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Chair: Andrea Celenza
Presenters: Andrea Celenza, Stanley J. Coen
Discussants: Mary Brady
Andrea Celenza introduced this panel about the infantile in the adult, exploring maternal erotism, traumatic experiences of loss and transferences-countertransferences, with two samples of analytic process, conveying how, with therapeutic intervention, the child within is accessed and integrated.
Celenza’s paper, “Maternal Erotic Transferences and the Work of the Abject”, drew on Kristeva’s work on maternal eroticism, the abject and revitalization in maternal eroticism, and Celenza noted that through erotic transferences, it can often be seen how an analysand has translated and internalized her mother’s vitality, as well as inhibitions, and destructive potentials. Celenza illustrated how she had reconceptualized a patient’s material through the lens of Kristeva’s work. Kristeva describes maternal eroticism in its deepest sense - beyond sexuality - as a vitalizing, nurturing vocation committed to the child’s life, while also the first agent of seduction, transmitting unconscious fantasies to the infant to be, and to have her to love, through touch and gaze. The maternal body is the first signifier of the erotic, but maternal eroticism is also devitalizing as a mother initiates her baby into confronting loss. Traumatic loss can create a dreaded void, the abject, concretely located in the maternal body as horrific objects that can infect life, a site of devitalizing fears. This void can be aligned with Green’s work of the negative, the unthought known, and as a child fears damaging the parent, the analysand fears harming (or being harmed by) the analyst. In a mother’s refusal to collapse, however, this transformation of destruction, the resignification of the abject, is the activity of maternal eroticism, paralleling the analytic process.
Celenza introduced an analysand, Petra, whose infantile erotic longings undermined her adult capacities. When Petra was 22 years old, her mother died