Desire: An Enigma Wrapped In Riddles Inside Mystery

Introduction:

I learn such things on Twitter. 

I forget to whom exactly to give credit for introducing me to Galit Atlas and her book, The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing, and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2016). It may well have first been Adam Rodriguez, but I know it was even more forcefully Taylor Zimmerman, whom I met with great delight in Indianapolis in April at the celebrated day with Jonathan Shedler. Over the coffee hour and in subsequent correspondence, Taylor strongly encouraged me to read Atlas, so I am grateful to him as to Adam. 

Atlas is the third person in an ongoing series of clinicians in whom I am finding much wisdom with regard to erotic dynamics in psychotherapy, especially in the transference and countertransference. The first of these was, and is, Andrea Celenza, about whom I first wrote here, and more recently here. 

She and Glen Gabbard are arguably the two leading scholar-clinicians writing on sexualized boundary violations in professional contexts, including clinical and clerical contexts. Given the power of their writings, and the fact these topics are almost universally ignored in all training programs, and even by licensed professionals, I am at the point now where I just flatly tell anyone who asks, and even more who don't, that they should buy all of Gabbard's books and all of Celenza's and read them. Were I in charge of training programs in this country for future clinicians of all sorts, I would absolutely make these two authors mandatory reading. 

Into this group I now can bring Galit Atlas, who writes in a different style and with a different focus than Gabbard and Celenza, but with them is still broadly in the field--hitherto often terribly overlooked or denied--of erotic dynamics in treatment. Her book, The Enigma of Desire, puts me in mind of another recent treatment by another psychoanalyst, Carlos Dominguez-Morano (whose utterly irreplaceable Belief After Freud should also be required reading, not least by Christians still talking bollocks about Freud), The Myth of Desire: Sexuality, Love, and the Self, which I have to go back and re-read. 

Right, down to business. 

Atlas on Maternal Erotics:

Atlas begins punchily enough in her introduction by arguing that "In treatment, adopting the role of a nurturing mother can function as the therapist's way to avoid the erotic material that emerges between her and the patient." This I take to be just another version of the important warning (echoed by Shedler, Maroda, McWilliams, and many others) that being too much of a "container" (Bion) or providing little more than a "holding environment" (Winnicott) will mean you ultimately fail your patient who is there because something is wrong and something needs to be changed, not merely contained. 

A second related warning follows from this later in the book (p.80): "our patients' traumatized self-states may collude with our own in order to protect the tender parts of the self, the other, and the treatment from damage by the aggressive parts." (This, of course, is reason #23689 for the psychotherapist to have had his or her own in-depth and intensive long-term psychotherapy, and to engage in regular supervision and consultation.)

Also early in her book Atlas makes plain her own debts to what she calls Kleinian mothers, who have led her to be able "to trust the mind to lead us to the most unknown truths and to believe that the ability to tolerate those tensions allows us to live and to love." She also mentions her debts to Laplanche and Kristeva, and Jessica Benjamin, especially this: "I do not believe we can definitely know what belongs to us and what belongs to our patients." 

This point, of course, puts one in mind of Thomas Ogden's celebrated notion of the analytic third, and of the inability, as he has also recognized, to know where the patient's experience ends and the clinician's begins. 

The Erotics of Writing:

There is a sensuous quality to Atlas's writing itself, not least in her case studies, which are presented here in ways that are less stilted and bloodless than one so often finds. That is to say, there is still a warm pulse in the people she writes about. 

Moreover, and more interesting for me who has long loved to write and cared deeply about the felicities and rewards of style, and who has often felt a flush of excitement in the exchange of ideas, she openly acknowledges that "While writing, I found myself...swinging from feeling overaroused and exposed to using ideas as a way to distance, process, and regulate" (p.30). Lest we miss the point, a bit later she quotes a famous 1989 paper of Ronald Britton in which he recounts a patient demanding: "'Stop that fucking thinking'!" From this Atlas deduces that "thinking is a form of the therapist's internal intercourse" (p.32). Just so! 

I can relate to that outside the consulting room, but also in, which she captures with equal candor: "I notice the movement between moments of sexual stimulation and arousal to use of theory....I believe we often experience the same movement as analysts trying to regulate ourselves and our patients when the erotic pervades the analytic space" (p.30). Guilty as charged! (If I find myself becoming very theoretical, or subjecting the patient to a lecture, than I know my intellectualized defenses have led to such an enactment, and, following Fonagy's counsel, I need to rewind the session back to the point where I was able to mentalize before the defenses were, uh, aroused.)

The Enigmatic and the Pragmatic:

The unique contribution that Atlas make, so far as I can see at this point, is her stress on what she calls Enigmatic and Pragmatic knowing. Much more could be said about this, but I don't want to give all of the book away, so suffice it for me to say that the enigmatic and pragmatic are tied to her dual understanding of the origins of, changes in, and different desires manifested in sexuality: "the erotic comes into existence when the sexuality that at the start was based exclusively on nourishment and satisfaction of hunger moves away from the functional and toward play" (p.41). 

Do not, she warns later, be too enchanted (as some of us who love Winnicott are inclined to be) by notions of play, for these, too, can be used to displace certain important things: "playfullness can be a seductive way to express erotic and aggressive contents...but it's important to note that it can also serve to obstruct erotic transference and countertransference" (p.81). Yes it can, as I've noticed in some sessions after the fact, and not without some chagrin! 

Sexual Longing and Erotic Manifestations and Their Dangers:

Her mention of the erotic obstructing transference material takes us back onto more familiar ground, also covered by Gabbard and Celenza, and then by David Mann, whose two books on the topic I began last weekend, and about which I will have a very great deal to say later (O lucky reader!). 

Rightly does Atlas note early in the book that "sometimes we underestimate how dangerous it feels to be part of a dyad." I try to remind myself of that at least a few times a week, and (for some reason) it always happens at the last turn of the corridor immediately before bringing a patient into my consulting room. In those seconds as I usher them in, I cast my mind back to the first time I ever met with a psychotherapist (a pastoral counselor as I recall) in my teen years (to discuss sexual matters, too!), and how anxious I felt: I try to get a feel for whether this person with me is also a bit anxious, which is an entirely understandable feeling for, as Atlas continues a bit later, "being a patient is a dangerous position" for the patient may feel "he is forced back into the powerless position of being a child to a seductive mother who penetrates and excites him, feeds him but also controls his food and will certainly abandon him, leaving him overexcited, humiliated, and alone" (p.37). 

Strong stuff! No wonder people on Twitter lose their bloody minds when you speak such thoughts aloud; no wonder my undergrads had a collective meltdown at the mention of any hint of anything remotely "erotic" in the therapeutic relationship; no wonder even licensed professionals shy away from these discussions at best, and at worst become amusingly and revealingly hyper-defended. 

Why would anyone submit to this humiliating penetration and abandonment? Later she notes some of its rewards: "Allowing yourself to be penetrated means embracing a more fluid structure that is based on unsolidified boundaries....This is not exclusively a feminine process" (p.69). Indeed not. 

Precisely my attraction to psychoanalytic thinking, starting with Freud, more than three decades ago now was because it seemed to be quite at home with the idea of the fluidity, the complexity, the ambiguity and ambivalence--the sheer messiness--of human sexuality. I have always been highly suspicious of anyone who wants to put it into neat boxes, or map it out on a linear continuum or Kinsey scale. None of us is ever "straight." 

Before going further, she reminds us that for many of us, we had (referring to Kohut) no "mirroring" of the erotic and sexual growing up: "sexual feelings are unique in that caregivers systematically ignore them and they are therefore unmirrored" (p.115). This will and will not show up in a variety of ways in life, and in therapy. 

For some this lack of mirroring can leave the terror of such feelings in place, and that is where you must begin in therapy: "are there ways to listen for, and to, the unique accents of the language of sex." And if those accents are ones of fear, then, nodding towards Bion, Atlas says that an early task of the second mind in the room is to help the first mind bear to think about those fearful desires and terrifying thoughts.

As you think about them, some of the difficulty of such feelings comes from the fact that "sexual longing presupposes a sense of loss and a hope of refinding." 

That refinding is not a straightforward path from infantile attachment to adult sexual longings. It is often much more complicated than that, and thus the clinician needs to proceed with due caution: "the secret psychoanalytic touch is always about tolerating the erotic in the room while not adding to the stimulus." 

Earlier, she notes that we can and probably should do more than that: "we try to hold the unknown darkness with them, tolerate the 'too muchness' of excitement, joy, horror, and shame." Later she will speak of the "suffering of pleasure, of the excess that the body and the mind cannot contain," to which some might give the name "lust" while others (here Melanie Klein) prefer to speak of "human yearning for an 'unattainable perfect internal state'." 

Enactments Made and Redeemed:

Atlas is making what seems to me a very significant advance on how we think about therapeutic enactments. That word is almost universally taken as a sign of danger and enactments seem almost always to be treated sternly. This mirrors, it seems to me, the early Freud and his unidimensional warnings about the dangers of transference and countertransference especially. Only after 1950 did we start to get some limited reflection on what positive things countertransference might contain, and only much later--that is, within the relational movement of which Atlas is a significant part--do we start to see people recognize that countertransference can often be a positive good and contain much valuable information.

Similarly, Atlas is, in the last section of the last chapter of her book, opening up new territory by arguing that enactments are not just "a return of past dissociated memories but rather as the threshold for the introduction of emergent ways of being, of an opening toward new relational possibilities" (p.150). Enactments thus "work toward the future."

They do more than that, as becomes clear in her attempted definition: "enactments may well be a central means by which patients and analysts enter into each other's inner world and discover themselves as participants within each other's psychic life" (p.150). This does not guarantee, of course, that all enactments will always have a positive outcome, but it does begin to help them lose some of their fear, just as we have overcome fear from a century ago of countertransference as a sign of an insufficiently analyzed analyst. 

A concluding word that reminds us of how demanding our vocation as psychotherapists is, for we "must straddle a paradox, always skeptical, questioning, seeking hidden meanings, searching for unconscious dynamics at play, the trailing edge, a hermeneutics of suspicion--while also, paradoxically, trusting unconscious process and surrendering to the continuous flow of the enactive dimension of analysis, relying on a hermeneutics of faith" (here referencing Ricoeur).