bleed profusely. I ministered to her, mingling my being with her blood, cleaning her up, reassuring her that she did not smell, and comforting her with surrounding, tearful embraces in these last months of her life. We achieved an emotional union we had never had before.
When I returned to our sessions, Petra brought in some objects that she wanted me to hold for a few minutes, transmitting (in her mind) my psychically soothing capacities to the objects she had brought, soon to be transformed and capable of soothing her. I did not hesitate to hold these objects (a stone and a small wooden box), holding them firmly in my hands. Then she brought out a shawl, sheepishly offering it to me. I immediately took the shawl and placed it around my shoulders. I left it there for about twenty seconds. Petra was stunned that I would so easily let her things touch me, and she watched me welcome her presence, through the shawl and my body, as our beings intermingled. I believe this was not simply “putting on a shawl” and the various holding functions that act might symbolize. This was a moment when Petra experienced me willing to risk death and, more particularly, to risk closeness with her destructiveness and murderous capabilities.
I believe my actions conveyed a message from within the maternal erotic transference: “I will endure what you give me, no matter the shape or form, and you do not need to fear what is inside you.” I believe my lack of hesitation put our bodies in touch with each other, a nonverbal communication without mediation, emphasizing the bodily based nature of the interaction. Though we talked about the meaning of these actions many times over the course of the analysis, I believe the absence of hesitation in the moment was a nonverbal communication of my sturdiness and lack of fear.
Around this time, Petra was able to address ways in which her mother was physically present but psychically absent and even bad (paralyzed, submissive, potentially persecutory). She expressed her gratitude that I would be “so kind and patient with her crazy,” referring to her various fears, hateful sentiments, and use of transitional objects she had me endow with soothing capacities.
I believe I was able to offer Petra this intimate touching (and its fantastical psychic soothing) without hesitation because of my recent experience with my mother and all the touching, seeing, and holding it had entailed. I further believe this message was unconsciously transmitted to Petra in a way that made the containment of her longings to see and touch me (to take me in), detoxified and uncontaminated. In talking about these experiences and the meanings they had for her, Petra spoke of experiencing me as unafraid, sturdy, and “openly willing to accept her crazy needs.” She talked about the smell of her sweater after being in my office, and I was reminded of my experience with my mother, especially the fact that she had directly asked me if she smelled, apparently worried about the blood from the tumors on her body. Felicitously, Petra and I added s-c-e-n-t-s (to “cents” and “sense”) to the collection of concretizations representing Petra’s precious objects, now as healthy identifications, having been transformed through a revitalization of signifiers of the abject.
My conjecture is that changes in me (through the parallel process of my own mother dying while remarkably, and for the first time, coming alive to me), enlarged my receptivity to Petra’s retranscription of her own memories of her mother. I was not afraid of touching my mother, the moments of fluid exchange—blood, tears, and love. These experiences were not abstract, but were highly personal, passionate, and embodied, in what Wilson (2014) artfully calls “that place of the flesh” (p. 103). My memories of this experience with my mother were directly translated into a capacity to offer the same to Petra.
From Inhibited Passivity to Disciplined Receptivity
In the psychic envelope of the analyst’s containing function, signifiers of the abject can emerge and become available to the analytic process. For Petra, the crux of this work revolved around differentiating her mother’s traumatizing passivity and paralysis from my disciplined and enduring receptivity that invited her into the usable space of analytic process. I suggest that such disciplined receptivity can be viewed as an eternal signifier of the maternal, clearly a part of Kristeva’s vitalizing and revitalizing components of reliance.
I suggest that a void or a disavowed, foreclosed area in Petra’s psyche became a usable space through the enlargement of my containing and receptive capacities. I believe my receptivity to my diseased mother, my willingness to risk and survive being infected with my own mother’s contaminated maternal eroticism, expanded my receptivity to Petra’s fears and fantasied destructiveness toward me. My willingness to be changed in these ways opened up a space in me that enlarged the usable erotic usable space between Petra and me. My active, receptive capabilities contained what Petra was enduring and grew from a rapprochement between my mother and me that I could now offer as analyst/mother to Petra. In particular, my disciplined receptivity (as a signifier of maternal eroticism) countered Petra’s internalized imago of the passive, abject maternal introject (her mother’s paralysis), offering her instead a benign and sturdy experience for maternal identification.
These transformations can also be viewed as having been played out in the up-and-down negotiations of the fee, where “pennies” were alternately held back or given to me. In the alternating negotiations of the fee (like the rhythmic mutual regulation between mother and infant 16 ), I remained nondefensively responsive to Petra’s needs (e.g., her financial demands) and able to receive her gifts (e.g., full-fee payments) without fear of being contaminated by the up-and-down movements. I believe this play was an erotic interplay, a mutually regulatory process (Elise 2017, 2019; Kristeva 2014a,b) based on a taking-in/receptive and penetrating-into dialectic (Celenza 2014)—an expanded vision of maternal eroticism and its revitalizing capacities.
Thus, Petra’s worry about contaminating me can be viewed as an erotically tinged anxiety related to all manner of vitalizing “taking in.” Longing for identification had brought with it a fear that she would contaminate and ultimately harm me. Seeing, touching, and knowing me were all forbidden, as the witnessing of the assault on her brother had contaminated her and left her with the memory of her mother’s traumatically disappointing response.
In the months following Petra’s gradual deidealization of her mother, she reported to me that she no longer worried about my frailty or that she would harm me in some way. I also noticed she no longer hid behind her hands while lying on the couch. Soon there emerged a hypersensitivity with me, in relation to her and anything she might say. She said, “The more precious you are to me, the more scared I am of losing you. It’s the depth, it feels like soul to soul. I get greedy for it. I want to feel it all the time.” These sentiments intensified and characterized the next phase of analytic work. On another occasion, she said, “It’s like romantic feelings—I worry about every little thing, like I’m going to do something wrong and you’ll break up with me!” These changes coincided with an ability to directly look at me, as well as masturbatory fantasies that no longer involved me punishing her, but as inviting her pleasure in her body. I experienced these changes as demonstrative of her ability to take me in as part of her subjective experience in the analysis. It was also around this time that she and her husband began trying to have a child.
Conclusion
The analyst’s vitalizing activity, as reflected in the analyst’s invitation to be, in the offer to take in the analyst as an object of love, to receive what the analyst transmits, and in the taking in of other components implicit through nonverbal means (through gaze and displaced touch), is part of a healthy analytic process. I have illustrated how I embodied many of the facets of maternal eroticism as implicitly experienced in my relationship with Petra. By attending to and responding within the multiverse of maternal eroticism, a process of transformation occurred where signifiers of the abject, previously residing in foreclosed spaces of the analysand’s mind, were accessed in the usable space of the analytic setting. These then developed into transitional objects as I embodied sturdy and enduring maternal attributes, countering Petra’s fantasied fears of her internal destructive potential. Further, her internal world was transformed as introjected signifiers of the abject became endowed with my love and care for her, fundamentally transforming these symbols and detoxifying them of her potential destructiveness.
The initial transference experience with Petra revolved around her experience of me as untrustworthy, greedy, manipulative, and exploitative, a negative maternal erotic transference that allowed for the emergence of various signifiers of the abject. In the second phase, the analytic process was characterized by an ongoing transformative process where signifiers of the abject diminished in their devitalizing power in the face of sturdy and steadfast maternal eroticism, becoming transitional objects of soothing and comfort. In this phase there emerged a different, less defended form of maternal erotic transference, characterized by a deepening longing for me and her ability to take me in within the analytic process. I view the emergence of this type of transference as an achievement, resultant from the working through of the initial version of maternal erotic transference structured around a sadomasochistic dynamic.
Working in the realm of the abject presents special countertransference problems for the analyst, given that such signifiers (and their concrete referents) are universally abhorred. The analyst naturally resists embracing abject experiences, even as the analysand is immersed in and preoccupied with them. As with any content presented to us by our analysands, we must find a way to resonate with their experiences despite feeling revulsion or the threat of being dragged into an “imploding black hole.” There were many moments in my treatment with Petra where I found myself reluctant, if not loath, to immerse myself (once again) with her fears of germs, fetid odors, blood, and other concrete aspects of me, my body, or hers, lurking in our clothing, on our skin, or simply “in the air.” The work was at times frustrating and odious, when the foulness of humanity was front and center. Beyond the relentless concreteness of her defensive processes, the content was distasteful and hideous—the very “things” we all want to avoid or purify. I preferred to embrace her aggression and envy directly, and I said this often to Petra. Yet the analytic process requires that we suffer and endure our analysand’s symptomatology as we mutually bear it in the transformational process. This process, in turn, transforms us as we suffer through it. 17 Still, the arousal of tenderness in the face of these fears, the fears of an unprotected and vulnerable little girl, remained prominent during most of the treatment, aiding in my ability to contain, symbolize, and help her interpret what so greatly tormented her.
Kristeva’s elaboration of maternal eroticism carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. As Kristeva (2014a,b) and Balsam (2014) suggest, the devitalizing components (including, especially, the work of the abject) serve to de-eroticize (devitalize) maternal eroticism. This may be one factor that explains the view of the maternal as de-eroticized in the psychoanalytic literature. In this way, the recognition of muted or absent erotic dimensions in maternal transferences may not be an artifact of deficient theorizing or clinical acumen, but a clinical finding that fails to be problematized (Davies 1998; Elise 2019). When a nonerotic maternal transference is identified in clinical practice, the lack of erotic dimensions within it should be viewed as a present absence and the development of a maternal erotic transference in the clinical process, an achievement.
As Kristeva (2014a,b) describes, a component of maternal eroticism is its devitalizing potential, conveyed through separations, absences, and losses. When experienced within tolerable limits and through the mother’s capacities to revitalize and repair, these experiences reignite the child’s lust for life (especially beyond the mother), its investment in the outside world). I have suggested that the vitalizing and devitalizing capacities within maternal eroticism are dialectically related and together are the mother’s vital gift to the child. In parallel, these components (especially the revitalizing component) of maternal eroticism are the psychoanalyst’s gift to the vitality of the analysand.
Footnotes
Training and Supervising Analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; Assistant Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School (part-time); faculty, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
The author thanks Bruce Embry, Glen Gabbard, Ellen Golding, Humphrey Morris, and Nancy Peltzman for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Submitted for publication October 7, 2020; revised February 16, 2021, and May 25, 2021; accepted June 14, 2021.
1
In referring to the maternal, I use the terms mother, primary caregiver, and the maternal interchangeably, none of them necessarily denoting a woman. If women no longer own the feminine (
), then what I mean to convey is the way in which the infant experiences the primary caregiver’s ministrations, probing, and receptiveness to the infant’s needs.
2
A primeval god of Greek mythology, Eros was in later tradition identified as the son of Aphrodite, goddess of sexual love and beauty, his father being either Zeus (the king of gods), Ares (the god of war), or Hermés (the divine messenger of the gods). See Hesiod’s Theogony (c. 730–700
3
4
In this paper I draw inspiration primarily from Kristeva’s 2014 JAPA essay (1914b) and the three accompanying commentaries (Widawsky 2014; Balsam 2014; Wilson 2014) and include many of Kristeva’s previous contributions (1980, 2000, 2011, 2014a,b). Through a clinical case, I also draw heavily on Winnicott (1953, 1960, 1971a,b) and Green (1986, 1995, ).
6
7
I have chosen the term signifier to connote carrier of (conscious or unconscious) meaning. I do not use the term in the context of Lacanian theorizing, but prefer the term signifier to symbol, imago, representation, and various types of internalization because signifier is general in its connotation and does not specify a form (verbal, nonverbal, imagistic, sensory) or mode of internalization.
8
The word abject denotes the state of being utterly hopeless, miserable, humiliated, or wretched.
10
discusses the dream of Irma’s injection, in which Freud examines her throat and is horrified upon seeing a “big white patch” and “whitish-grey scabs” (p. 103). He recognizes this experience as Freud’s encounter with the real (in Lacanian terms) and Kristeva’s theorizing of the “unnameable, prior, fleshy, and feminine place,” encompassed by maternal reliance (p. 105).
11
12
Wilson (2014) expands on this maternal responsibility, what Kristeva (2014b) felicitously terms “herethics” (p. 82), and incisively describes maternal containment as “a willingness to wonder, an expectation to engage, and the transformation of hate into an embodied sense of caring that enacts ‘knowledge’ of life and death and the fragility of the entire arrangement” (p. 107). In these ways, the revitalizing components of maternal eroticism, especially in its commitment and responsibility toward revitalization and holding of aggressive impulses (), parallels the analytic purpose and process.
13
14
These components of the analyst and the analytic process overlap but can be separated for heuristic purposes.
15
16
I am indebted to my good friend and colleague, Ellen Golding, for her insights on this rhythm between Petra and me.
17
See Celenza (2006, 2014, for more clinical examples of ways in which the analyst suffers through the analytic process.