On Slochower's ‘Erotic complications’

Dear Sir

We read with great interest Joyce Slochower's paper ‘Erotic complications’ (IJP, 80: 1119-30), reporting on an erotic transference, the countertransference of which led her to understand that it represented a reversed re-enactment of childhood and adolescence experiences that were not primarily sexual in nature. The mode of expression of that erotic transference evoked in the analyst feelings of intrusion, aversion, self-consciousness and coldness, which made her ask herself whether it was not a defence mechanism against erotic feelings. The main intervention was to reveal to her patient that she was feeling ‘put on the spot’ and that she asked herself if the patient had not experienced such a feeling when growing up. This intervention was followed a few weeks later by a new transference response: the patient felt self-conscious and scrutinised by the analyst, and recalled a forgotten ritual in which her mother scrutinised her body, searching for unsightly body hair and removing it. The erotic transference was considered to recreate in reverse an experience in which she had felt sadistically examined as an imperfect object and a potential source of humiliation for her mother. The primarily non-sexual nature of these adolescent experiences may be questioned: adolescents tend to feel intrusive parental attitudes towards their body as an incestuous menace. The transference-counter-transference dynamics might have reproduced both the sexual and non-sexual aspects of the relationship with her mother by a mechanism of projective identification: the patient seemed to identify with her mother's incestuous and sadistic intrusion and controlling attitudes and gave the analyst feelings of self-consciousness, humiliation, emotional penetration, helplessness or hostility that she had felt and repressed or from which she had reacted with isolation, denial or dissociation. She might also make the analyst experience the coldness with which she defended herself against the e