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What an honour it is to have Dr. Vaia Tsolas (2024) thoughtfully reflect on this analysis using feminine theoretical constructs. Given the historical emphasis on the maternal in psychoanalysis, we should laud the inclusion of the female sexual. One can hope for the permanence of Pandora's act in this vein; let us be satyrs and no longer disavow the pivotal organizing power of female sexuality in the psyche. Let us embrace its complexity rather than vilify it as pestilence, an entrenchment in Chasseguet-Smirgel's (1976) phallic monism.
Dr. Tsolas's thoughts have served such a role in parallel in my work with “L” (Telio, 2023). The vertices outlined in her paper have been fecund and echoed throughout the analysis. I track Schaeffer's (1997/2011) sphinx darting through the transference-countertransference and animating alternating objects on the stage of characters at play in L's psychic life. L herself had embodied this engulfing stranglehold of phallic monism in mind-obliterating alcohol use. Paradoxically, her drinking also served as an escape from misogynistic flattening. Self-destruction is both a repetition of early harsh maternal superego and an elopement from its grasp.
Interpreting these concrete representations of the sphinx has facilitated L's anality to coalesce. I recognize the multiple functions of Fain's (1971) mother in myself. I feel as if I mete out oxygen to feed a small candle inside a glass lantern, cautiously enabling excitation, while also shielding against external tempest. As Dr. Tsolas conveys, the treatment provides a safe landscape, a world inside a womb, for L to take shape. This is the image of the flaming vulva. Freedom inside and through the womb. Rather than collapsing, inert, between sessions, L has been able to stay alight, carrying on her own fantasy. She has a burgeoning mind, a persistent interiority. In life, she has been able
to invite the touch of a man, welcoming the initial rites of adult sexuality, without traumatic intrusio