“And Binding with Briars, my Joys and Desires”: Discussion of Janine de Peyer’s “Unspoken Rhapsody”

Abstract

This paper discusses Janine de Peyer’s “Unspoken Rhapsody: Female Erotic Countertransference and the Dissociation of Desire,” elaborating on the professional and clinical aspects of working with female erotic countertransference with male patients, with a focus on dissociation and containment in these contexts. Perspectives from evolutionary psychology and affective neuroscience are offered to better understand how female analyst/male patient dyads differ from that of male analyst/female patient.

Keywords:

• erotic enactment
• erotic countertransference
• women analysts
• female analysts
• erotic desire
• dissociation
• affective neuroscience
• evolutionary psychology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ From William Blake’s poem The Garden of Love, 1794.

² Davies (1994) has written on these difficulties with erotic feelings in the analyst, the need to track our visceral/somatic experiences and, the now widely accepted view, that the analyst’s sexual subjectivity, or countertransference, may inform us of the patient’s early erotic experience, whether that experience is preoedipal or oedipal, and may also inform us of the patient’s parent’s subjectivity. Davies (1998a, 1998b) has also written on the emergence of post oedipal organizations of sexuality in patients.

³ Of course, there are many aspects of attractiveness which men and women share, such as wanting someone who is honest and kind; my point here is to focus on differences.

⁴ There is interesting research on women therapists treating male patients (Gornick, 1994). Notably, there were differences in how therapists at different stages in their professional development reacted to their erotic countertransference.

⁵ David Buss has been at the forefront of evolutionary psychology and the study of sex differences in humans and other species for over 30 years.

⁶ The exception would be those male analysts who fall into the “Dark Triad trait” category, i.e., those men high in narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, who are indifferent to harming women and everyone else (Buss, 2021).

⁷ Women also secrete testosterone in the presence of attractive men but their levels of testosterone are significantly lower (Lopez et al., 2009).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Noelle Burton

Noelle Burton, PSYD, is a graduate of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and an Associate Editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues. She is a Founding Member, Faculty and Supervising Analyst at The Institute for Relational Psychoanalysis of Philadelphia; and Faculty, The Stephen Mitchell Relational Study Center. She is in private practice in suburban Philadelphia.