Jonathan H. Slavin

The innocence of sexuality.

The author explores aspects of sexual experiencing as they emerge in the course of development, especially as structured between parents and children. Is a certain mode of “innocent” sexual relating an important outcome of the developmental process, and does this mode have a place in the analytic process? The author suggests that the restoration of a capacity for sexual experiencing that is relatively free of convoluted developmental legacies may represent an important achievement in analytic work; and that the analyst’s participation in this process, using his or her own capacity for “innocent” sexual responsiveness, may be essential to this outcome.

Slow Dancing: Mind, Body, and Sexuality in a New Relational Psychoanalysis

Recent psychoanalytic writing has involved an effort to reintegrate the body and bodily experiencing into our understanding of the construction of the mind. This integration is critical for psychoanalysis because, as is increasingly clear in science, the physical brain, the body’s experiencing organ, and mind are one. As Kandel (2013) noted, “Psychotherapy is a biological treatment, a brain therapy. It produces lasting, detectable physical changes in our brain” (para. 11). Yet can we return to the brain, to the body, to materiality, to trying to find our minds in the body without returning to a fundamental psychoanalytic integration of the absolute centrality of sexuality in our mental development? Mustn’t a new relational psychoanalysis that reckons with the body in the mind also reckon with Freud’s compelling understanding of our sexual experiencing at the core and edge of our relational worlds? In this paper we explore some of the ways one’s individual sexuality, one’s sexual fingerprint, embodies all of the potential for human experiencing in ourselves and in relationship: the driven and surrendering, the edges of passion and violation, the paradox of relationship and dissociation, attunement and personal desire. Our focus is on sexuality in the powerful, brain-changing interactions between patients and therapists in the treatment process.

“The Legitimate Guiding Forces of One’s Behavior in the World”1: Discussion of “Generative Enactment: Memories From the Future” by Aron and Atlas

This paper takes up the issue raised by Aron and Atlas of the transformation of fate into destiny and the reacquisition of a sense of agency in one’s future. The paper suggests that past and future need not be framed as binary and examines the way in which struggles, traumas, and impasses of the past can also represent “legitimate guiding forces,” as Freud put it, for envisioning a different future. The paper illustrates this perspective with a clinical vignette.

“I Have Been Trying to Get Them to Respond to Me”: Sexuality and Agency in Psychoanalysis

Abstract Psychoanalytic theory has seen many changes in the past 100 years. But in the process, sexuality, as the centerpiece of our understanding of human motivation and conflict, seems to have gotten lost. As they did a century ago, clinicians today deal with sexual transferences and countertransferences. And issues of gender and sexual orientation are widely discussed. Yet, across most current theoretical perspectives, nothing compels us to focus on sexuality, as such, in the way that was once absolutely essential. During the same period, psychoanalytic approaches have consistently been concerned with questions of personal agency, i.e., its disruption in development and restoration in treatment. Indeed, the aim of treatment was traditionally understood as enabling patients to repossess their experience of themselves as “agents” in relation to their own disowned motives, affects, and drives (“where id was, there shall ego be”). In contemporary interpersonal, intersubjective, and relational perspectives, the issue of agency takes on even more central significance. This article explores how these two seemingly different conceptual and developmental frameworks—sexuality as a function of mind, and agency as a derivative of relational experience—may be compatible. Here, I examine the relationship of sexuality and the experience of agency in parent–child and analyst–patient relationships, and suggest that sexuality as such may yet have a central role in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking and in our understanding of the basic nature of psychic functioning.

Reading the Mind and Reading Freud: Some Reflections on the Work of Irene Fast

Abstract This article discusses some of Irene Fasts notable contributions to fundamental psychoanalytic issues. In nearly a half century of writing, at a time of significant transformation in psychoanalytic thinking and clinical work, Fasts ideas about differentiation processes in development, the formation of gender identity, and how the mind is organized and structured have been highly influential. Fasts precise, clear thinking, and her ability to get inside of the developing mind have been at the cutting edge of the interface between intrapsychic and Interpersonal/Relational ideas, while anchored in a serious appreciation of Freuds work. Fast was one of my first supervisors, and later a mentor and personal friend. Many of Fasts ideas have influenced mine, and this article describes how an application of Fasts views can significantly enhance psychoanalytic understanding of transference and of the “reversibility” of affective experience between patient and therapist in transference-countertransference dynamics.

Finding Margarethe Lutz

The editors of this series of papers review their efforts to ascertain the identity of Margarethe Lutz and the provenance of the accounts she provided of her consultation with Sigmund Freud. There is considerable evidence that she conveyed fundamentally the same account, with emphasis on certain critical features of her experience, in many interviews and writings, privately and publicly. The editors briefly highlight the main points provided in each of the seven papers discussing this remarkable consultation and acknowledge the considerable assistance they have received from many individuals in investigating, verifying, and bringing these important papers to publication.

Those 45 Minutes Changed My Life: The Meeting of Sigmund Freud and Margarethe Lutz

The editors of this series of papers introduce the account of Margarethe Lutz, a patient who saw Sigmund Freud for one session and spoke of it 70 years later. It was an experience, she said, that “changed her life.” The editors note that there are few, if any, accounts of treatment with Freud that illustrate in such detail the unfolding of an individual session. The editors asked the authors of the seven papers in this issue to address the question of what, in this single session, may have led to its life-changing impact and the implications this may have for the way contemporary psychoanalysts and psychotherapists think about their work.

“I Never Felt I Should Think About Freud”: From Authority to Liberation in Psychoanalytic Work

Freud’s project of personal liberation, the endeavor to free the individual mind, saturates his work. His very definition of adulthood is about “detachment from parental authority.” Indeed, in the session reported in this issue, the patient insists that her single meeting with Freud set her free, and that it lasted a lifetime. Yet it would seem that Freud’s use of authority as reported in this session contradicts this notion. This brief paper examines the paradox of reconciling Freud’s powerful way of working and the use of his authority with the patient’s experience of coming to matter as a person for the first time. The paper suggests that maintaining this paradox enables a place in which both therapist and patient are to be able to have their say.