ABSTRACT

In this richly woven study of preoedipal erotic experience, Harriet Kimble Wrye and Judith Welles focus on patients for whom early mothering did not sustain the flowering and subsequent transformation of early erotic desire. Such patients remain under the sway of a primitive eroticism that is often sadistic and invariably perverse. Successful analytic work requires accepting and containing the patient's primitive erotic needs; reconstructing the mother-infant narratives that sustain these needs; and mobilizing the patient's transformative desire to grow out of maternal eroticism to an adult love of self and others.

part |31 pages

I Story Making

part |72 pages

II Maternal Erotic Transferences and Countertransferences

chapter |16 pages

5 The Birth of Desire

Transforming Birth Narratives Within Maternal Erotic Transferences

part |51 pages

III Perversions: Derangements of Desire

chapter |32 pages

6 Perverse Narratives

The Threat of New Narratives of Desire

chapter |19 pages

7 A “Horrible Dry Hollow”

Lost in Arid Deadspace

part |68 pages

IV Permutations and Transformations Related to Gender

chapter |15 pages

8 Erotic Terror in Men

Fear of the Early Maternal Erotic Transference

chapter |30 pages

9 Where's Poppa?

The Appearance of Paternal Transferences in the Face of Early Maternal Transferences

chapter |22 pages

10 Oedipus and the Spruce Goose

A Narration of an Oedipal Transition