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My teenage daughter, struggling to make meaning of her science textbook, asked me to read to her. We curled up on the couch and passed the book back and forth, reading alternate paragraphs aloud. This bodily engagement recalled memories of bedtime stories and putting on plays. Soon, links between light refracted through prisms, the radiating communication of celestial bodies across spacetime, and the expansion of the universe were alive with meaning and available for use in thinking about homework problems. But this shared pleasure quickly gave way to a feeling of overawe. What is the universe expanding into, we worried. What does “into” even mean in the context of an infinite universe with dynamic multidimensional formations, or of dark energy, the invisible roiling force that creates space? We anxiously turned away from this overwhelming encounter with the sublime. Back on the couch, my daughter completed her problem set and I returned to reading a certain psychoanalytic book.
What, you might ask, does this cosmic-domestic scene have to do with a review of Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field, Dianne Elise's brilliant and quietly revolutionary argument for analytic eroticism? I hope I can explain.
The transformative potential of erotic relationships and the contribution of eros to a life of knowledge and beauty have been recognized at least since Plato's Symposium. As happened between my daughter and me, and as sometimes happens in psychoanalytic work, eros can facilitate lively and creative thinking; but it can also lead to overwhelm and avoidance. Elise's book offers a passionate argument for how we might navigate eros's turbulent straits.
It is an ironic commonplace that psychoanalysis is inhibited about engaging the libidinal. A field founded on the transgressive ideas of