On Love, Eros, and the Perverse

Introduction:

Recently with my students, I began a discussion about transference and counter-transference in psychotherapy, including erotic transferences and counter-transferences. The class seemed to cleave into two: those who regarded the idea of any sort of erotic feelings arising, in either direction, as "gross"; and those who didn't see what the big deal was. I'm not sure by whose response I am more disconcerted. 

Part of the difficulty turns on the wide variety of meanings attached to the term "erotic." I tried, following the ancients, to expand upon it as something much wider and more vital than the merely sexual or, narrower still, the genital. I brought in Freud's notion of the libidinal and its close links in to the notion of both "life" and "love." This gained traction with the students and also frank relief among them. At last they seemed to find a notion they could relate to: the erotic as something that excites deep and wide interest, even "passion," as people often say today, without necessarily implicating them in some sordid desire for sexual intercourse with whatever/whomever this objet is. 

In talking with them, I was of course drawing on what I've written previously about what I have learned, and am still learning, from Andrea Celenza, especially in her vitally important book Erotic Revelations: Clinical Applications and Perverse Scenarios (Routledge, 2014). I drew on her work with my students in attempting to illustrate the polymorphous ways in which erotic desire can arise in treatment. As Celenza shows, such desire, far from being avoided as it almost universally seems to be today, can in fact be helpful--but it can also lead to disastrous outcomes if not handled well. 

On the strength of how much I had learned from that book, I recently bought another of hers: Transference, Love, Being: Essential Essays from the Field (Routledge, 2022). There are riches scattered throughout this collection, one of whose chief virtues is that almost every chapter is 3 or at most 4 pages in length. 

The collection begins by reflecting on the disappearance of the notion of love in psychotherapeutic practice. And that reflection itself begins by referring to Philip Bromberg's work, who really deserves (and will one day achieve) an essay of his own on here. When someone introduced me, last fall, to his essay "Standing in the Spaces," it effected a sea-change in how I conceive of my own mind and the notion of selfhood and psychic change. It also changed for the good how therapy was progressing with one particular long-term case that seemed to be bogged down. 

Since then, I have used excerpts from his essay in a number of classes, and in every case it has stirred up lengthy and fascinating discussion. 

Celenza says that the splits in the self, which Bromberg focuses on, can be helped by reconsidering and reintroducing the notion and practice of love, properly understood, in the therapeutic relationship. 

Disappearing Love and Hidden Sexuality:

Along with the disappearance of any notion of love in contemporary practice, Celenza, in this book and her other one, has pressed the case more relentlessly and compellingly than anyone else I have read about the disappearance of sexuality and the erotic, citing a word-count Fonagy did some years back showing that terms like 'relational' are all over the literature today, but 'sexual' and cognate terms have taken a nose-dive. This leads Celenza to claim that "there is an unmistakable desexualization that pervades psychoanalytic theorizing...., an erasure of the natural erotic and sensual aspects of intersubjectivity" (p.75).

Celenza, later in this chapter, speculates that perhaps this disappearance has someting to do with the fact that, understood classically, "Eros is described as the son of Chaos, the original primeval emptiness of the universe" (p.76). She does not elaborate the point but the suggestion seems to be that therapy is often difficult enough without (one imagines some bedraggled, overworked, underpaid clinician moaning) introducing further potentially destabilizing and presumably difficult elements such as the erotic.

But at what cost do we exclude such things? In later chapters, she returns indirectly to the theme saying that "we must have the full range of affectivity at our disposal" in order for us to "help our patients...experience the excitements and mysteries within themselves" (113). These excitements, she notes a page later, "include allowing sexual desire to be present in our countertransference." The point of doing so, she repeatedly notes throughout the book, is to serve the patient: "the more we can acknowledge what we feel at work with our patients, the better we do." (Her earlier book, Erotic Revelations, has helped me greatly in seeing that such feelings can be stirred up within us in ways that unconsciously and blithely ignore our cultured notions of "gender" and "sexual orientation.") 

The Perverse and Sadomasochistic:

The essays in the final section are the ones I gravitated towards the most for I have for some time been engaged in trying to understand manifestations of what she calls "the perverse," including sadomasochistic fantasies and actions of some patients.

Some interesting work has been attempted here over the years, but there seems to have been gaps in the literature. Robert Stoller's book Perversion: the Erotic Form of Hatred, from the mid 1970s, seems to have been one of the first major works in the area. The topic comes and goes across the decades. There was renewed interest in the late 90s on the "perverse," and I have to say that it was a great surprise to see my first analyst's work in this area cited in Celenza's chapters and notes. (See also this essay by Dr. Louise Carignan, whose winsome necrology is here.) 

Celenza brings much (not all) of this literature together in chapters 30 and 31, which I found the richest in the book. She begins, rightly, by trying to define terms, offering "a contemporary definition of perversion that reveals a form of psychic functioning as a quality of being toward others, toward one's body, or toward internal objects" (p.139). This differs, she says, from past definitions which were almost always entirely behavioral in nature. She continues: "I propose that a perverse internal psychic mode is one where affective embodied and pre-reflective self-experience is split off or dissociated." 

Chapter 31 is perhaps the longest and most helpfully detailed in the book, and continues on these themes. She explicitly reviews the past literature to see what she finds still useful, discarding the rest. She says that any new attempt at defining the perverse must abandon "phallocentric and heteronormative assumptions." 

What does perversion look like in action? She begins by arguing that "persons engaging in perverse scenarios are attempting to imagine a one-person universe" (142). The tracks closely with cases I have seen clinically.

From here she lays out seven "characteristics that define a perverse quality of being." These are:

• Constriction and Constraint
• Repetition
• Objectification
• Sexualization
• Desire to Harm
• Means/End Reversal
• Absence of Symbolization. 

Taken together, these are usually brought to bear in constructing scenarios and fantasies to manage anxiety, ward off danger, and maintain control. As Stoller put it, sadomasochistic fantasies are usually ones of triumph that at some level are thereby trying to reverse the traumas of the past. They have a dead and deadening, self-reinforcing nature to them; their objects are sexualized to turn threats into pleasure; and there is very little ability to play with them in a symbolic register. She very helpfully elaborates on all these points in some detail, and with clinical material--as she does in nearly every chapter. 

Overall, then, Transference, Love, Being is a rewarding collection and I continue to be grateful for having been led to Celenza's work.