The Narration of Desire: Erotic Transferences and Countertransferences

By Harriet Kimble Wrye

In this study of preoedipal erotic experience, Wrye and 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0881631477
• ISBN13: 9780881631470
• Release Date: May 1994
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Narration of Desire, A Psychoanalyst's Perspective

Although this book first appeared in hardcover in 1994, it has recently been released in Paperback edition by its original publisher, the Analytic Press as demand for it continues in psychoanalytic institutes and in training centers around the country. The Narration of Desire is written from the lively perspective of a feminist psychoanalyst whose theoretical underpinnings while Classical are broadly shaped by object relations theory, Bion, Klein, and intersubjectivity or Relational Psychoanalysis. What is unique about Narration of Desire: Erotic Transferences and Countertransferences is its experience-near clinical material describing vivid encounters in the realm of the earliest bodily-based transferences and countertransferences. It takes up the transformative role of working within the therapist's capacity to hold his or her patient's body within her "MindWomb" for a kind of bodily based nearly non-verbal transformation. Authors Wrye and Welles explain carefully the critical difference between physical touch, which is apt to foreclose psychological transformation, and working within the boundaried and safely symbolic psychological realm of "as if"--This well-written book continues to inspire and illuminate deep therapeutic work within these primitive bodily states of mind.