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).

Gabbard and Bejnamin on Love and Hate

Freud won the Goethe prize for his magnificent German prose. We do not seem to have comparable prizes (so far as I know) in English to award to psychoanalysts like the venerable Glen Gabbard, whose prose is cogent and crisp, and written in an accessible and admirably humble way. In a future world when justice is finally and permanently established, that is, when I am at last emperor of all I survey, I shall bestow a prize on him. Perhaps we might call it the BST Prize. 

Having, as you will see here and here, recently written of how profoundly helpful I have found Andrea Celenza on the challenges of erotic and loving transferences and counter-transferences, and the associated problems of boundaries, it is no surprise to find Gabbard, in Love and Hate in the Analytic Setting, to be equally valuable on precisely the same points. Indeed, Gabbard and Celenza have collaborated on these issues in previous publications.

What follows is less a systematic reflection on Gabbard (and, toward the end, Jessica Benjamin, whose The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination I finished on the same weekend as Gabbard) and more a kind of "aphoristic plundering," as it were. I used to feel vaguely guilty about this method of reading (which I do not use all the time), but having been fortified by stiff doses of Winnicott, quoted lavishly by both Gabbard and Benjamin, I justify such a method to myself by saying I am "using up" both authors, consuming them as good objects, and they are manifestly able to survive this "destructive" consumption of mine. 

Gabbard on Love and its Limits:

Gabbard begins on a note that might seem commonplace to many but which, within the hidebound context of psychoanalytic schools-cum-ideologies, is startlingly rare to read: "No one theory had all the answers to the challenges we confront in clinical practice" (xi). With this one simple manumission, as it were, Gabbard frees himself to range widely and unapologetically over Freudian, object relational, intersubjective, Kohutian, and other analytic traditions, finding what is useful and leaving the rest behind--the very model of "plundering the Egyptians" (cf. Exodus 12:36) one expects, but infrequently finds, in scholars and clinicians alike. 

Chapters 1 and 2 went over well-trod territory (for me) in quoting Freud's famous line to Jung that "essentially, one might say, the cure is effected by love." Gabbard admires this but is also troubled by it, leading him, in the second chapter, to note that one common motive in choosing to follow a vocation to be a psychotherapist is that you wish to be loved and admired. This is fine, he seems to say, provided you come (as he will spend the bulk of the book doing) to grapple with how much "sadism and aggression are ubiquitous forces in love relationships" (p.43). 

You must, to be an effective clinician, not fall into the trap of assuming that love is all you need, for love never goes anywhere by itself: tagging along are always aggression and hatred, and your failure to recognize and deal with these can, at best, lead to stalemate in the treatment, and at worse destructive enactments of various sorts (up to and including sexual boundary violations, about which he has written definitively in several places, including here). 

Gabbard on Hate and its Purposes:

Hatred, Gabbard shows, has multiple functions. Inter alia, it can:

• organize the ego
• master rage and destructiveness to prevent them from getting out of hand
• "conceal longings for love and acceptance" (especially in the transference; p.47)

Why, we often ask, do we hate for so long? Why can we not adhere to the simple counsel, "let it go!"? Gabbard says that "to hate is to hold on to an internal object" which may have had some purpose, including maintaining some contact with that object which was and is better than no contact. Such contact cannot just be dropped by the patient alone: the ties that bind to the object, he argues, can only be undone via the transference. Once again, following Franz Alexander, we see that what we learn to hate in one relationship we can relearn to hate (less) in another, and perhaps even to love it (more). 

Gabbard sees"hatred as residing on a continuum." My crude attempt to illustrate his several points would look like this: on the mild end of the continuum we'd see attempts at control or "domination" (as Benjamin calls it); in the middle there would be preservation of the hated object, but with some sadistically inflicted suffering; and on the extreme end, we would find complete destruction of the object. 

Regardless of type, Gabbard repeatedly cautions the clinician against rushing in to change focus, or try to control the hatred, or urge the patient on to replace it quickly with "positive" thoughts or "happy" memories (or worksheets and breathing exercises one might add somewhat snippily). I have often felt the pressure to do so, but every time I have resisted such pressure it has turned out for the best. As he rightly reminds us, "with many patients the necessary depth of understanding is not reached until one has sat for a sustained period with searing hatred or painful longings" (p.65).

Gabbard reminds us throughout the book that we all have our own hatreds and propensity for aggression. We cannot, even as well analyzed clinicians, fool ourselves into thinking we are utterly incapable of such things. Thus, he seems to suggest, it should not be that hard for us to have empathy for the patient's hatred and aggression if they are relatively accessible within us. (He quotes Searles and often Winnicott on this point of having your own hatred and aggression close by.) If we do find those things hard to understand, then we have forgotten what Christopher Bollas said decades ago: "In order to find the patient we must look for him within ourselves."

No Collusion!

Gabbard reinforces an important lesson, especially relevant to work with teens or disaffected spouses, but in some ways to all of our patients and their diverse hatreds: do not collude in creating an extra-transferential object to hate together. A therapeutic alliance cannot be built upon having a shared person or movement or experience to hate. Remember: hatred and love always co-exist, and to indulge in one-sided and totalized hatred (of, say, your patient's spouse, boss, or parent) is to risk collapsing the analytic space, to destroy the therapeutic stage on which you need to be able to "play" with these things for the patient to move forward. 

How Special Am I?

At one point Gabbard says we must confront the tension inherent in this work: we can only be special to the patient by renouncing all other special relationships, including lover, mother/father, friend, etc.

I admit to finding this very helpful with certain cases from time to time which seem to evoke a very strong protective-paternal counter-transference (discussed weekly in supervision, I hasten to say!). Part of me wants to fill multiple roles for such patients, being special in a good 4 or 5 different roles they lack--but which I know I cannot play because doing so would actually be harmful. 

What I can do, instead, is make sure that this one role--that of psychotherapist--is done according to the best of my ability. Allen Frances, on one of his very valuable videos with Marvin Goldfried (some of which I have my students watch), says that at every session the therapist should ensure it is a memorable experience for the patient. Do not treat it as just an ordinary event because, he says, for some their appointment with you is the highlight of their week. Thus it is special for the patient even as I am not that special. 

Such tension is hard to maintain for some. Gabbard recognizes that the forbidden nature of the relationship can make it highly erotically charged. We might not even experience conscious erotic or sexual attraction to the person; but the fact that we operate inside the frame, with its restrictions on what and how we meet and work together, increases the desire some have for a deeper intimacy than is possible (or healthful). 

At the same time, however, erotic and sexual desires may not be the hardest to deal with. I admit I was rather stopped cold by Gabbard's claim that "Sexualization may also defend against feelings of love...,which are relatively more difficult for many analysts to acknowledge than lustful feelings" (p.91). I have never thought of that before, but in reflecting on it, especially in light of my own analytic therapy, I think I see the logic of this now.  

Gender Fluid Transferences:

Perhaps the most valuable thing I have learned, first in Celenza, and now in Gabbard, is that--as it were--the unconscious mind and its desires are not gendered in the ways we might consciously expect. Some of the transferences toward me have been baffling until reading these two authors who argue, as Gabbard does here, that "there is considerable gender fluidity in the roles played by both analyst and patient in the analytic drama, and if these are allowed to emerge without premature foreclosure, a variety of transferences may appear that involve both homosexual & heterosexual longings" (120). 

Thus, whether with male or female patients, and prescinding from their manifest gender and sexual identities, I can at times be mother, father, brother, lover, and many other objects in the transference. And my counter-transferences are not just what might be called "paternal" (this one seems the most obvious) but also (much less obviously) "maternal": on this latter point I am constantly reminded of how much the experience inside the consulting room is indeed a "holding environment" as Winnicott put it, a "container" as Bion called it, and how those contemporary-clinical experiences are not far removed from the primitive experience of being held and cradled as a child as one's upsets and unknown desires are contained by the soothing mother. 

Let me turn now from Gabbard to Jessica Benjamin. Her book The Bonds of Love is one I have found helpful in dealing with overly sadistic material in some patients. 

I will not go into the wonderful (I almost said masterful!) ways she spends the first part of the book going beyond the understanding of domination in Freud to bring in Winnicott and others. She very helpfully gets us past the rather narrow range within which Freud understood these concepts into a wider terrain from which we gain a broader perspective. 

Much of this is possible by returning to Winnicott on "The Use of an Object." There he famously outlined how objects can be used and are destroyed--but survive. Indeed, use and destruction are linked: they must be destroyed inside our minds in order to see that they can survive outside and beyond us. This is a necessary first testing of reality, and (unlike Winnicott) Benjamin says such a discovery of reality is not merely grim awareness, but can be joyful: the destroyed object has--I discover to my delight--survived after all. 

Benjamin says the utility of this experience lies in the fact it reminds us how interconnected we forever are to each other: "if we assume complete control over him and destroy his identity, then we will have negated ourselves as well. For then there is no one there to recognize us, no one there for us to desire" (39). In saying this, of course, what echoes loudly in the background is Winnicott's famous declaration "there's no such thing as a baby!" By that he meant that a baby is always and only an object-in-relation: to the mother, father, and others around it on whom it depends. 

This dynamic helps us understand relations between sadists and masochists. Both need each other to undergo but survive the experience. Both may arrive at love via the experience. 

For the sadist (and I must say Benjamin gives rather more attention to masochists: her attempt to understand sadists is much less developed), the "thrill of transgression and the sense of complete freedom" are tinged with "fear (guilt) that his aggression will annihilate her." Her survival, however, "creates for him the first condition of freedom." The survival of the masochist creates in and for the sadist a real feeling of "love." 

In turn, the masochist's "submission is ambiguous," Benjamin suggests. It is a "false self," that is a "compliant, adaptive self that has staved off chaos by accepting the other's direction and control, that has maintained connection to the object by renouncing exploration, aggression, separateness" (p.72). But in giving over to an experience of pain "in the presence of a trusted other who comprehends the suffering he inflicts," the masochist can find not just relief but also a form of love. 

There is something a bit too neat here, I must admit. But I have already inflicted my own form of suffering on the reader with this over-long reflection, so I shall rein in my sadism for now, recommending both Gabbard and Benjamin and their excellent books to those who are not familiar with them.

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.