Transformations of Desire and the Logic of Life Narratives: An Essay Review

The Narration of Desire is at once a report on the stages in Wrye and Welles' collaborative discovery of early maternal erotic transference (s) (MET) /countertransference (s) (MEC), and a fascinating account of how their attunement to MET/MEC phenomena enabled them to create the “narrative space” in which their patients' primitive appetites and excitements could achieve symbolic coherence. Whereas the main title represents the authors' appreciations of the profound relationships between narration and desire, the subtitle, “Erotic Transferences and Countertransferences” represents a familiar fact of contemporary clinical theory—that transferences are composed of erotic potentials.

As Wrye and Welles acknowledge in their copious citations and references, the preoedipal transference—countertransference experiences they describe have been staples of the analytic literature for several decades. Unfortunately, Wrye and Welles were unable to clarify how their clinical theory differs from the several corrective object relations approaches they refer to. By focusing almost exclusively on preoedipal maternal transferences and then insisting that these transferences are erotic in the full sense of that term, with all its libidinal and aggressive connotations, the authors subverted what might have been a highly original contribution to psychoanalytic clinical theory. Perhaps Wrye and Welles had been concerned that the originality of their ideas would be overlooked unless they presented them in opposition to the classical