Introduction: 2010 Symonds Prize Essay

Through the generosity of the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation, the Editors of Studies in Gender and Sexuality award the 2010 Symonds Prize to Andrea Celenza, Ph.D., for “The Guilty Pleasure of Erotic Countertransference: Searching for Radial True.” Dr. Celenza is Faculty, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; Faculty and Supervising Analyst, Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis; Assistant Clinical Professor, The Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School; and Private Practice, Lexington, MA.

For this fourth annual competition, we received a plethora of suitable essays, but this one stood out for its subject matter and its voice. Celenza directs our attention to the originating topic of psychoanalysis, sexuality, particularly in the difficulty it presents in the consulting room. Celenza is well known for her clinical work with analysts who have conducted sexual relationships with patients (e.g., Celenza, 2007). Alone and in collaboration (e.g., Celenza and Gabbard, 2003), she has developed new ways of thinking about this transgression, which, it should be noted, afflicts not only psychoanalysis but also other helping professions. In this fluidly written essay, Celenza proposes, for clinical work that engages sexuality in patient and analyst, the metaphor of a “bicycle wheel with multiple spokes,…each spoke representing a crucial dimension in a pattern of relating that may repeat itself over and over.” Working with an intersubjective model of the analytic relationship as ideally in “balanced tension” or “radial true,” she holds that “the erotic dimension of our connection…adds to the balance” among the multiple roles analysts have with their patients, each role counterbalancing the others.

We are also fortunate to have, as discussants, two creative, thoughtful, and experienced clinicians, Karol Marshall, Ph.D., and Sue A. Shapiro, Ph.D. Although both question the suitability and versatility of Celenza's key metaphor of the wheel, they do so from different perspectives.

Marshall, in her “Thinking About the Unthinkable,” envisions desire quite differently from Celenza, which leads her to an alternate conception of clinical work. From a Lacanian perspective, she criticizes “an excessive trust in technique, reason, and dialogue [, which] is precisely how it happens that erotic countertransference emerges in enactments that violate professional boundaries.” Marshall emphasizes the centrality of “the intimate peer group” to the clinician's attempt to sustain balance. She also holds a novel view of the patient as outside the analyst-patient dyad, asking, in regard to regulations about posttreatment sexual contact, whether the “person who seeks psychological treatment [must be] conceptualized as forever vulnerable.”

In the interpersonalist idiom of unique individuality, Shapiro considers the productive particularity of clinical work. Celenza's essay, in her view, “straddles two, perhaps irreconcilable positions: on the one hand, that universal claims are possible…and, on the other, that nonlinear dynamic systems—patients, analysts, and patient-analyst dyads—are complex and particular…” Introducing the interesting concept of “clinical realism,” she argues, by examining Celenza's cases, that its demands are in tension with the impulse or imperative to generalize about clinical psychoanalysis and mind. In this connection, she points to certain gendered generalizations, which she sees as verging on stereotype, that Celenza employs to illuminate the analyst's management of countertransference.

In her reply, Celenza responds to her critics, in particular furthering her thoughts in regard to the question of gendered language and the speakability of desire.