The Narration of Desire

Erotic Transferences and Countertransferences

Harriet K. Wrye, Judith K. Welles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135061609
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this richly woven study of preoedipal erotic experience, Harriet Kimble Wrye and Judith Welles focus on patients for whom early mothering did not sustain the flowering and subsequent transformation of early erotic desire. Such patients remain under the sway of a primitive eroticism that is often sadistic and invariably perverse. Successful analytic work requires accepting and containing the patient's primitive erotic needs; reconstructing the mother-infant narratives that sustain these needs; and mobilizing the patient's transformative desire to grow out of maternal eroticism to an adult love of self and others.

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II
Maternal Erotic
Transferences
and
Countertransferences

3 __________
The Maternal Erotic
Transference

All things considered, it seems to me that the analyst's bisexuality must be well integrated to enable the development of the baby, made by the analyst and the analysand in their work together, the baby which represents the analysand himself, recreated. (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984, p. 175)

FREUD AND THE FEMININE PSYCHE

In his declaration of female psychology as a “dark continent,” Freud (1933) acknowledged the limitations of his own understanding of the feminine psyche. He invited female analysts to consult their own internal lives and their experiences with their female patients in order to gain understanding of female psychology. In developing our narratives about the maternal erotic transference and countertransference, we have indeed taken him up on his invitation to explore the “dark continent,” as that is an apt description of the primordial swamps and uncharted territories we describe.

We wish at the same time, however, to call attention to the pho-bic, racist, and sexist implications in Freud's choice of the phrase. “Dark continent,” referring to Victorian Europe's Africa, carries the implication of danger, disease, and colonial exploitation. These dark connotations are inseparable from the development of psychoanalysis; they are not to be dismissed as a simple semantic or poetic choice. Freud's “radical distrust of maternal influence” (Keller, 1985) lends an enduring tilt to psychoanalytic theory and practice.

According to Freud (1933), erotism was stimulated in females primarily by their longing for the strength, excitement, and power of the phallus to fill the void left by their castration. In our opinion, the construct of ubiquitous penis envy is the single best example of analysis' being temporarily blinded by the prevailing view. Early critics of Freud's phallocentric views challenged penis envy by elaborating the complementary presence in males of breast and womb envy (Homey, 1926; Fliegel, 1982; Chehrazi, 1986).

The classical paradigm of transference was that it was oedipal. When it was erotic, typically female patients to male analysts, it was viewed as disruptive and needing to be “managed” (see Introduction). This early paradigm of erotic transference has had to be radically amended. Sensual bonding between mother and baby, what we call “body loveprinting,” and its appearances and permutations in the analytic dyad pique much interest. Infant research, making possible newer understanding of preoedipal development, has dramatically challenged the classical view of the internal life of the infant. Further impetus has come from feminist scholarship and interest in gender countertransference. Important developments in the philosophy of science and postmodern literary criticism have been applied to theory and clinical work. Questioning basic assumptions has opened the doors and windows, so to speak, on the nature of transference in general and the erotic transference in particular. It is within this intellectual atmosphere of challenge and response that we elaborate our narrative.

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE MATERNAL EROTIC TRANSFERENCE

It is our view that maternal transferences, anchored in preoedipal matrices, are not merely precursors of oedipal, genital erogeneity but are erotic in their own right. These phenomena are indispensable aspects of subjectivity, self-esteem, and the continuous narrative of emotional development.

The early sensual bond between mother and baby, when marked by reciprocity and attunement, makes separateness tolerable and engenders baby's “love affair with the world” (Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975). That love affair becomes the basis of loving relations and all erotism after the separation-individuation phase and into the oedipal and postoedipal period. When we use the word “erotic” we are talking about the gamut of feelings— from tender, sensual, and romantic to anal erotic, sadistic, aggressive, and masochistic—that stem from that original mother—baby bond. The feelings pertain to bodily contact and arise in the transference.

Ours is the broadest possible view of maternal erotic transfer-ences. It includes all manner of sensual bodily fantasies in relation to the analyst's body. We locate the origins of erotic experience in the preverbal arena, when the mother's and baby's contacts are really about dealing with body fluids. The infant, having once been literally encapsulated in mother's womb in amniotic fluid, experiences closeness to mother postnatally through contact with skin and bodily fluids, through her caretaking in relation to milk, drool, urine, feces, mucus, spit, tears, and perspiration. A mother's contact with and ministrations to her baby in dealings with these fluids may optimally create a slippery, sticky sensual adhesion in the relationship; it is, so to speak, the medium for bonding. This sensuality, experienced by both parties, is key in their relationship.

It is precisely these physically encoded and generally repressed memories of the mother's voluptuous body that may be both longed for and feared by the adult in treatment. Maternal erotic transferences and countertransferences re-create this primal, preverbal, sensual-erotic contact between mother and infant, and often have a kind of juicy as well as gooey and messy dimension.

While fluids conduct contact, there is a rhythm to the wetness and dryness in mother-infant contact, and a suitable balance of neither too much wetness nor too little must be maintained. Wet or full diapers must be changed for dry ones so that the baby is not left helplessly swamped. In an optimally functioning mother-infant dyad, the baby is given an appropriate amount of milk, bathed regularly, and “patted dry.” Similarly, the analyst is aware of metaphorically maintaining a fluid balance by creating and justifying a viable narrative space for each patient.

All the sensual precursors to adult sexuality are subsumed and consciously or unconsciously rekindled within later genitally focused erotic experience. The seminal and vaginal fluids of genital erotic contact in adult love play are the symbolic extension of these earliest sensual fluid connections between mother and infant. Thus, taking issue with the classical views of transference, which distinguish maternal transferences from oedipal erotic transferences, we contend that maternal transferences are not only libidinal in themselves, but also aggressive and that they underlie and make a direct contribution to genital sexuality. Thus we emphasize what psychoanalytic research has affirmed about infancy, namely, that the early experience of mothering and being mothered is distinctively erotic.

Maternal erotic transferences may first manifest in the analytic setting in concrete fantasies about the real parts of the therapist's body. We often know we are in its midst when the patient's dreams and communications are characterized more by powerful sensory imagery. Bodily concerns take center stage and are expressed in fantasies of nursing, putting together, getting inside, pouring, patting, and making, as in making a baby, messing, making pee and stool, smearing, poking, exposing, drooling. The therapist may become aware of a range of his or her own somatic responses to the material, including “melting” or sleepy feelings akin to the letdown reflex during nursing, or skin sensations indicative that the relationship is being communicated and experienced on a preverbal bodily level. The therapist may experience an impulse to pick up, bathe or clean, bundle up, or rock the patient rather than make verbal interpretations.

These primitive fantasies may be inhibited, sometimes for both therapist and patient, by the shame and difficulty of putting into words these essentially bodily experienced and bodily expressed phenomena and by “erotic terror,” panic driven by early erotic transferences. Given the ambivalence associated with dyadic union, the transference can oscillate between blissful and terrifying and is often fought against or fled because it is experienced as humiliating or, worse, engulfing. We think this may account for many treatment interruptions and failures. Here and in subsequent chapters, we explore the ways in which the transference is inhibited and how, if ignored, it can lead to treatment failure.

We emphasize that the MET is a positive and necessary transforming phenomenon in psychoanalytic treatment. Analysts of either gender who have access to their own maternal erotic countertransferences in response to their patients' matching transferences may make possible their patients' acceptance of and immersion in the maternal erotic transference—with its loving and sadomasochistic permutations—thus fostering a sense of wholeness.

FOUR STRANDS IN THE NARRATIVE OF DESIRE

In an effort to distinguish maternal erotic transference more sharply from other transference manifestations, we shall recount four interrelated narratives, which are clinically derived and developmentally based. We discuss them first in relation to their developmental origins and then as they manifest in early maternal erotic transference phenomena. They include 1) what we describe as the birth of desire and body-based aspects of the self; 2) anal erotism and permutations of desire; 3) the sensual matrix in the formation of object relations; and 4) erotic desire as a transitional opportunity fostering the solidification of gender identity. Full understanding entails the differentiation of these broad narrative strands notably from one another, but also within the context of other transference phenomena.

Birth of Desire: Body-Based Aspects of Self

Of the four interweaving threads of the preoedipal maternal erotic transference, the first and most encompassing is the rich sensory/bodily attachment reminiscent of the sensual reciprocity between the baby and the mother¹ from birth. This narrational theme has its origin in the rich sensuality of the earliest mother-baby relationship.

Far from needing the “autistic” isolation postulated by classical theory, infant research confirms that infants actively seek sensory stimulation. The beginning of relating is evident in babies as young as three days: they show distinct sensory preferences for their mothers and select by smell the breast pads of their own mothers over those of other nursing mothers (Stern, 1985). Much attention has been given to the sensual bonding of feeding, bathing, cooing, and holding during the first year of life (Emde, 1976; Lichtenberg, 1981, 1983; Call, Galenson, and Tyson, 1983). This sensual, erotic attachment proceeds developmentally and includes reciprocal visual, tactile, olfactory, taste, and auditory behaviors, cues, and fantasies.

Primitive precursors of object relations are evident on sonograms of intrauterine life (Piontelli, 1989). In Piontelli's studies, fetuses actively related to the uterine wall and sought out the umbilicus sometimes playfully, sometimes harshly, sometimes peacefully. The womb functions as a container, a “rumpus room,” a nest; the umbilicus becomes a familiar plaything. Both womb and cord are omnipresent aspects of the most fundamental meaning of “other.”

Sanville quotes Joan Erikson ( 1988) writing of the prenatal origins of creativity in the early mother-infant sensual surround. She maintains that

part of the biological purpose of the bodily activity of the foetus is to increase the sensations (themselves necessary … for the very development of the brain). … Hearing is already functioning in utero, and light and dark can be distinguished. After birth, visual experiences can lead to a veritable “orgasm of delight.” (cited in Sanville, 1991a, p. 431)

As these earliest interactions make their way into the analytic relationship, typically in wordless, pregnant silences, they provide access to the nonverbal, primitive precursors of emotional relating and underlie the transformational possibilities of regression.

Anal Erotism: Permutations of Desire

In the Introduction, we spoke of the metaphor of the rose growing from its roots in the fecund earth into the bloom of mature love. We also referred to our interest in the mother-baby sensual bond as it pertains to issues of anal erogeneity. It is this earthy, primitive soil of anal erotism we now till. The second narrative thread weaving through maternal erotic transferences centers on positive and negative fantasy re-creations of the developmental period of anal erotism. In it, the evolution of a patient's early object relations can be traced and reworked in fantasies of anal containment and expulsion, anal spoiling and valuation, and anal birth.

Although we do not believe these phenomena to be necessarily limited to any group, the patients who first illuminated our par-ticular perspective on these issues shared certain characteristics. They were intelligent, verbal, and successful in work; although free of overt perversion, they were particularly conflicted or uncertain about physical sexual characteristics. Some had had very early intrusive toilet training, including enemas. They presented themselves for treatment exhibiting obsessive-compulsive defenses against both their earliest erotic longings and their later sadomasochistic impulses. From the beginning, they exerted a powerful, sometimes even stultifying, control over the analytic situation. While some consciously craved the analyst's words and felt deprived of them, they nevertheless filled up the hours and allowed the analyst little opportunity for intervention. In many important ways, these patients resembled those described by Shengold (1985) as subject to defensive anal narcissistic regression. Safety, for such patients, resides in the ability to transform “life's intensities and precious people … into the indifferent and the trivial … [depriving] both … self and the analyst of variety, vibrancy and value”(p. 48).

We wondered if the obsessional defenses against erotism we saw in high relief in these patients existed over a broader clinical spectrum. While we found some cogency in obsessiveness as a defensive construction, our clinical focus stresses creative and reparative aspects of anal erotism, and we believe it is, in varying degrees and permutations, ubiquitous. For example, for some patients, attention to their anal functions through toileting and enemas, though sometimes perverse, intrusive, or harmful, represented their primary sensory tie to their maternal caretakers.

The anal erotism uncovered in the treatment of a surprising number of patients who had experienced enemas in early childhood first captured our interest. We saw that these ego-flooding experiences not only had been painful, humiliating, and overwhelmingly confusing to them as young children but also had been erotic. For these patients, anal erogeneity was a way into their earliest sensual-relational experience.

For some patients, anal interests centering on toileting are redo-lent of fantasies of cloacal birth. In the latter case, the fantasies of making a baby are not articulated oedipal, triadic fantasies reflecting genital strivings but, rather, are the more primitive fantasies typical of the preoedipal period, such as fantasies of babies made from mud, food, or feces. These aspects of maternal erotic transferences may manifest in fantasies of “making something special” for the mommy/analyst or bringing dreams into treatment like fecal babies to be proudly admired.

For others, the equation “feces equals baby” is a painful fact of their infantile self-experience. They believe themselves to have been a “shitty” baby whom mother wished to flush away. Transference manifestations of this aspect of MET often surround patients' core belief that they are not worth anything, that they do not deserve the analyst's attention. Conversely, patients may dispense with the analyst's “creative interpretations” as useless fecal babies to be forgotten or flushed away as waste product without value.

The Sensual Matrix in the Formation of Object Relations

A third element of the MET for both male and female patients can be understood as the patient's need to rework a primitive fractured narrative into an integrated view of the mother/therapist as a living whole object.

This third transformational aspect of the maternal erotic trans-ference is adaptive and represents a creative attempt to make the mother/therapist into a living, more dimensional whole person. In this sense, the transference offers a narrative of the development of object relations from part-object phenomenon to whole-object relatedness. At this point in the transference, it is the baby who is making the mother into a whole object, and the mother/analyst is often dreamed of as a container—a car, a pool, a room, a tray, a box. These are concrete transference manifestations in that they appear to be to the real parts of the body of the therapist—fluids, spaces, breasts, limbs.

This integration is prerequisite to the capacity to tolerate separateness and discover a relationship to Mother as Other. Under successful developmental conditions, this integration would have been accomplished by the mother's earlier sensual ministrations to the baby, whereby her continuity and consistency would have helped the baby to experience a sense of wholeness. When this developmental need has not been realized, patients may enter psychotherapy or psychoanalysis to deal with it among other issues.

The process of integrating parts into a co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• I Story Making
• 1 Words and Stories in Narrative Space
• 2 When the Story Doesn't Flow
• II Maternal Erotic Transferences and Countertransferences
• 3 The Maternal Erotic Transference
• 4 The Maternal Erotic Countertransference
• 5 The Birth of Desire Transforming Birth Narratives Within Maternal Erotic Transferences
• III Perversions: Derangements of Desire
• 6 Perverse Narratives The Threat of New Narratives of Desire
• 7 A “Horrible Dry Hollow” Lost in Arid Deadspace
• IV Permutations and Transformations Related to Gender
• 8 Erotic Terror in Men Fear of the Early Maternal Erotic Transference
• 9 Where's Poppa? The Appearance of Paternal Transferences in the Face of Early Maternal Transferences
• 10 Oedipus and the Spruce Goose A Narration of an Oedipal Transition
• References
• Index