Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field

Dianne Elise

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429862106
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Clinical Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field centers on the mutually reinforcing relationship between erotic and creative energies. Erotic embodiment is given context within a contemporary model of clinical process based in analytic field theory and highlighting Winnicott. Dianne Elise uses clinical material to bring theory alive, giving clinicians an explicit picture of how they might utilize the ideas presented.

In a fascinating return to Freud's emphasis on libido and Eros, a creative mind is seen as located within a libidinal connection to the erotic body. The erotic is underscored as an important ingredient of the clinical situation—a lively spontaneity that partakes of the analyst's as well as the patient's creative self, vitalizing the field of clinical engagement. A full formulation of the analytic field must include awareness of the centrality of the erotic in the maternal matrix, in ongoing development, and in the clinical setting. The erotic-aesthetic dimension of the mind potentiates the creative interplay of the analytic process.

Written in an engaging and accessible style, this original contribution makes complex theory available to psychoanalytic clinicians at all levels, and to a wide range of readers, while offering sophisticated theoretical and clinical innovations. Elise addresses the need to engage multiple aspects of erotic life while maintaining a reliable professional boundary.

Part I

Erotic vitality in analytic process

Chapter 1

Moving from within the maternal

The choreography of analytic eroticism

In this chapter, I describe the clinician’s analytic activity as akin to that found in choreography, where the structuring of a dance or of a session each expresses an inner impulse brought into narrative form. I link the embodied art of dance to the clinician’s creative vitality in contributing to the shaping of the movement of a session. In offering my formulation of an analytic eroticism, I hope to expand the terrain of what might traditionally be viewed as erotic transference and countertransference.

Just as photography captures and preserves a series of images, choreography creates and preserves a series of images of the human body in motion infused with the vitality of libidinal energies. Clinically, when the creation of a symbolic narrative moves into the verbal while retaining this embodied, affective component, transformation of psychic pain is possible. The aesthetic capacity to keep this embodied vitality alive in the analytic relationship is the quality I refer to as analytic eroticism. Taking up the concept of maternal eroticism presented by Kristeva (2014), I explore the “multiverse” of mother/child erotic sensibilities—the dance of the semiotic chora—as well as considering a parallel engagement within the analytic dyad.

Kristeva (2014) offers an evocative pairing: “Reliance, or maternal eroticism” (p. 69). An intimate equivalence is suggested. The relationship between the two intrigues. Yet, who is it that relies on maternal eroticism? Kristeva indicates that a mother relies on her eroticism in mothering her child, but also that the child relies on the mother’s eroticism in developing a vibrant sense of self. The encounter with the mother as erotic being brings into being the child’s erotic self, both in the specifically sexual and in the most general sense: vitality in living, a curious and creative engagement with life—Eros, rather than functional adaptation. We as a species rely on our inheritance of maternal eroticism as crucial to our humanity—a generational transmission of tantalizing tenderness and fierce passions in an embodied relationship with mother, with self, and with the world. This bequest is, I suggest, what we as clinicians—women and men—may hope to help each patient access and elaborate, as well as, necessarily, to contact in ourselves. In Kristeva’s conceptualization of maternal eroticism, we find hints of an enlarged understanding of what might be encompassed within the erotic life of the analytic couple.

Kristeva (2014) emphasizes that reliance does not mean maternal omnipresence, but is instead concerned with releasing “another living subject to the world” (p. 76) while “accompanying the living” (p. 78). The mother–infant dyad relies on circulating eroticism within their pairing—a force of life, a rhythmic pulsing that brings them together and sends them apart. A mother relies on her eroticism to invest in her baby and in its development and to turn her in directions of desire other than her child, setting a limit, a line between the two, allowing for a state of emergence from the stasis of a closed unit, and thus supporting the child’s unique unfolding as well as her own. This dynamic pairing would ideally form the foundation for an experience of a couple relation that breathes—connecting in, releasing out, oscillating, but sustaining over time. Maternal capacity in this regard rests on an internalization of erotic vitality from her own mother (and father)¹ that forwards her own unique trajectories in multiple directions.

As Kristeva states, the mother holds; she is not a passive by-stander; she stands by her child; she is committed. Without abandoning, she also needs to release any “hold” that would grip, constrict. Contact with her erotic self supports each of these activities that can seem to be opposing but are each essential to life—hers, the baby’s, the couple’s, the species’s. The parental sexual couple must also be kept in view; maternal eroticism is not solely in relation to the child, for the child, but an aspect of a woman as a sexual being in fullness.

In this chapter, and in this book as a whole, I hold to the erotic in maternal eroticism, which is not typically what comes to mind when thinking of an ethic of responsible care and concern. My focus is on the potentiating capacities of eroticism for the analytic dyad. Thus, I will not be addressing directly the ways in which aggressive impulses and the metabolism of hate play an important role in a mother’s relationship to her infant. Kristeva’s (2014) conceptualization of maternal eroticism is a highly complex formulation regarding the dynamic interplay of conflicting impulses and feeling states. My concern is that, in the very complexity of her theorizing, the erotic is in danger of slipping away from sustained attention. Psychoanalytic theorizing seems to find it easier to stay with themes of tender attachment, violent attack or the abject. We quickly lose any erotic rooting. In thinking about what maternal eroticism might mean for us as clinicians, we need to be able to envision how maternal eroticism materializes—in what ways it matters—between an actual mother and her child, and then between an analyst and patient.

As Kristeva so provocatively elaborates, an erotic environment exists between mother and baby. In these developmental beginnings, the relation with the mother provides a sensuous matrix, “a phonic and kinetic envelope” (Widawsky, 2014, p. 62)—an aesthetic birthplace of movement, meaning, and shaping of the self: “For Kristeva, the semiotic is not simply part of the signifying process; it is also a component of the identity and construction of the self” (Widawsky, 2014, p. 62).

I have described the nursing couple (Winnicott, 1965) as engaged in the first, primal act of intercourse, with breast-feeding sexually stimulating for infants of both sexes, as well as for the mother (Elise, 1998b, 2001).² In my work on maternal desire, I include the mother’s desire and desire for the mother (Elise, 1998a, 1998b, 2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2007, 2008, 2012, 2015a, 2015b). Encountering the erotic beauty of the mother, the infant experiences an aesthetic world “scintillating with meaning” (Meltzer and Harris Williams, 1988, p. 14) and feels, with excitement, the pulsing vibrations of its own psychesoma. Bodily movement is emotional life now given visible form in a mutual dance of desire.

Maternal eroticism is the affective atmosphere, the embodied vitality of this psychic space that, in Winnicottian (1971) terms, might be thought of as the “environmental mother,” but is here conceptualized as alive with the erotic. An impulse to move rhythmically derives from maternal eroticism that libidinally energizes the mother–infant duet.³ Their sensual dance becomes the infant’s first choreography, in the repetition and patterning of these expressive movements. Civitarese (2012) suggests “from the interaction with the mother the child’s . . . flow [of] sensations and emotions receives its first cadence . . . the rhythmic repetition of sensory-motor patterns produces configurations and schemas that give shape to experience and a sense of continuity to the body” (p. 143). This “dancing” already partakes of the mother’s adult sexuality, albeit enigmatically (Laplanche, 1992) and is, for the infant, a full-bodied, nude embrace with excitation to every part of the mind and body, including genitally (Freud, 1905), that will form the template for the adult dance of sex.

Eroticism in the maternal matrix: the dance of development

As envisioned by Kristeva (2014), maternal eroticism is both a libidinal energy and a creative surround. This semiotic chora is a space for mutual creation within the maternal matrix—“womb”—where the sensually embodied mother–infant interaction can be shaped reciprocally and given increasing symbolic form. This “primary maternal preoccupation” (Winnicott, 1956, p. 300)—the mother’s preoccupation with the infant, as well as the infant’s with the mother (Elise, 2007)—should not be viewed reductively as a “symbiotic” relationship, but as a complex, mutual engagement leading to increasing individuation. Borrowing the term from Plato, “Kristeva emphasizes the chora’s motility,” (McAfee, 2004, p. 20)—a rhythmic space of spontaneous movement by which significance is constituted. Moving from within the maternal, a child eventually takes its first steps into the symbolic, a realm that is most meaningfully expressive when enlivened by semiotic motility.

I propose dance as paradigmatic of the semiotic and choreography as exemplifying a symbolic communication that retains its bodily, affective force. Dance gives shape to affective expression through embodied motion, e-motion. When patterned and available for recollection and reiteration, dance becomes choreography—an embodied narrative of emotional experience. Choreography is uniquely expressive of the transformations of the semiotics of dance into symbolic representation, where the link to affective embodiment remains intact: dance becomes symbolic narration without losing the libidinal energies of bodily motility alive in the chora.⁴

Although the term choreography derives from a slightly different Greek root (choreia: dance) than chora (place), there exists “an element of similarity in that the Greek root for dance was related to a (certain) space” (Ramo, 1999, p. 324; cited in Das, 2012, p. 117). Dance unfolds in the place where maternal eroticism enlivens the space, unleashing libidinal energies and creative imagination, the meaningful patterning of which is choreography: “Signification is like a transfusion of the living body into language” (Oliver, 1997, p. xx)—an aesthetic leap into the symbolic.

I underscore that dance, with its primal beginnings, both pre and post-natal, is the most fully embodied form of art, giving shape to affective life through movement. Each human starts out prenatally with mother as dance partner. Held in the embrace of the mother’s swaying body, the prenatal infant is waltzed around the womb, set in motion, always accompanied by the rhythmic beat of mother’s heart, the song of her voice, even when she is not actually singing. The fetus eventually responds with a solo—a first kick, so exciting to the mother (and to the fetus?). Surely there must be, in this mother–infant duet, continuity from the womb to the rocking embrace of the mother’s arms and lap,⁵ with nursing returning the baby to proximity with the musical beat of the mother’s heart emanating from the depths of her body.⁶

Torsti (2000) describes this “dance”:

At four months, the infant seems to begin a dreamy movement of the hand during breastfeeding, (p. 289) . . . In some children, this movement develops into an extensive plastic motion of the hand, dreamily and with a wide sweep . . . As the infant grows, this movement may take on a dance-like form . . . The rhythm of the sweeping movement of the hand is from the very beginning, at the age of four months, quite different from the rhythm of sucking the breast. It seems to express an inner music or a calm breathing. In fact I observed one baby making these movements at the point of falling asleep, when the father began to play the piano. In my view, in these movements the infant expresses its own, separately experienced kinesthetic image of itself; . . . The sweeping, dance-like movement forms a space for self-definition and draws the outline of the self.

(p. 290, emphasis added)⁷

I am putting forth that this mother–infant dance is maternal eroticism, and that when maternal eroticism is foreclosed, the dance is as well: “The dance did not develop in any of those infants whose mothers experienced anxiety during the feeding” (Torsti, 2000, p. 290). Torsti is referring to a deep and pervasive anxiety, not an idealized expectation that a mother be without any anxiety. When a pas de deux is able to flourish, these movements of the body-self evolve throughout development into increasingly complex “choreographies” that express personal creativity in the shaping of the self. Such dances unfold and gather form in repeated sequences—choreographies unique to that pairing, available for recall and to give meaning in a symbolic realm that expands beyond the verbal:

Language is but one manifestation of symbolic functioning. Other manifestations of symbolic functioning include the use of sign language, gesture, pantomime, mimicry, the dance, the use of visual imagery in organizing thought, music, mathematical symbols, and dramatically-organized actions . . . All of these are expressions of the underlying semiotic function. When we speak of the language of the body, we should, to be more accurate, refer to expressions of the bodily self. The artist and the musician express feelings and communicate with others without utilizing language.

(Call, 1980, p. 260)

In so doing, artists connect us to our mother–child origins and to the aesthetic pleasures of our first communications.

Choreography as artistic expression and as metaphor for clinical process

Dance as a creative art form is a lyrical language that uses the body to speak—a communication uniquely shaped to express deep feeling. In dance, one listens attentively to the music, actual or internal, and to how it moves you to move. A feeling is evoked by the music along with a wish to convey this feeling in bodily movement. Dance is an emotional process—a transference, one might say, to the music. From an internal impulse, one responds with a particular gesture and then another and another, out of the myriad of ways the human body can move, the multitude of possible steps. Finding certain movements that “fit” with an inner feeling in response to a registering of the particular qualities of the music, one develops these steps choreographically into recognizable, but varying, and increasingly complex, patterns.

Going beyond improvisation, in choreography one is conscious of building up a narrative, placing chosen steps in a refrain that can be recalled and revisited. One listens to each musical phrase repeatedly, (as we each listen attentively to the “notes” of our patients), and gradually finds and develops the movements that most express what you want to say with your body. An emotionally expressive communication is being shaped that can be made use of over time, returned to for further reflection; the process is like composing a symphony or crafting a poem, and it is like the narrative building process of psychoanalysis.

With writing, one arranges words on paper in order to convey a compelling theme. As with writing, a “topic” suggested in dance by a piece of music engages one in a personal way and you find your theme to express in a structured sequence. Each of these creative ex...