Braving the Erotic Field in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children and Adolescents and Adolescent

"This new book from Mary Brady is unique in that it addresses a subject on which psychoanalytic publications are scarce. The reader will find thirteen chapters written by very distinguished analysts practicing in different parts of the world who bring their clinical experience together with some theoretical proposals.

For the title of this book, Mary Brady skillfully put together key psychoanalytic clinical concepts like "erotic transference and counter-transference" and the field theory coined by Madeleine and Willy Baranger in 1961-62.

Today, it is even more evident that the analytical situation now hinges on two centers: the patient and the analyst. The latter is not considered now the privileged observer. From this perspective, an analytic process in conceived as a total situation in which the focus is the transference-countertransference relationship.

I would like to suggest another factor: both patient and analyst live in a given culture. This is particularly striking in the treatment of children and adolescents, who are the ones most impacted by changes in society and culture. Nowadays we are contemporaries of a series of transformations in subjectivity.

This book is a must for child and adolescent analysts as it sheds light on the changes in sexuality that happened after psychoanalysis was born during the Modern Era, and the importance of being aware of the erotic feelings that arise during work with young patients. But I think that therapists treating patients of any age will benefit from this immersion in the clinic of eroticism in the analytical session."

Virginia Ungar, M.D., International Psychoanalytic Association President

"As if eroticism wasn't already elusive, child and adolescent work presents thornier problems still, so erotics in this clinical arena have been particularly absent, indeed taboo. Not so in this volume. Here is a collection of scholarly, intuitive, passionate and playful, chapters reflecting a brave and daring foray into the erotic field of child and adolescent analysis. Constituted in a suspended real, play therapy (child, adolescent and adult) elevates persons to characters dramatizing this hidden, passionate world. A co-created theatre, this is the real real; with courage and deft awareness, these papers show how play depicts it and what to say and do.

Read this book, learn from the best among us and find the child analyst within you."

Andrea Celenza, Ph.D., Author of: Transference, Love, Being: Essential Essays from the Field (forthcoming from Routledge)

"The essays chosen by Dr. Brady compel us to explore the ways in which we can keep alive the erotic encounter with our analysands. The essays utilize theory to be present in the encounter rather than to keep our distance. Given the often deep uncertainty we have about our own capacities to encounter eros in our relationships, the book is a powerful help in demonstrating how, from various theoretical positions, it is possible to explore our own awakened erotic countertransference in service of its awakening in the life of our analysands. This is a book to be read and thought about multiple times."

Ray Poggi, M.D., Training and Supervising Analyst, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California