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I have committed two crimes in my life,” Freud is reported to have remarked. “I called attention to cocaine and I introduced Stekel to psychoanalysis.” Stekel, of course, was one of a handful of early analysts who
drew from Freud's earliest musings the radical conclusion that psychoanalysis fosters sexual liberation. Whereas Freud labored honestly to process in his mind the inevitability of errant desire, some of his followers indulged in promiscuity as a self-evident good. There were even those for whom “curing through love” in the therapeutic setting became conflated with sex. What began as encouragement for one person to freely associate became permission for two people to associate freely. Perhaps because the therapeutic situation so readily immerses participants in erotic desire, it became necessary for psychoanalysis to develop a language that dampens sexuality. Words like boundaries, structures, integration, and containment readily keep passion at bay, as does a word like superego. The so-called slippery slope is, after all, the very terrain on which psychoanalysis locates itself.
Andrea Celenza takes a long hard look at the “slippery slope.” And what she does quite admirably is shed light where there is often only heat. Celenza's primary purpose is “to identify pitfalls, vulnerabilities, stress points and warning signs for all mental health professionals, academics and clergy” (p. 15). The operative word here is “all.” For one of Celenza's guiding assumptions is that we are misguided if we presume that perpetrators and victims are fundamentally different from us. “The inability or unwillingness to accept the now well-documented fact that we are all vulnerable to this type of transgression, “she writes, “can stimulate a reactive anger … which blocks the capacity to come to terms with this vexing problem” (p. xxiii).
Celenza's work is based on a review of epidemiological studies, psychological evaluations, and her own experience with over 70 therapists, psycho