What is it about?
I highlight the ways in which a patient’s infant sexual history can manifest with palpable impact within the co-created analytic field. When maternal eroticism has not been plentiful and well attuned, significant clinical challenges ensue. A clinician’s embodied, libidinal capacity for analytic eroticism is essential in engaging a patient at the level of the maternal erotic matrix. A mutual encounter in facing loss is imperative in stimulating psychic growth.
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Why is it important?
Current conceptualizations of the analyst’s role stress that an analyst is a co-participant in the creative unfolding of a dyadic conversation meant to further the development of the patient’s capacities of mind toward increasing elaboration of personal meaning. Analysis offers a space to avow loss, to feel sadness, to grieve and go forward with libidinal vitality rather than remaining in psychic stasis. Like maternal eroticism, analytic eroticism promotes an expansion of the personality (Elise, 2019). This outcome requires the clinician’s libidinal investment, an investing that needs to be palpable to the patient as an alive aspect of the analytic field.
Perspectives
Grieving is a capacity, the development of which needs to be “stimulated” by holding open the reality of absence: to open the analytic field to the need for shared mourning rather than remaining mired in an extended retreat into grievance.
Dr. Dianne Elise
Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Analytic Eroticism: Commentary on Schoen’s “Erotic Entanglements”, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, July 2025, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/10481885.2025.2524328.
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