You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Describing the impetus for writing her second book, Karen Maroda remarked, at a Division 39 Meet the Author seminar last year, that “we've been talking about a two-person approach for a number of years now … but we have yet to really revolutionize psychoanalytic practice in a meaningful way that includes both people.”
Evocatively titled Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation, the book is centered on Maroda's ardent plea for emotional honesty in the analytic situation. In her unselfconscious, shoot-from-the-hip style, Maroda shares with us the intimate details of interactions with her patients. Augmenting the rich clinical material with research findings and other relevant literature on affect and cognition, she enters into a dialogue of agreement and disagreement with other eminent authors and clinicians, all of which is meant to demonstrate that positive therapeutic outcome depends on the emotional engagement of both partners in the analytic couple.
Maroda refers to herself as a relational analyst. She tells us her book is devoted to exploring the complexities that arise from taking the position that the two-person relationship serves as a vehicle for therapeutic action. She asserts that “the core understated aspects of this therapeutic action involve mutual emotional honesty, mutual emotional availability, and an atmosphere of mutual trust” (p. 38). In chapter 1 we learn from Maroda, through case example and collegial dialogue, what she means by mutuality. Whereas Freud attributed the power of seduction to women patients endangering their analyst's neutrality, Maroda stresses that psychological seduction is a mutual phenomenon, generic to the analytic situation. She goes on to challenge the theoretical underpinnings of our profession that have kept the person of the analyst in his or her head and out of the living relationship.