Main description:

In this richly woven study of preoedipal erotic experience, Harriet Kimble Wrye and Judith Welles focus on patients for whom early mothering did not sustain the flowering and subsequent transformation of early erotic desire. Such patients remain under the sway of a primitive eroticism that is often sadistic and invariably perverse. Successful analytic work requires accepting and containing the patient's primitive erotic needs; reconstructing the mother-infant narratives that sustain these needs; and mobilizing the patient's transformative desire to grow out of maternal eroticism to an adult love of self and others.

Contents:

Part I: Storymaking. Words and Stories in Narrative Spaces. When the Story Doesn't Flow. Part II: Maternal Erotic Transferences and Countertransference. The Maternal Erotic Transference. The Maternal Erotic Countertransference. The Birth of Desire. Part III: Perversions: Derangements of Desire. Perverse Narratives: The Threat of New Narratives of Desire. A "Horrible Dry Hollow": Lost in Arid Deadspace. Part IV: Permutations and Transformations Related to Gender. Erotic Terror in Men: Fear of the Early Maternal Erotic Transference. Where's Poppa? The Appearance of Paternal Transferences in the Face of Early Maternal Transferences. Oedipus and the Spruce Goose: A Narration of An Oedipal Transition.