EROTIC DESIRE IN THE THERAPY ROOM
DARE WE EMBODY IT?
CAN WE AFFORD NOT TO?
By Shoshi Asheri
(A talk given at the UKCP conference on the 11 September 2004)
As you know, the title I chose for my presentation is: Erotic desire in the therapy room: Dare we embody it? Can we afford not to?
I wonder what this title evokes in each of you? …I can tell you that right now I’m filled with a familiar cocktail of excitement and dread which I embody whether I like it or not, each time I’m about to share my thoughts about this subject in public. This, you may say, can be a description of a typical stage fright. No doubt. Yet, I believe that the subject itself contributes significantly to the intensity of my feelings. Moreover, the fact that this subject fascinates and excites me as a psychotherapist, and the fact that I’m about to expose this fascination and excitement publicly, increases my fear dramatically.
Why? Why am I so scared to have these feelings and explore them openly with you? Seeing how much is written about clients’ erotic transference and in comparison how little is written about therapists’ erotic countertransference, I’m clearly not on my own. So what are we, psychotherapists, so scared of?
First there is a general recognition of the powerful forces associated with the erotic and the sexual. The expression and exploration of these forces in literature, poetry, visual arts, music, pop culture etc. is evidence of our preoccupation with these forces. As we know, as much as it is associated with pleasure, great heights, longings, healing capacity, creation and creativity; it is also associated with greed, obliviousness, selfishness, invading and exploiting forces.
Freud was already aware of the high risk involved when working with erotic transference and countertransference. In 1914 he wrote,
“The psychoanalyst knows he is working with highly explosive forces and that he needs to proceed with as much caution and conscientiousness as a chemist. But when have chemists ever been forbidden, because of the danger, from handling explosive substances, which are indispensable, on account of their effects?”
(Freud, 1914, Observations on transference love. S. E. pp170-171)
Unfortunately, what followed this amazing invitation, as I see it, for therapists to play with fire cautiously and conscientiously were profound restrictions on the therapist requiring us to neutralize and be ‘unstirred’ by patients’ powerful desire (Freud 1915). Although much has changed in the psychoanalytic notion of the validity and use of erotic countertransference, I believe that we are still negotiating our way with the impact of the traditional notion that the erotic is a form of resistance and it is regressive (infantile) rather then progressive. Also, that erotic countertransference is a sign of unworked through material on the therapist’s part which needs to be taken to the therapist’s own analysis and certainly does not belong in the therapy room with the client.
Another major reason for our fear to deal with the erotic in the therapy room is the relationship between incest taboo and the strong code of ethics around sexual abstinence.
One of the supreme ethical values of psychotherapy, which runs beyond the different approaches, is that sexual activity taking place in therapy is a profound abuse of power. It is, therefore, unethical and liable for punishment when discovered. We know from psychological study of incest that when we meet a universal taboo we are probably facing a universal impulse.
It is enough for us to look at the strength of the taboo in relation to sexual involvement in therapy, to realise the strength of the impulse to pursue such an involvement. If we accept the idea that the intensity of the prohibition is reflective of the intensity of the desire; it makes me wonder what the touch taboo in the field of psychotherapy indicates. Is it to do with the strong desire to do so in the therapy room? Or is it to do with misconception about the nature of the touch we are talking about? Hence, for me, as a psychotherapist who believes that touch needs to be ‘on offer’ in certain situations, there is an extra anxiety attached to dealing with erotic desire in the therapy room and, more so, in dealing with it publicly.
So, to the question of what am I, and we therapists, afraid of: if we let ourselves engage with the erotic desire in the therapy room we will be stepping into a powerful, potentially explosive situation and may be swept by forces beyond our control. We may be burdening our clients with our own unworked through material, running the risk of unconsciously exploiting them for our own gratification and, by doing it, we may retraumatise them. Worst of all, this forceful material may be stronger than our ethical beliefs at some point and we may find ourselves crossing a forbidden line. If we add the possibility of touch to our work, we are truly playing with fire…
Coming back to my personal anxiety in talking to you about my way of working with erotic desire in the therapy room: in doing so you may sense my unworked through material and I may be found unethical in thoughts if not in action.
This is why, as David Mann put it, (1997) the subject of erotic countertransference went underground and ‘intimidated analysis from healthy disclosure to colleagues and supervisors’.
I think it is time to have as many open discussions about this subject as we can. We have a lot to catch up with, considering how practiced we are at talking freely about our clients’ erotic desire and how unpracticed we are at daring to talk about our own.
So I will start by coming out. Coming out as a therapist who thinks a lot about sexuality and the erotic in the therapy room. I think about it, I feel it and at times I dare to embody it. I think about it when it is there in the room, and I am suspicious when it is not there.
Am I simply obsessed with the subject? Am I seeking in the therapy room something I’m lacking in my bedroom? These are important questions which I ongoingly ask myself as a way of monitoring my position. However, there is much more to why I give this subject such a primary place. I believe that engaging with the erotic is a key for therapeutic transformation. I believe the erotic provokes and excites growth. It is an expression of the desire for connection and integration. I do it because I believe that being intimidated by the taboo and bypassing or diluting the erotic charge in the therapy room for the sake of safety, is not only missing a therapeutic opportunity but also risking reenactment (the avoidance itself as a starter) and even acting out.
In this talk, when I refer to erotic desire, I refer to the drive for physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual connection and integration within oneself and with another. I refer to the force that changes and invents new structures and forms new ways of being and relating. It is the energy that sits on the edge of change, where the habitual patterns end and the risky zone of new possibility begins. If you like, it is the desire to flirt with life and aliveness. When this desire is welcomed it can induce sexual feelings. So erotic desire can include sexual desire but it is much wider than that.
When I refer to sexual desire I refer to a more restricted urge for genital excitement and satisfaction.
Obviously both of these desires can be used defensively (for example, as a way of avoiding the unbearable pain of an earlier longing for nurturing and attachment) in which case I would refer to it as eroticised or sexualized desires.
The essential conflict we deal with when we work with the erotic charge, is the conflict between the desire or quest for connection, expansion, integration or simply, more aliveness versus the fear of tolerating all of the above. The fear manifests itself in the embodied armouring or resistance on a muscular, emotional and cognitive level. In short, we do all we can to stay within the safety of our habitual way of being and relating. Obviously, both client and therapist are caught up in this conflict. Therefore the point when the erotic enters the therapy room and brings the potential excitement and greater aliveness within both the client and the therapist and between them, also brings much fear. This can be described as a ‘charge’ that is felt both vertically (WITHIN the client and WITHIN the therapist) and horizontally (BETWEEN the client and the therapist). Very uncomfortable. This is the point where both client and therapist would do all that they can to go unconscious and become more comfortable again, i.e. back to the safety zone of the familiar (usually this is the point where we, psychotherapists, defend ourselves by hanging on to sophisticated therapeutic arguments against engaging with the erotic in the therapy room).
In this talk I am more interested in exploring what we, therapists, do with this ‘erotic charge’.
I want to bring an embarrassing example of the extent to which I blinkered my vision in order to avoid the erotic desire in the room. My only excuse is that it was many years ago…nevertheless… I should add here that identifying details have been altered to protect the anonymity of my clients.
My client was a woman in her mid-thirties; Jewish; second generation to the holocaust. She grew up with both parents who were holocaust survivors and deeply damaged. The atmosphere in the household was deeply confusing. On the one hand they showered her with all possible material things attending to all her wishes ‘like a princess’ as she said, on the other hand there was a lot of violence, verbal and physical, between the parents with an edge of sexual excitement attached to it. The violence was never directed at the children but the feel of sexual excitement attached to violence was free floating. My client’s presented reason for coming to therapy was a series of abusive relationships with men. ‘I can only feel loved if I am bruised’ she said. In her appearance she was like a little girl dressed in sexy clothes and her behavior with me was a reflection of that. Like a young child she was very demanding of my full attention, stretching boundaries of time and money as much as she could with very little awareness of me as a person. I was at her service. On the other hand, she was witty, highly intelligent, intellectually stimulating and flirty in a non-personal kind of way. Habitually. Although I had been working for few years as an existential psychotherapist, I was at a point where I had ‘discovered’ the power of body psychotherapy, particularly the biodynamic approach, and I truly believed I had the answer for her deep distress. I would take her places she never been before. I would help her experience gentle, truly tuned, unconditional love, like the ‘good enough mother’ she never experienced before. In short, I would show her that it is possible to be deeply touched and met without being bruised.
For nearly 2 years I stuck to my narcissistic plan, ignoring all my accumulating fury at feeling used, played with, unseen, teased. Even my frustration with not having much effect on her tendency to get involved in abusive sexual relationship didn’t raise enough alarm bells. I wanted to believe it was a question of time and persistence and I took comfort in the occasional sense of tender contact we did manage to have or her temporary ‘melting’.
One session when she yet again told me how inflexible I was with her need to change the session time because her hair dresser couldn’t shift her time, I lost it. I lost it big time. I was like a guilt tripping Jewish mother going wild. I told her, shouted at her, what a spoilt little princess she was and how ungrateful and unseeing she is of all my efforts to meet her and how I have been going out of my way…too embarrassing to get into details.
Essentially I lost all therapeutic position and I was verbally battering her in an out of control way. I completely shocked myself and, I assumed, her. When I managed to recompose myself and look at her I was even more shocked. She was smiling at me with a grin that felt very alive; there was a kind of sexual pleasure in her smile. She felt met by me like she hasn’t had before…at last she felt her impact on me and I was deeply impacted as she could see. I was visibly shaking and out of control…metaphorically, she brought me to a violent orgasm.
I was not sophisticated enough in my understanding to use this interaction to its full. She is one of those clients who is still haunting me because I can see now what I couldn’t see then. This is obviously a complex case which can be understood in many ways. I want to draw your attention to one aspect. My resistance as a therapist to engage with the erotic desire which was very uncomfortable for me. The erotic desire that had a violent edge to it. If you like, the sado-masochistic desire which my client grew up with and desperately tried to introduce to our relationship so she could work through it.
In my resistance, I infantilised her longing to integrate her erotic and sexual parts of her self as a woman, by putting all my emphasis on her deprivation as a little girl. By clinging on to my position as a loving unconditional mother I was operating from a safe but not fully engaged position. In a way I desexualised her by relating to her pre-Oedipal needs and bypassing the oedipal struggle to establish a sense of sexual identity in relation to another. She did what she could within her parameters, to call me to come to her in a different way and I did all I could to not go there. Probably because if had I let myself engage emotionally and then embody what she provoked in me I would have had to feel a new and frightening place in myself - my erotic desire to make her, FORCE her to see and feel me and my existence. If I had let myself go there, I probably would have identified my wish to penetrate her and reach her in places I could not manage to reach with my gentle touch. Searls (1979) argues that one reason for therapists to cross the boundary and become sexually involved with clients is an outcome of frustration when all the therapeutic tools they know of didn’t manage to reach the client’s resistance. In that sense, an erotic countertransference can be understood as a wish to metaphorically penetrate defensive barriers in order to be more effectively reaching of the client.
I did not fall into sexual acting out but in resisting my erotic countertransference I did act out my frustration rather than engage with it and use it therapeutically.
You may ask yourselves what would I have done then if I had the understanding I have now. This is obviously a hypothetical question, but it might be useful to explore, at least, ways of thinking about it. I imagine trying to understand my desire to forcefully penetrate her in order to claim my existence, as a projective identification of her position in relation to her parents who where so damaged themselves that they couldn’t see her existing in her own right. (She was either precious evidence for their survival, so precious that she needed to be treated like a princess, or she was an unconsidered audience to their internal and external ongoing nightmare).
In order to access her internal experience in a fuller way, I would have to look at how this projective identification might resonate with me and my own story. I imagine that something about using sexuality as a way of fighting for a fuller sense of existence would feel familiar to me. The point where I would have to stretch my own line is in exploring my relationship between sex and violence or sex and power. I would be sent to an unfamiliar, and not necessarily comfortable, zone which is my relationship with sadomasochism. I imagine wanting to explore it both on a personal level (what do I feel or think about it and is it, maybe surprisingly so, unconsciously manifesting in my life, maybe not in an obvious form like hers, but nevertheless). In other words, I would want to challenge my prejudices.
I would also do it by expanding my awareness and knowledge of this issue on a cultural level (reading and thinking about S and M, the connection between the holocaust and sexual violence etc.). From this expanded awareness I would want to meet her energy where it is, rather than where I thought it should be. I would do it by walking a fine line between having a taste of such a relationship between us and being able to reflect on it. That is, we would develop a symbolic language which allows the exploration of erotic excitement via ‘playing’ with the power relationship (to the extent that ethics allow and no retraumatising is happening). Using verbal exploration, imagery, fantasy, relational bodywork etc., we could explore the line where her habitual position (excitement via being bruised) ends and something else less predictable can emerge. The purpose is not to get rid of her habitual position, but to grasp the meaning of it, take what is appealing and healthy for her out of it and question the part that is not healthy by taking the risk of going to a less predictable place. It might be a place where tender love and a mutual intimacy can occur but it might be something different altogether. This is for her to find out and not for me to dictate (like I tried to do originally in mothering her tenderly). I think that if I managed to provide such a context for therapeutic exploration, both of us could potentially experience a relationship like we never had before which she could then take to her life outside of therapy and I would too.
I want to move now to talk about less hypothetical situations where working with the erotic desire did manifest in practice and try and formulate the considerations I tend to take into account to guide my interventions.
Mann (1997) talks about the psychoanalytic situation as an expression of sexual intercourse. He sees two aspects to this perception.
1. In his view the client’s way of relating in a session often will mirror how they relate during sexual intercourse.
2. He sees a parallel between psychic change, birth and growth and physical birth and growth.
‘Following a creative psychic coupling between the patient and the analyst, change in the therapeutic encounter follows the same path of conception, gestation and labour as does the body.” (Mann, 1997 p.120).
Whether I fully agree with him is a discussion in its on right, but I certainly share the view that thinking of the psychotherapy encounter metaphorically, as an act of love making, can be very useful in understanding the client’s internal world and the transferential dynamic. By now, I have learned how vital it is to let my imagination take me where it/I need to go. That means that many times I find myself imagining how would it be to make love with this client. I try to embody the fantasy and catch what will be my initial, spontaneous reaction to this thought:
Excitement? Repulsion? Indifference?
What part of me will it call upon? Feminine? Masculine? Maternal? Playful? Sexual?
What part of my body will feel involved? Breasts? Mouth? Genitals? Brain?
What will be the nature of the contact?
Will I be required to sit and watch them making love to themselves? Would we be lying down enjoying with great intensity our intellectual exchanges but be untouched or untouching from the head down? Would they want my participation?
How much of my own passion do I imagine they want to witness and how much of it they can actually take?
Will they want me to be gentle and soft or would they like to be met with more thrust and penetrative energy?
When I work with a couple I let myself go into a threesome scenario trying to get a sense of what will it feel like between each couple of the triangle and how would it feel between us as a whole?
If I dare go into such images, if I do not let the potential shame or guilt that such activity can provoke, paralyse me, I can find some incredibly rich and otherwise hidden information about my client, myself and the transferential dynamic between us.
I remember a client of mine who was in her forties, in her second marriage, with three young daughters. She was in the caring profession, very disciplined, conscientious and hard working. Her beautiful red hair was arranged in a tight bun on top of her head which always made me self-conscious about my own unruly hairstyle. She was in a mid-life crisis when she arrived with lots of restlessness about her current life but at a loss as to what she actually wanted to change. She talked very little about her sexual life, apart from saying that it was not much fun, and another side comment about not letting her girls keep their hands under the duvet before they go to sleep because ‘you never know what they might get up to’. I felt puzzled by the level of flowing affection I felt towards her considering how contracted and somewhat puritanical she appeared to be. I was also aware that I couldn’t go far with using the love making metaphor. Something was not allowed between us. About 2 years into our work together she arrived to a session with her hair loose. I couldn’t but admire her hair and looks. She immediately apologised for coming in before rearranging her hair. I managed to hold the moment with her and help her identify the pleasure she was not letting herself feel. She blushed and tolerated the pleasure for about 3 seconds starting to tell herself more than me about an erotic dream she had but very quickly stopped and started to put her hair up again. For a split second I had an image of her letting herself have a moment under the cover while I was watching but it was soon gone. I said: I feel like you let something happen under the cover but decided to put your hands out again because ‘you never know what you might get up to’.
This became part of our language in our sessions and slowly she tolerated longer moments by herself exploring herself under the cover. This gradually moved to a crucial point where she realised she was getting pleasure out of me watching her (as I understood it, she could tolerate her own pleasure enough to allow her desire for another to come into her vision). Eventually, after few months of many-layered explorations she wanted me to ‘join her’ under the covers. We went through a period where she needed a very delicate holding of the thoughts and fantasies in relation to her attraction to me. It inevitably took her to question her attraction to women in general. Neither she nor I knew whether her sexual orientation was truly in question and whether this was part of her restlessness. For her, having a sexual desire and a relationship with another woman was entertaining the unthinkable. I was questioning my position and my responsibility in allowing ‘the unthinkable to be between us’. I checked my countertransference intently. I felt myself responding to the erotic desire, feeling deep excitement as we were entering more into unknown possibilities but I was interested to realise that I didn’t experience it as sexual desire. It was not located in my genital area. In my images I was not called upon to mutually explore sexual desire but rather to witness self-exploration via her identification with my attractiveness as a woman. In my assessment, and through my own supervision, I came to think that it was not that I was resisting the possibility of sexual desire between us, but that the more dominant desire in the room was her desire to flirt with unthinkable possibilities and I was a vehicle for it. Nevertheless I was willing to drop this hypothesis if her sexual orientation would turn out to be the real issue. After 5 years of working together my client managed to loosen up to the extent that she could have her hair down and her attractiveness seen for longer periods of time. Her sexual relationship with her husband improved to some extent. She also identified a secret passion she had for horses as what she really wanted to have in her life, but perceived as a fanciful dream. Eventually she moved to the country with her family and a pregnant horse that she bought. I do not know if her sexual life transformed dramatically but I think her life as a whole did. She followed her secret desire. How much of it was to do with allowing the unthinkable in the room? I will never know but I believe that if I didn’t pay attention to the location of the countertransference in my body, if I took what was happening only as a question of sexual orientation rather then remain open to wider unpredictable possibilities, I could have hampered her process.
One of my supervisees asked me: am I allowed to feel so aroused when working as a therapist? This is not dissimilar to a question I ask myself as a mother when I step into my daughter’s bedroom to wake her up in the morning, gently moving her soft curls from her face, uncovering her little warm body from under the duvet and picking her up into my arms feeling her silky skin touching mine. She is in her most innocent stage between unconsciousness and consciousness. As she wakes up I feel flooded with love, ‘Mumma I love your smell’, she says and starts licking me in a playful way. ‘You’ve got goose pimples’, she says, ‘I’m going to call goose pimples nipples’, she laughs. ‘I can give you nipples’, she teases me. (She is on the cusp between innocence and new awareness of erotic language).
By now we are both laughing uncontrollably tickling each other.
Am I allowed to feel so embodying of the love between us?
Am I allowed to be so erotically alive holding my daughter in my arms?
Both my supervisee and I feel like we step into a forbidden zone where we have feelings we should not have. A ‘misconduct’ in its own right. Are we betraying our ethical responsibility? I think it is limiting to think of the therapeutic position as a parental one but to an extent we cannot ignore the relationship between the two. If we accept the notion of transference then we have to take into consideration the notion that our clients’ erotic longing for us is, many times, an incestuous longing (the longing for the good parent they never had) and, as such, the incest taboo applies with all its power. So what kind of relationship do we want to have with this necessary taboo?
Going back to my daughter. If I let myself be intimidated by the incest taboo to the extent that I have to stop the kind of interaction I described in order to avoid the risk of responding erotically; I would deprive both of us, but particularly her, from an essential opportunity to experience physical intimacy which will give her an embodied sense of self in relation to another. I want to believe that by engaging with the taboo rather then being overly obedient to it I pass her the message that yes, she is gorgeous and that her gorgeousness is welcomed and fun to be with. I also pass her the message that she is affecting me, both emotionally and physically. I want to believe that I pass her the message that yes; this is who she is and how she can affect others. She is safe in my arms because her gorgeousness is for her to have and live out and not for me to take or hold on to.
Andrew Samuels’ concept of ‘erotic playback’ is relevant to this discussion. This is how he terms the way in which a parent communicates to children of both sexes that they are admirable, physically desirable and erotically viable creatures.
This is a challenging position to have as a parent. You are required to be able to tolerate the charge between having the feelings and containing them at the same time. As we well know, many parents either don’t mange to allow the feelings or do not manage to contain them. As therapists we have to pass a similar message to our clients who come to us to explore and integrate themselves as desirable and sexual beings. In facing a similar challenge we also run a similar risk: either not letting ourselves feel the erotic desire or acting it out.
Some would say that if you add touch to it, the risk is much higher. Is it?
What is the place of touch when working with the erotic desire in the therapy room?
Even for the most radical writers who call for more engagement with the erotic desire in the therapy room (Mann, Messler Davies, Samuels, Orbach), touch is where they draw the line. It is hard to explore this issue without first discussing the question in principle, meaning: what is the place of touch in psychotherapy generally. This is obviously a paper in its own right. However, in this context I would want to give you a taste of what guides me when I consider touch in psychotherapy and more specifically when I consider touch while working with erotic desire.
As you may have gathered, I started my career as an existential psychotherapist with deep beliefs in object relation thinking. I took pleasure in my self image as an open minded psychotherapist, who sits at the edge of both the humanistic and the psychodynamic approaches, grappling with the tension and connection between them yet not being confined by either of them. This self image got somewhat dented when I realised that there is one area in which I felt confined in an absolute position. The ‘ no touch taboo’. I believed that there is no place for physical touch in the therapeutic encounter and I had all the familiar and good arguments to back it up. For example: touch provides gratification and therefore traps the client in a positive or limited transference, the absence of physical touch facilitated the development of the symbolic level, the therapeutic relationship can be easily sexualised by touch and can lead to transgression of professional boundaries and anyway, look how Reich’s work took him to a dodgy place…
As valid and convincing as these arguments were, my clinical work and of course my dented self image, led me to question this absolute position. Is it possible that my need to hold it so absolutely is somewhat defensive? Is it possible that by being so absolute in assuming ‘no touch’ I bypass or deaden a complex, rich and potentially creative conflict?
‘To touch or not to touch and, if to touch, how to touch’ became a question that entered my mind in most sessions. Eventually I realised that this is such a complex question that it requires a whole new training. This was the point when I started to train at the Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy only to discover that they are still asking themselves the very same question…Many years later, as a trainer and supervisor, I still ask this question together with my students. As you realise, I found no recipe but I deeply believe in the importance of a therapeutic culture which is ongoingly engaging with the question and is willing to risk therapeutic interventions which may include touch.
These are some clarifications in relation to the kind of therapeutic touch I refer to:
· As opposed to the body therapies which use touch in an attempt to treat and relive a symptom, (i.e. an alternative to the medical treatment) the touch I refer to aimed at deepening the engagement with the feeling (be it emotional or physical). Rather than ‘soothing the feeling’, ‘treating’ it or ‘getting rid of it’, the touch is used as a way of accessing more unconscious material.
· The nature of the touch is varied and at times unpredictable as it is not dictated by a technique (although technique may be involved), but by the client’s material and the therapist’s creative ability to illustrate and bring to life the internal emotional dynamic as an external physical manifestation. This in return provides a here and now embodied experience where verbal interventions and explorations can take place.
· Physical touch may or may not happen according to different therapeutic considerations, (some are not dissimilar to the considerations we take before a verbal intervention which may ‘touch’ the client in a particular way).
· The most fundamental guideline to the decision whether to touch or not to touch and if to touch how to touch is the nature of the transferential dynamic.
Let me give some examples which will take us back to the erotic desire:
As a rough map I would say that I try to assess whether the erotic desire in the room indicates issues which are pre-Oedipal, Oedipal or post Oedipal. This is where the use of the therapeutic interaction as a metaphor for lovemaking gives me a lot of information. My embodied countertransference becomes an essential asset.
When working with pre-Oedipal material the transferential dynamic is likely to be based on the longing for an unconditional nurturing. I am likely to have a maternal bodily response which can be erotic but hardly likely to be genital. In this situation I may find myself, through images or physical sensation, thinking of breast feeding, nurturing or on the other side feeling overwhelmed or resentful by the demand on my energy (sucked dry) and so on. I perceive it as the client’s quest for increasing the formation or definition of self. I may chose touch which will increase body awareness, skin boundary, a differentiated sense of where the client begins and where they end. The erotic orientation is more sensual and, if it is sexual, it is not yet relational. In short, if I choose to touch, the touch will aim to deepen the vertical connection within the client in order to facilitate an embodied sense of self.
When the material is Oedipal, the erotic charge is likely to become more relational. My position as a nurturing mother can become a passion killer, curtailing other more exciting and complex explorations. I may become an object of desire or a source of disappointment. I may become the idealized parent/lover or a rival or competitor. Issues of love, possessiveness, envy and competition are likely to surface. I believe that the nature of touch, if we choose to go there, needs to take this complexity into account and illustrate the relational dynamic.
For example, I worked with a male client who was caught up in a profound ‘pull and push’ dynamic with his mother. He was struggling to find his sexual potency in the face of her needy and manipulative behaviour. This client gained a profound embodied insight by using what I would describe as relational body work. We found a way to illustrate his internal object dynamic, bodily. I asked him to sit on the floor in front of me and let me pull him towards me by his arms while at the same time he could push me away using his legs and sensing what was happening to his pelvis and genital era. We then played with various options following his changing impulses. For example, at some point he started ‘flirting’ with his feet playfully and teasingly touching mine. This developed to him pulling my legs towards him with his legs by increasing his pelvic movement. By slowing the process down and combining verbal exploration while it was going on, the sexual man was clearly waking up, looking at me the old/new object and wondering what he wanted to do with his arms. If he pulled me with his arms would his need as a boy grow; would he castrate his newly emerging potency? What is the place of his need when he is sexually coming to life? As we went on with the physical and verbal exploration using images and fantasy at the same time, he could realise physically, emotionally and cognitively the power of his longing to come towards me and at the same time his rage and need to push me away in order to make more space and feel the power of his pelvis and genitals. The conflict between the little boy who was still seduced by his mother’s need (and his own) versus the man who wanted a new and different expression, came to life. As he was using more of his pelvic strength I could feel my pelvic area responding to him. If you like, as he was embodying himself as a man he became sexier and I responded to it. In his case, at this stage, it was crucial for me to notice my sexual response but hold it only as information because his emerging sexuality as a man was young and I could easily burden and overwhelm him with my feelings. One devouring mother was enough for him to deal with at this point. For a while he needed me to silently contain my feelings so he could develop his. He needed me to hold the tension between being the old object and the new one all at the same time. I believe that the embodiment of the dynamic within each of us and between us escalated his sense of urgency and agency. The man who desired to separate enough from his mother could feel the potential sexual power he possessed within the safety of the therapeutic relationship. Later he was able to check with me his effect on me. As I understand it, he gradually moved towards entertaining the possibility that as a man he can have an effect on a woman.
Obviously an integral part of the work with the erotic in the Oedipal stage is to do with welcoming and celebrating the emerging sexuality, and dealing with the disappointment that this can not be consummated with you, the parent/therapist.
Finally, some words about working with the post-Oedipal stage. For a long time I tried to define and formulate an experience I have with certain clients mostly towards the end of our therapeutic work but not necessarily so. In these situations I feel paradoxically very relaxed as a therapist but highly alert as a person and a sexual woman. When clients either arrive particularly mature to the therapy room or they have worked through much of their material and we are approaching an ending, the issue they now present is their need to integrate their sexuality and eroticism as adults in relation to another SEXUAL adult, as opposed to a parent. There is a feeling in the room of an erotic desire which cannot be engaged with if I remain only within my role as a therapist. In my countertransference experience, my responses are more spontaneous, less censored by therapeutic thinking as if my client and I by now share a common language that can already differentiate, to an extent, an idealised notion of me and me as a person. As if they want me to respond to them as one sexual person to another. It is not about pursuing it, yet entertaining the possibility by both of us is therapeutically essential. I find this place fresh and liberating as I do not feel the need for the same level of measured responses. Yet it is truly scary because there is a very thin line to hide behind. It is me, the sexual woman, they need in order to truly liberate themselves from an Oedipal attachment into full adulthood. This is a place I’ve been working with for a long while but found it tricky to formulate so I am still full of questions. I was thrilled to find an article which related to the very subject. It is called: ‘Between the disclosure and foreclosure of erotic transference and counter transference: can psychoanalysis find a place for adult sexuality?’ by Jody Messler Davies. In this fascinating article, she describes an interaction with a client who she worked with for long time who says to her 'forgive me if I’m wrong, but I think you’re flirting with me’. After a detailed and tortured theoretical explanation in which she clearly preempts all the attacks she is imagining she’ll get from her colleagues, she tell us her response to her client: “I think you were right, I hadn’t been aware of it until you said something, but I’m flirting with you”. This is taken out of context but I believe that it is a good example of a point when the most therapeutic response to the desire in the therapy room, is the therapist undressing some of their masks and showing themselves to their adult client in their humanity. This is the point where I feel the full intensity of my love for my clients and at the same time I start letting them go into having their, hopefully, more integrated erotic self with other adults. Obviously what holds this moment is still the containment of the structure which allows the engagement with real desire but not the acting out of it. I love them, desire them and I let go of them.
What is the place of touch at this stage of therapy is what I’m still grappling with. All I can say is that at this point in particular, nothing that smells like a therapeutic exercise or technique would do. It has to feel real and adult and, therefore, paradoxically spontaneous yet controlled. It is a touch that needs to illustrate the optimal tension between therapist within a role and the therapist as a person. The line between the transferential relating and I-thou relating is stretched to its limit.
Like any theoretical map, this one is intended only to facilitate our thinking process. In clinical practice it is never as clear-cut or as linear a process as it might sound from this description. As we all know from our own personal erotic experiences as well as from our work with clients, an erotic interaction can start from a post Oedipal position and evoke within minutes Oedipal and/or pre-Oedipal material. As therapists we are required to develop fine-tuning and move positions flexibly and fluidly. That is the art of this work.
To my supervisee’s question, “am I allowed to feel my erotic desire when working as a therapist?” I would go as far as to say that it is our responsibility to do so!
The explosive material is in the therapy room anyway. I would rather learn to play with it, touch it, consciously and artfully and, by doing so, risk the chance of therapeutic transformation.
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