ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the clinician’s analytic activity as akin to that found in choreography, where the structuring of a dance or of a session each expresses an inner impulse brought into narrative form. The embodied art of dance is linked to the clinician’s creative vitality in contributing to the shaping of the movement of a session within the analytic field. We know that the dance of psychoanalysis is not the creative product of the patient’s mind alone. Clinical work invites, requires, a choreographic engagement by the clinician in interplay with that of the patient. The capacity for this interplay derives originally from maternal eroticism—mother–child erotic reciprocity—the dance of the semiotic chora. A parallel engagement within the analytic dyad is conceptualized. In developing the formulation of an analytic eroticism, the terrain of what might traditionally be viewed as erotic transference and countertransference is expanded. The erotic is an important ingredient of the clinical situation, a stimulus fueling the creative self of both the analyst and the patient. Extended case material is presented of a female patient who suffered from a deficiency of maternal eroticism.
