Longing

Psychoanalytic Musings on Desire

Jean Petrucelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781855754355
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429915819
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Longing: Psychoanalytic Musings on Desire is a contemporary, interdisciplinary exploration of one of psychoanalysis's most foundational and fascinating areas of investigation. This anthology explores the vicissitudes and varieties of desire, its public and private, normative and transgressive, its light and dark expressions. It examines desire in its relational, cultural, clinical, physical, sexual and aesthetic forms. Collectively, these essays demonstrate an understanding of the difficulties of identifying and realizing desire, precisely because it is multiple, omnipresent, shape-shifting, ongoing and, perhaps, always ultimately unfulfillable. They question whether desire is by definition something that cannot be satisfied, and contemplate how we relate to our desires? Interpersonal psychoanalytic practice and theory understands desire not merely as an intrapsychic drive but also as a force shaped by and shaping interpersonal relationships. From within this perspective, a number of the contributors examine a broad variety of clinical manifestations of desire as it struggles for expression or suppression.

Part I
"Listen, Do You Want to Know a Secret?": Selves Untold or Lost in Translation

Chapter One
Privacy and passion: shadows in the analytic terrain

Judith Brisman

“If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got no where to go”

(Adam Phillips, 1996, p. 39)

In our culture of micro-awareness, media incursion and high technology, there are few hiding places left untouched. We are primed to see. The “manifest destiny” of our time is that of traversing not miles, but cells, genes, and electronic data. We are on a trajectory of knowing. The goal is a never-ending pursuit of the undiscovered.

The analytic world as well has been delicately poised on the fast-moving currents of our culture. Here, too, there has been an ever-present quest to know more, see more, establishing the base of therapeutic action responsible for change and growth.

Yet questions loom. In a world fast-paced, swept into discovery, where Oprah-esque revelations, blogging life events into the anonymous arena of the public eye, and deep-cut investigative reporting reign, where is the role of privacy in the evolution of our culture?

Perhaps there are hints of a backlash. Consider recent trends in architectural design (Fletcher, 2004). Home blueprints reveal a shift in focus. The “great room”, the common arena of collective gathering popular in this last decade, has given way to the construction instead of a multitude of smaller rooms, each focused on the specialized needs of the individual. There might be a weight-lifting room, a photo lab, a computer study. We want to get away; we want, in the most literal of terms, to “get our space”.

In the analytic terrain itself, one can argue that here too there is a growing respect for the patient’s need for a “room of one’s own” within the analytic chambers.

Take, for example, the recent thinking by Gordon (2004). Here, the role of discovery, both in our material world and the analytic culture, is questioned. “I worry,” he writes, “that we’ve come to know far, far too much . .. In a perverse attempt at ‘relating’ to the material world,” he continues, “we have assumed a ‘can do’ stance toward nature which is really one of sadistic mastery and control.” In the therapeutic environment, this may well be manifested by a neglect of respect for the arena of the unknown, the gap, as Gordon refers to it, between self and other. With a trajectory of knowing more, what is lost is the numinous quality of knowing less, the mystery that is inevitable in any life event, including the analytic relationship.

Levenson’s thinking (2003) has increasingly moved in a direction of urging the analyst to ease the tight reins of exploration and understanding. The focus on interpretation, clarification, and a linguistic ordering of the patient’s world is reconsidered. In its place, the analyst is encouraged to imagine, to actually envision the patient’s verbalizations, without corralling the patient with words of an interpretation. Actual interpretation of content may occur later—or not at all. Using an image Don Stern (2004) has evoked, this kind of work with the patient is not unlike a first reading of poetry, where active critique and understanding might be put aside, as the essence of the patient’s words merely sift through one’s soul. The poetry, the patient, and the analyst are free to roam.

Poland (2000, p. 18) recently emphasized the importance of the role of analyst as witness, not active interpreter. He points to recent directions in analytic thinking in which the patient’s striving for separation, not union with the other, takes centre stage. Here, the analyst’s role is to stay in attendance with the patient, recognizing the emotional import of the patient’s self-exploration, without the intrusion of “supposed wisdom”—at least not verbally.

Or consider Ogden (2004, p. 186), who writes of the development between patient and analyst of a quality of intimacy involving such experiences as “. . . humour, playfulness, compassion, healthy flirtatiousness . . .” “These experiences,” he writes, “may be the first instances in the patient’s life of such healthy generative forms of object relatedness.” But he notes “. . . more often than not, I defer interpreting the meanings of such analytic events until much later in the analysis, if I interpret at all” (my italics).

The realm of the private is known to all analysts—the moments one doesn’t touch, doesn’t look deeply—but indeed this is often considered merely a pause in the flow of the analytic work. The analyst won’t look now— maybe later. But what if not looking at all is as critical as anything else that one does? In this regard, I am not talking about the more profound experience of “mysterium tremendum” of which Gordon writes. I’m talking of the psychological, the much more profane process of allowing the growth of privacy in the therapeutic relationship. And through this privacy what may unfold is the unimaginable—both the sacred and the mundane.

Certainly, the role of passion in the analytic exchange allows for such questions.

As an ineffable aspect of living, the role of passion in the analytic relationship embraces the realm of the unknown. Mitchell (2003) considered that “there is always an unknown in one’s self or others that is a dimension of sexual passion—this contributes to its excitement and its risk”. In this regard, Dimen (2003) writes of passion “We are talking in rational language about the irrational . .. We are caught between the wish to make it clear and the recognition . .. of mystery, enigma”.

If indeed passion is ultimately indemonstrable and private (Mitchell, 2003), how do we recognize its existence in the analytic setting? And when we do recognize its existence, what are we to do with it? Do attempts at exploration only serve to wilt the possible, dissolve the very fire of desire, one that in order to burn does so only because it has been untouched?

Hirsch (2004, p. 2) considers that

sexual or romantic desire between patient and analyst is typically left out of the picture, lest the charge of pedophilia or incest be levied on the perverse analyst . .. One rarely gets the sense of two adults in the consulting room. Love reflects love primarily in the nursery.

How does one, as Hirsch might ask, “grow up” passion in one’s analytic mind and within one’s analytic relationships without destroying the very analytic frame that allows its existence to come to be, and without destroying the privacy of the patient that allows for passion to burn in the first place?

It is nine months into a very intense thrice weekly analysis of a profoundly brilliant and troubled young woman. (It is important to note that what follows is hardly a fully developed case presentation, but more a moment in time in a very complex treatment, a moment that has allowed me to play with ideas and thoughts I am considering.) For seven years, severe changes in body image and body structure have allowed for desperate attempts at defining this patient’s sense of self. Weight has fluctuated up and down 40 lbs on her small frame. We work hard to disallow the mirror’s tyrannical presence in defining whom she is and isn’t.

And indeed I’m never quite sure whom I’m going to meet at my door each day. She is the spiked-hair vamp, silhouetted in lingerie and work boots. She is the soft feminine princess drenched in white, save for a now red mane of hair. Her mind travels in rapid fire to the unimaginable, to the profound. Imagine Robin Williams in your office and you have a glimpse of what it is like to sit with her.

We wonder about a history of sexual abuse and how that translates into vengeful binges in which her body is ravaged and abused. We consider abrupt losses she endured as a child, painful departures, unthinkable deaths that she witnessed. She wonders if it is all right for her, at moments, to infuse her life with thoughts of our time together, what I’ve said, when next we’ll meet.

And so, months into this very complicated treatment, I open the door to the waiting room and find myself momentarily stunned by the presence of a decrepit old man, dried blood on his face, sunspots on his wrinkled and bald cracked head, peering up at me from the chair.

The session had begun.

My patient was wearing a mask, one of those professional latex masks that completely covers the head, with openings for eyes and the tongue of a mouth, and with a veined neck that can be tucked into one’s shirt. The mask allows for the disguise of identity in pure and horrid fashion. With the mask on, there was no overt recognition that a quite beautiful young woman was present in my office.

The mask was for Halloween and was ostensibly brought to the session because the logistics had made sense for her to buy it en route. Once in my office, she took the mask off and we got to work. Except that, obviously, we had been working all along. We spoke about horror and surprise and abrupt disconnection in the patient’s life. About her expectations of what I would experience as I opened the door. But the session went flat and was atypically lifeless.

Finally, in a moment perhaps generated by my missing the usual unspoken passionate exchange to our connection, I asked if she would like to put the mask back on. I wondered who was missing from the room.

What followed was one of those analytic exchanges that becomes embedded in one’s mind for life—certainly in mine, and, I can’t help but believe, in hers as well. The moments that followed ricocheted us both back and forth, to and from a surreal place in time—nowhere and everywhere at once. From deep within the mask, the patient told me about her grandfather’s experience of sexually abusing young children. This was not the litany of facts reported in previous sessions, for certainly her life with her grandfather had been a critical part of previous discussions. This, however, was an emboldened account of an old man’s experience in a voice I had never heard previously in our work.

“What was it like for you, grandpa?” I asked.

“I slept,” he said, in a slow gravelly voice. “Those girls did it.”

“But your trousers were already unzipped when you came into the room, your belt was undone. Why??”

There was silence. And then a tear, slow to emerge, welling on the brim of the eye of the mask, slipped over the edge of the coverture and dripped silently down the rubbery face. At once, worlds converged.

It is impossible to convey the power of this session, upon both me and my patient. The mask was penetratingly life-like; my patient as I knew her vanished from the session. My own horror and sadness were as alert as hers during this time together. Tears certainly had welled up on the edge of my analytic mask. We were both shaken, emboldened, completely disrupted by this time together.

But what I can convey through words is merely a photograph, an encapsulated, edged vision of a moment that had no bounds. It is what you as reader, I as presenter, can share about this time that will allow us a community of understanding. Through this writing, I am conveying my work, doing my job, not lost in the boundless, passionate world of memory, senses, and images. I am cordoned off as reporter of that lost world.

In the sessions that followed the mask hour, the patient came in with an array of experiences that represented her tasting life in a way that had previously been unknown. First, there was a day of eating from desire, not by measured calories-this for the first time in over fifteen years. Then days followed in which there was no bingeing at all—again unprecedented. She reported a sensual awareness of the world around her. There was a first kiss, mutually felt, an experience of her body as her own. Her life felt charged, momentarily courageous.

What had happened?

We can argue, as Bromberg (1998) probably would (and I would, too), that the experience of inviting the grandfather into the room allowed the patient access to a part of herself, previously contained and dissociated, expressed only through violent and unpremeditated binges. The wanton, hungry, and selfish aspects of self were now hers to bear, not just grandfather’s. With these aspects of self momentarily more fully alive in her, she grasped life and held on tight.

Additionally, one might add that by initially wearing the mask, disarming me of my normal rigour and rapport, my patient had set the terms of the interaction. I had decided to go along, to play in her world, with her masks, instead of asking her to play in mine, with all the masks inherent therein. And, as a result, the power base for that session had shifted. She was allowed the role of aggressor, not merely by scaring me and then by being the grand-father, but, more to the point, by presenting the possibility of new terms of engagement. Our conducting of the session in this manner may have allowed for the beginning of a reworking of shame, guilt, and fear associated with the more foreign, dominant role of aggressor.

But perhaps there is something more. What I am considering is that the very aspect of the session that wasn’t openly addressed, that which in a usual parsing of the session might go overtly undiscussed, was perhaps of critical value: unquestionably, this was the most passionate session that had ever occurred between us— indeed perhaps one of the most passionate sessions I’ve had. Neither of us acknowledged that nor spoke of it openly. It was just allowed to be.

By definition (Webster, 1992), passion is an “intense or violent emotion, especially sexual desire or love”. And violence itself, interestingly again by definition, involves a “perversion of meaning”. In the analytic room, when passion is present, perversion is immediate. With passion comes a boundlessness, unmarked by words, less the scaffolding of a structured means of relating. Its existence provokes a contradiction in the very terms within which we work. One cannot discuss, explore, or put meaning to passion because the moment one does, the entire experience suddenly becomes something else, bounded and contained and therefore no longer passionate. When passion presents itself in the analytic hour, we are inevitably distanced from the tools of our trade.

Bromberg (1991), Glennon (2001), and others have emphasized the need for the experience of “insideness” to help protect the self from excessive external impingement. The work traditionally has been that of shoring up the internal self through an ordering and understanding of the primitive chaos as it emerges through words, associations, affects, and transactions in the therapy. We work hard to join the patient’s chaos in the interpersonal mesh of analysis so that ultimately it can be contained and known. Our goal, as Goldner (2003) considers it, is to “reencounter the ‘otherness’ of the other and then reach the ‘otherness of the self’”. But is, as Gordon (2004) emphasizes, our scrambling to understand and reach born of a need to deny the intolerable?

Beebe’s (2000) infants shift their gaze from the mother’s visual embrace. The connection breaks and in the split-screen moment that the infant retreats to privacy, the mother either takes a deep breath or grasps.

The analysand infant—or adult, as Hirsch might urge—looks away, and we as analysts must question what we to do next. For example, when my patient came in with a mask, I was inclined to question the patient’s need to hide. Of course, I was also primed to interpret the disguise as a transferential enactment imbued with surprise, assault, and shock that allowed me to see more, not less, of her internal world.

But what would happen, would anything different happen, if the use of the mask was understood as the patient’s vehement, dramatically concretized embrace of the private while immersed in the interpersonal bath of the treatment? Would one think differently, act differently, if we thought of the patient, like Beebe’s infant, as needing to look away?

To grow passion in the analytic exchange we must reconsider the realm of the unspoken, non-verbal, and private in our midst. Allowing for privacy is not a parenthesis to our work, not an allowance for a moment in treatment that needs to be “interpreted later”. More to the point, I am considering the use of privacy as a critical and sustained aspect of analytic work, figuring as prominently as interpretation, containment, exp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: "LISTEN, DO YOU WANT TO KNOW A SECRET?": SELVES UNTOLD OR LOST IN TRANSLATION
• PART II: "SYMPATHY FOR A DEVIL": MANAGING PAIN WITH PAIN
• PART III: "DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL'S BEST FRIEND": REFLECTIONS ON A WOMAN'S RELATIONSHIP WITH HER BODY AND ITS ADORNMENTS
• PART IV: "LIKE A MOTH TO THE FLAME": SINGED BY DESIRE
• PART V: SEDUCTION IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN
• INDEX