Sadomasochistic relating: what's sex got to do with it?

The sexuality in sadomasochistic relating is most often viewed as defensive, functioning to erotize the repetition of earlier trauma, as a defense against painful affect, or as masking early, nonerotic needs for recognition and autonomy. However, this emphasis on the nonerotic dimension of so-called sexualized experience leads to symbolic interpretations of sexuality; this "deliteralization of sexuality" requires some embodiment in the concrete and literal, or metaphor is delinked from that which it is derived. Without discounting the validity of such formulations, this paper aims to put the drive (libido) back into formulations of sadomasochistic relations, and discusses the erotic dimension in sadomasochistic relations as an irreducible, hidden structure that both threatens and sustains the destructive attachment. It is suggested that sexuality is a driving force behind sadomasochistic interplay, while aggression may be recruited for defensive, concealing purposes. Through a case illustration, this paper demonstrates how sadomasochistic relating is symbolically penetrating, teasing, withholding, and intensifying in hate-inducing ways, all of which are designed to gratify and simultaneously harden the other. In many cases, sadomasochistic sexuality may be viewed as aggressivized, paradoxically, to maintain safety under the regressive pull of sexual and preoedipal longings.     

Different Strokes in Boundary Artistry: Commentary on Cooper’s “Blurring Boundaries or Why Do We Refer to Sexual Misconduct With Patients as ‘Boundary Violation’”

In this commentary, the useful idea of psychoanalytic process as boundary art is taken up, elaborated, and further conceptualized. Two registers of psychic experience are utilized: the mutual and asymmetric modes of relating inherent in and definitional of analytic process. In line with Steven H. Cooper’s ideas, the givenness of boundaries in the mutual realm constitute the psychic matter of self-other differentiation. In contrast, the asymmetrical register marks boundaries as asserted and intended to be actualized in behavior. The usefulness of “boundary violation” as an expression of a perversion of ethical commitments is construed as a justified and necessary phrase. Boundaries in the asymmetrical register, continually asserted, make play and flex in the mutual register possible and in this way form a dialectical relation. In concert with Cooper, these assertions reflect the power of boundaries to ‘allow us to get lost.’ Fallibilities in the ways theories can be coopted to erase (and thereby truncate) aspects of the psychoanalytic process are described as a misuse (violation?) of boundary art.     

The threat of male-to-female erotic transference

Vignettes from an ongoing psychoanalysis with a patient, Michael, are presented to illustrate the various dimensions of the erotic transference at different phases of the treatment. The relation to power, the experience and expression of aggression, how these may be organized by gender, and the female analyst's countertransference are discussed as potentially fostering or inhibitory in the development of an erotic transference. Traditional sociocultural gender stereotypes kept alive in fantasy can cause female analysts to subtly foreclose the impending threat of an intense erotic transference with male analysands due to a fear of outwardly directed male aggression. It is suggested that the maternal/containing transference can be unconsciously fostered by both analyst and analysand to defensively avoid expression of the aggressivized erotic transference in its full intensity. Similarities and differences in cases of sexual boundary violations with opposite-gender pairings are discussed.     

Analysts who commit sexual boundary violations: a lost cause?

The causes of sexual misconduct by analysts are discussed, as is the viability of rehabilitation for different types of transgressors. Common misunderstandings about the transgressor (such as the assumption of psychopathy and the likelihood of multiple offenses) are countered with a summary of data derived from the evaluation and/or treatment of over two hundred cases, most of them one-time transgressors. The typical characteristics of the analyst or therapist who engages in sexual misconduct are presented and discussed as qualities that are to some extent present in analysts generally. The temptation to deny this universal vulnerability is viewed as effectively replicating the kind of vertical splitting or compartmentalization that makes one vulnerable to sexual misconduct in the first place.     

From relation to the field: Modes of unconscious fantasy elaborations1

Abstract

Relational and field theories have much in common, despite divergent foundations. In this paper, several areas of divergence are selected, including the structure of the field as a relational matrix or as an unconscious joint fantasy of the couple; the fate and form of insight; and the nature of the unconscious as relational or ubiquitous. Differences in cognitive and attentional sets are identified and linked to different modes of insight. Using a clinical vignette, these divergences will be illustrated with an attempt to compare and contrast the two approaches through a discussion of how each lens highlights, expands, or forecloses different features of the analytic process. A mode of conceiving the unconscious as unstructured and multiple in potential is offered to reconcile divergent assumptions in therapeutic action. A consideration of Sandor Ferenczi’s clinical emphasis on relaxed technique, elasticity, and especially mutuality suggests that he would have been a field theorist were he among us today.