Touching Becomes Touching: Mind, Body, and Sexuality in a New Relational Psychoanalysis—Reply to Discussions

Abstract

In reply to discussions of his paper “‘If Someone Is There’: On Finding and Having One's Own Mind,” the author expands on Gentile's views of the creation of mind in its encounter with material and bodily reality. The author suggests that a new relational psychoanalysis that reckons with the body in the mind cannot escape reckoning with Freud's compelling understanding of sexual experiencing at the core and edge of our relational worlds. In sexuality, in one and the same moment, the paradox of the human mind and of human relationship is illuminated: the capacity to hold the other in mind, to hold them as the bestowers of our experience of agency; and at the very same time, to erase them as we privilege the desires of our minds, felt so urgently in our bodies.

Keywords:

• agency
• body
• mind
• relational psychoanalysis
• sexuality

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Miki Rahmani, MA, for her careful reading and substantive suggestions on this discussion.

Notes

¹Fenichel's brief volume is out of print and may be difficult to find. However, the basic text had been previously published in a series of articles in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly (1939).

²In Fenichel's (1941) terminology: “… an interpretation in the true analytic sense … is a real confrontation of the experiencing ego with something which it had previously warded off” (p. 46).

³In this context, Renik's paper (1993) on the analyst's subjectivity, well-known for its contribution to the advancing relational perspective in psychoanalysis, is also a remarkable essay on the way in which the analyst's bodily experiences and behavioral manifestations, often implicit, presage the analyst's capacity to think about his or her personal motivation and countertransference in the clinical process.

⁴It's almost impossible, writing this discussion, to not take note of the material references we use when we communicate. A picture. Something we see. Something material.

⁵In “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912) Freud wrote:

… we are thus led to the discovery that all the emotional relations of sympathy, friendship, trust, and the like, which can be turned to good account in our lives, are genetically linked with sexuality and have developed from purely sexual desires through a softening of their sexual aim, however pure and unsensual they may appear to our conscious self-perception. Originally we knew only sexual objects; and psychoanalysis shows us that people who in our real life are merely admired or respected may still be sexual objects for our unconscious (p. 105).

⁶The question of having coffee at some point in the future had come up in an early part of the analysis with Amanda and was discussed in previous papers (Slavin, 2007a, 2007b) in relation to the process of reconstructing personal agency and the independence of one's mind.