ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter puts forth the book’s premise that psychoanalysis is an erotic project and proposes that a creative aesthetic can provide a clinical container for the engagement and exploration of erotic life within the analytic field of each treatment. An atmosphere of libidinal energy is seen as a crucial aspect in enlivening the intersubjective field. When fully articulated as an energy potential in both participants, analytic eroticism can offer libidinal engagement within an ethical frame as a stimulus to emotionally embodied thinking—linking—that can lead to transformations in many dimensions including the erotic. Maternal eroticism, as the libidinal vitality and investment that a mother brings to her fully embodied engagement with her child, is developed as a metaphor for clinical process: The analyst holds, contains, and stimulates; each of these capacities is mobilized in the service of the patient’s growth. An intertwining of the erotic and the creative in the embodied, affective interaction of the analytic dyad allows for deepening contact with an authentic sense of being. A Winnicottian field theory is conceptualized.
