You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The title of Andrea Celenza’s book Transference, Love, Being: Essential Essays from the Field is a double entendre. At least I’m taking it as a double entendre. These are indeed essential essays from the field of psychoanalysis, and they are also essays from the vantage point of field theory and the importance of the interpersonal field. Celenza writes, “We are always immersed in a context, our bodies exist somewhere in the world in a field.” Like a phenomenologist, she is always focused on context and the field, and the field underlies her explorations of transference, love, embodiment and being. She writes beautifully about these themes and brings in numerous clinical examples to illustrate her concepts.
Celenza writes of love, eroticism, and being, and she illustrates how these themes play out in the transference-countertransference matrix. Love, often neglected in psychoanalytic theory, is a core aspect of the healing process in psychoanalysis. It is central to transference phenomena and central to the development of being. This book consists of short and succinct essays, but each essay has something very substantial and profound to offer. Each essay is like a facet of a diamond, and these facets together form a book that, from my perspective at least, is
a brilliant jewel with shining insights into the human condition and the mysteries of the psychoanalytic process.
The book is divided into 3 parts, all of which are interconnected and intertwined: (1) transference, (2) love, and (3) being. Celenza begins with the age-old controversy over whether transference is real or illusory. More specifically, she focuses on whether or not transference love is real. She concludes that it is real, writing, “So, I think we can definitely say that transference love in analysis is more real than in ordinary life. Thus, the