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Andrea Celenza's Erotic Revelations: Clinical Applications and Perverse Scenarios is a well-crafted collection of her papers. Some are new works, some are edited versions of old ones, and all are important contributions to the continuing revision of psychoanalytic models of gender and sexual development, efforts that have now traversed the fertile, variegated, and somewhat unruly landscape of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century.
Following a lucid introduction—“Transcending Boundaries”—are two main sections in which she addresses theoretical and clinical aspects of the manner in which erotic desires and unconscious fantasies express essential ways of being and shape how analyst and analysand engage the analytic situation. The first part, “Erotics Embodied: Transferences and Countertransferences,” draws mainly from previously published work.
Most fundamentally, she assumes that we enter the world embodied, characterized by sensate receptivity to feeling and affective aliveness. Echoing Laplanche (1997), Celenza asserts that the mother, immediately and universally, “transmits her enigmatic sexual unconscious to the infant” (p. 1) and that in this way one's gender and sexuality are present and emergent from the very first.