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During my training, I recall listening to Meltzer’s stepdaughter, Meg Harris Williams, reflecting on her father’s work. Above all, she said, he felt child psychotherapy was about love. I remember being profoundly moved by this simple idea from a man who had gifted our profession with so many rich yet complex theoretical perspectives. It resonated with me at a time when the going was tough, reminding me of what made the work so rewarding and compelling.
So, what does it really mean for us to love our patients and/or for them to love us? And what is at stake when such depth of feeling takes on an erotic element? Even thinking about this aspect of the transference – let alone saying it out loud – can feel risky; a strange response given the truth-seeking space we occupy.
The arrival of Brady’s book through my letterbox was therefore a welcome package. I was immediately struck by the first word of her chosen title: ‘Braving’. It could perhaps be mutually agreed that courage is a prerequisite for working as a child and adolescent psychotherapist. We dwell in vast vistas of the unknown and roll with the kicks, the punches, the spitting and swearing, not to mention our place in the anxiety-provoking adolescent shadows of self-harm and suicide.
But Brady, an adult and child psychoanalyst in private practice in San Francisco, seems to suggest that added succour is needed to enter the realm of the erotic. She sets out her stall clearly in her introduction, suggesting there is an ‘erotic insufficiency’ in modern day analytic thinking. Therefore, she says: ‘My hope in this book is that we can accustom ourselves to thinking and feeling in this territory’ (p. 2). Brady would like clinicians to ‘move around with some freedom in the erotic, sensuous and loving feelings in the field’ (p. 2). And she invites us to explore what she defines as the ‘erotic field’:
At any real depth and intimacy of psychoanalytic work it can be difficult to pin down ‘whose feeling is it? Instead, I suggest