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The changing body of the adolescent patient presents particular challenges to containment and pressures towards enactment. The bodies of patient and analyst are more directly the subjects of analysis with adolescents than with adults or with younger children. Adolescents need help to name and integrate their newfound bodily experiences. Their minds need to grow into the bodies they now inhabit. It is a challenge for the analyst to talk about feelings the adolescent has barely begun to name: the area of erotic transference/countertransference in the treatment of adolescents is largely ignored in analytic writing. The editor’s musings about the book title drive her to the term “braving” as this process does, indeed, require bravery as the kinds of powerful feelings the erotic dimensions tend to evoke may be potentially difficult to navigate.
Brady offers us a frank view of the erotic dimensions of clinical psychoanalysis with young patients, which she and her contributors discuss. “Erotic” includes more than sex; it also encompasses: “harmony, relatedness, purpose, significance, and meaning: This means, of course, that ambivalence, anxiety, jealousy, rivalry, and a sense of lack will also be present” (2).
To translate this into Bionian clinical language, an analyst needs to be able to be emotionally responsive and containing to the erotic (in a broad sense) in a patient and also to all of the related subtleties and problems. We hope to help free the growth of erotic aliveness in our patients – both sexually and in related forms, such as a passion for ideas, rich sensuality, and a broad and complex range of emotional experience and expressiveness. Timid avoidance of erotic feelings in the consulting room deprives adolescents of sincere adult thinking in relation to the challenges of enjoying and managing sexual feelings. The analyst’s capacity to be aware of his or her erotic feelings but not to act on them comes across in many ways. If the analyst can feel some ease