The Narration of Desire: A Clinical Response

Many clinicians today assume that our own images, thoughts, and feelings bear useful information in ongoing analytic work. We routinely search countertransference reverie and induced states in our awareness, and query them as clues to the internal objects, part-object projections, and self-states of the analysand. We monitor changes and fluctuations in the transference—countertransference relationship, sometimes during a session, sometimes later, in an ongoing process of mentally constructing and reconstructing the issues encountered as we traverse private worlds. There is much we cannot pick up in principle, because it is unconscious, and much we may not pick up, for reasons we may not know. Personal, technical, professional, or cultural limitations may constrict our use of transference—countertransference processes. Yet it may also be true that advances in theorizing can make possible new points of view from which to perceive, experience, reflect upon, and organize our immersion in the images and feelings of the countertransference, enriching both its clinical and research value.

Wrye and Welles address the restrictions of classical psychoanalytic theory as a guide to illuminating the broad sweep of transference—countertransference experiences that emerge in analytic work on early, compelling need. The classical model represents erotic desire as biological, sexual impulse contained by the body and the person as preoccupied with the object with whom those impulses will be consummated. It is a developing process that eventuates in a decisively formative encounter with the oedipal father. Wrye and Welles maintain that this