Absorbing Maternal Erotics: A Slippery Affair—Commentary on Papers by Wrye and Wayne

What is common across each of these papers is a view of psychoanalytic activity from the perspective of maternal erotics as developed by Wrye and Welles, with a particular focus on maternal erotic countertransference as well as maternal erotic transference. The concept of maternal erotics has struck me as a Kohutian/Winnicottian turn on Kleinian material formulated in a way that extends Freud's theories about sexuality. In particular it picks up on the early pages of The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) where Freud traces his view of a polymorphous perverse sexuality. But Wrye and Welles reinterpret this slipperiness of erotic experience, not just in a lustful, regressive, or destructive sense, not as the basis for perversion, but rather in terms of a quality or dimension of sensual experience requisite to the healthy development of a body ego construction which, too often, does not occur adequately.

In other words, foundational to the model of maternal erotics is the assumption that every human being needs, in the Winnicottian sense, good enough sensuality, good enough skin contact, good enough smells, good enough prosodic exchange, good enough visual stimulation, good enough oral responsivity, good enough movement, so that her developing sense of self as a body in contact with others