Transference,Love,Being: Essential Essays From the Field

Abstract

Allow me to begin with a list of 10 papers from our vast professional literature and then offer the rationale for this curious opening gambit:

Abraham, K. (1911). On the determining power of names. In Clinical Papers and Essays on Psychoanalysis. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1955, pp. 31–32.

Bick, E. (1968). The experience of the skin in early object relations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 49:484–486.

Coltart, N. (1988). The assessment of psychological-mindedness in the diagnostic interview. British Journal of Psychiatry 153:819–820.

Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1963). Synopsis of an object-relations theory of the personality. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 44:224–225.

Ferenczi, S. (1929). The unwelcome child and his death instinct. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 10:125–129.

Ferenczi, S. (1930). Thoughts on “pleasure in passivity.” In Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1980, pp. 224–227.

Freud, S. (1957). On transience (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). The Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1915)

Freud, S. (1955). On the teaching of psychoanalysis in universities (J. Strachey, Ed. & Trans.). The Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1919)

Khan, M.M.R. (1983). On lying fallow. In Hidden Selves: Between Theory and Practice in Psychoanalysis. New York: International Universities Press, pp. 183–188.

Menninger, R. (1932). Poor little good child. In A Psychiatrist’s World: The Selected Papers of Karl Menninger, ed. B.H. Hall. New York: Viking, 1959, pp. 556–559.

Though varied in their focus, these impressive contributions to our literature have one feature in common column. All of them are fewer than five pages in length. This is precisely the point I wish to make in my review of Andrea Celenza’s remarkable book Transference, Love, Being: Essential Essays From the Field. The art of brevity, once commonplace in psychoanalysis, is rarely encountered these days, and Celenza does us great theoretical, technical, literary, and aesthetic service by reviving this tradition.

Her book contains 37 essays (a curious number), whose length ranges from three to six pages; no more, no less. This is refreshing in an era when psychoanalytic writing has turned increasingly baroque, defensive, and long-winded. Celenza, in contrast, keeps tight reins on verbal flow and avoids unnecessary forays toward the periphery. Such sharpness of focus, however, does not preclude her from addressing a wide range of topics, including transference, paradox, therapeutic frame, the couch, sexual boundary violations, nature of clinical attention, embodied countertransference, empathy, perversion, and dreams. Celenza’s emphasis in all these mini-discourses is clinical, but such therapeutic concern is invariably anchored in theory, both classic and contemporary. Her oeuvre is large and extends beyond the masters (Freud, Ferenczi, Winnicott, and Bion) to the relationalists and intersubjectivists (Aaron, Benjamin, Ogden), the politico-philosophically inclined (Butler, Kristeva), the French (Chasseguet-Smirgel, Green, Laplanche), the Italians (Bolognini, Ferro), the feminists (Balsam, Chodorow, Kulish), and the social constructionists (Hoffman). Celenza thus comes across as not only broadly experienced as a clinician but also as globally inclusive in her scholarship.

Before such high praise begins to appear partisan or ring hollow, I enter the following 10 (the compulsion to symmetry—and even enumeration—being entirely mine and not hers) verbatim samples of Celenza’s deft and deep synthesis of psychoanalytic theory and practice:

• Psychoanalysis invites dreams of love. The dreams that emerge in the analytic setting are responses to the seduction of the setting, a seduction parallel to the primal seduction of the mother (Laplanche, 1997) because the analyst promises to maintain the boundary between analysis and external life. (p. 11)

• Psychoanalytic approaches have continued to evolve. Some changes emerge from cultural trends that may not have a lasting life. In contrast, changes in epistemology, modifications in the frame and basic assumption about our endeavor, reflect critical, clear-sighted and indisputable truths that are bound to stand the test of time. (p. 22)

• While of course, the emphasis upon the mutuality and humanness of the analytic relationship is a much needed corrective to the wooden, inaccessible classical caricature, the emphasis on mutuality to the exclusion of the disciplined restraint of asymmetry is problematic, especially as this evokes omnipotent rescue fantasies. (p. 46)

• These attentional sets [a directed attentional set and a diffuse attentional set] are purposive and correspond to different attitudinal intents in relation to the analytic process. For example, an analyst interested in historical reconstruction or repetitive defensive processes may foreground more frequently a directed attentional mode and listening stance. In contrast, analysts interested in elaborating unconscious fantasy or inscribing heretofore unrepresented states would, for the most part, listen more diffusely and nondirectively. (p. 55)

• Our gaze into the world is comprised of a taking in/grasping dialectic, a receptivity to and penetrating into dialectic. In an overall way, and from the position of the experiencing self (what I refer to as the embodied subject), individual experience can be described as some amalgam of receptivity and potency—in the language of sexuality, holding and penetration or, in the language of the body, openness and backbone (p. 78)

• All loving is totalistic; to have, to hold and to be are combined in loving and desiring. Just as seeing is having, knowing is owning, and wanting is touching. A totalistic view of erotic desire encompasses all of the longings, where no form of love leans on another. (p. 98)

• Geography is a useful and malleable container for unacceptable wishes; serving as a ready receptacle, countries, cities and concrete places can draw out or prompt projections that represent disassociated sides of ambivalence. (p. 118)

• A developmental view of our capacities to uphold ethical standards of conduct [reveals the following]. For the classical analyst, the attachment to and identification with ideals of neutrality, anonymity and abstinence can wane over time as aging, mortality and perhaps depleted self-experience become emerging realities. For the relational analyst, the capacity to self-defer, to maintain asymmetry and to put one’s own needs in the background can also weaken, as mutual resonances seduce depleted self-states and become foregrounded. (p. 127)

• I suggest that the classical literature on perversion retains clinical utility because persons engaging in perverse scenarios are attempting to imagine a one-person universe (albeit wishful, illusory, impossible and fantastically constructed). In this view, a perverse mode of being or a perverse mode of functioning is a defensive fantasy construction that constitutes a retreat from interpersonal experiencing (either in relation to internal objects or to those in actual reality). (p. 142)

• The pull to know right and wrong objectively is driven by a persistent wish: that great panel of judges in the sky . . . but then again, only when the verdict is in our favor! Moving away from this inevitable pull requires a constant push towards the realization and disappointment there is no such jury. Even a cruel but just god is preferable to the devil of infinite uncertainty. (p. 167)

Is there a need now for more to be said? I think not. The broad and deep scope of psychoanalytic theory and technique, exemplified in these shining thought pieces, is ample testimony to the excellence of Celenza’s book. Its message is that theory and practice are inseparable. The former arises out of the latter, and the latter is perpetually guided by the former. In the postmodern disregard of “facts” and derision of “theories,” Celenza’s bold conservatism is impressive and refreshing. To explicate any further will be disrespectful to the very virtue of form she has skillfully revived: brevity. And now you “really” know why I began my review the way I did.