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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• sexual fingerprint
• sexuality
• body
• countertransference
• metaphor
• mind
• experiential neutrality

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented as a discussion of papers by Galit Atlas and Steve Kuchuck at the conference on Psychology and the Other, October 2013, Cambridge, Massachusetts; at an invited conference of the New Mexico Psychoanalytic Society and the University of New Mexico, January 2015, Albuquerque, NM; and as an invited paper, October 2015, University of Turin, Turin, Italy. Some early sections of this paper were also published as a response to discussions in Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Slavin, 2014). Thanks to Irene Fast, PhD; Mia Medina, PsyD; and Owen Renik, MD, for their careful reading and substantive suggestions on this discussion.

Notes

¹ “Suzanne”

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² Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003) provided many similar and additional examples along these lines.

³ As Lakoff and Johnson (1980/2003) noted, one’s particular social and cultural milieu will regulate and ritualize some of our body’s contact with the physical world and with other people.

⁴ Jonathan H. Slavin.

⁵ It’s almost impossible, in the writing of this discussion, for us to not take note of the material metaphorical references we use when we communicate. Locate. To find in the physical world. A picture.

⁶ As Oxenhandler (2001) described, “Violation is an element of eros. Erotic love—at what ever end of its continuum—always involves an element of transgression, the overflowing of ordinary boundaries. At the very least, transgression is present as a possibility, as what we refrain from, as what we play with and balance on the edge of. … The very permission that is granted to physical love in certain contexts … occurs over against the backdrop of prohibition” (p. 205).

⁷ As Freud (1905/1958) put it, “A mother would probably be horrified if she were made aware that all her marks of affection were rousing her child’s sexual instinct and preparing for its later intensity. She regards what she does as asexual, ‘pure’ love, since, after all, she carefully avoids applying more excitations to the child’s genitals than are unavoidable in nursery care. As we know, however, the sexual instinct is not aroused only by direct excitation of the genital zone. What we call affection will unfailingly show its effects one day on the genital zones as well. Moreover, if the mother understood more of the high importance of the part played by instincts in mental life as a whole—in all its ethical and psychical achievements—she would spare herself any self-reproaches even after her enlightenment. She is only fulfilling her task in teaching the child to love. After all, he is meant to grow up into a strong and capable person with vigorous sexual needs and to accomplish during his life all the things that human beings are urged to do by their instincts” (p. 223).

⁸ Reprinted from E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George James Firmage. Copyright © 1956, 1984, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

⁹ Medina (2012) wrote similarly regarding the experience and processing of countertransference.

¹⁰ In borrowing this phrase from Benjamin (2004), we are using it strictly in an experiential, rather than intersubjective, sense.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan H. Slavin

Jonathan H. Slavin, PhD, ABPP, is Clinical Instructor in Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Adjunct Clinical Professor, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis, New York University; Founding Director, Tufts University Counseling Center (1970–2006); Former President of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39), American Psychological Association; and Founding President, Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. Dr. Slavin’s published work has focused on fundamental experiential elements in the psychoanalytic relationship including love, sexuality, desire, truthfulness, and personal agency, and their role in the repair of the mind.

Miki Rahmani

Miki Rahmani, MA, is Chief Psychologist, South Jerusalem Mental Health Center, and Faculty emerita, School of Education, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. In more than 35 years of clinical teaching and consulting she has taught annual courses, seminars, and workshops on the supervisory relationship, the supervisory process in clinical work and in education, and on the treatment process.