The Narration of Desire: Erotic Transferences and Countransferences

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Summary: Narration of Desire, A Psychoanalyst's Perspective
Review: Although this book first appeared in hardcover in 1994, it has recently been released in Paperback edition by its original publisher, the Analytic Press as demand for it continues in psychoanalytic institutes and in training centers around the country. The Narration of Desire is written from the lively perspective of a feminist psychoanalyst whose theoretical underpinnings while Classical are broadly shaped by object relations theory, Bion, Klein, and intersubjectivity or Relational Psychoanalysis.
What is unique about Narration of Desire: Erotic Transferences and Countertransferences is its experience-near clinical material describing vivid encounters in the realm of the earliest bodily-based transferences and countertransferences. It takes up the transformative role of working within the therapist's capacity to hold his or her patient's body within her "MindWomb" for a kind of bodily based nearly non-verbal transformation.
Authors Wrye and Welles explain carefully the critical difference between physical touch, which is apt to foreclose psychological transformation, and working within the boundaried and safely symbolic psychological realm of "as if"--This well-written book continues to inspire and illuminate deep therapeutic work within these primitive bodily states of mind.