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In her book Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field, Dianne Elise thinks upending thoughts, thoughts which pose eye-opening questions such as: How exactly does heterosexuality ever flower in a girl, who begins life in union with a woman? In a field where we accept the almost loopy idea that perception begins with the mouth, (Spitz, 1955), can we just as easily accept the idea that our first experience of intercourse takes place via a breast, with a woman pleasurably penetrating us orally? What if we thought of psychoanalytic treatments denuded of erotic transference and countertransference as alarmingly incomplete? Might male impenetrability, physically and psychically, lead to a woman's “frigidity? How can we actually attribute triadic relations to the oedipus complex if a mother's sexuality is devalued or insufficiently embraced, leaving the girl without a worthy opponent over whom to triumph as she sprints to its resolution? After spending time swimming in Elise's thoughts, I started to wonder anew whether the goal of “oedipalization” is even realistic for women, and if perhaps Freud was right after all: maybe our superegos are weaker than men's - and hey, is that such a bad thing?
Elise's oeuvre, which revives and privileges the radical potentialities of the primariness of bisexuality, has a West Coast by way of Haight Ashbury, “free love” feel. The influence of Thomas Ogden, (she was an early student) with his insistent
valuing of sensations ineffable and inchoate in the consulting room, makes itself surely felt around the feathered and fluttering edges of her extremely fecund thinking. And yet her work, perhaps it is better to call it her opera (referencing the Italian feeling filled word which morphs meaning to include, work/opere, workers/operai, operation/operazione, operator/operatore, and of course “opera”) is grounded in her breathtaking grasp of psychoanalytic clinical and metapsychological theory, feminist and otherwise, that atten