Two to Tango: Commentary on Celenza

I want to begin by expressing my admiration for Andrea Celenza's particular strategy in developing her theoretical argument, as well as for the subtlety and courage in her clinical work and its report. What is so useful and necessary to me in Celenza's approach is that she sets up a complex matrix of experience as she introduces us to the particular locus of trouble, the gendered problematics of desire and aggression in a heterosexual analytic couple in which the analyst is a woman. She asks that we think about the wider culture, the narrower, historically specific psychoanalytic culture we are operating within, the stereotypes of gender we are embedded in, and the infusion and confusion of cultural stereotype and gender ideology into psychoanalytic theory and practice. Gender arrangements intersect with the structure, and muscle, and bones of transference in ways that are sometimes surprising and sometimes obvious.

Right from the outset of this demanding and fascinating clinical case, Celenza immerses her readers in complex grids of power and constriction, domination and dependency. Drawing on literature over the past two decades, Celenza notes how unremarkably the transference to a woman analyst has been assumed to be maternal, regressive, and pre-oedipal. Celenza traces the historical shifts in modes of clinical work from a constricted and emotionally narrow-gauge style to more broad-spectrum, deep engagements with patients. The widening relational perspective (along with other cultural shifts as well) may have made the crucible of transference and countertransference more volatile and more fully susceptible to expression and enactment. The frame and setup of analysis has the power to set off powerful fantasies of domination and intimacy. As Celenza reminds us, these fantasies often come in their own unique, quite luridly gendered colors. This way of thinking