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Dianne Elise is known for her major theoretical contributions to gender and female sexuality; she is the forefront of changes in
psychoanalysis in these areas, as Adrienne Harris writes in her foreword to Creativity and the Erotic Dimensions of the Analytic Field—truly ahead of her time. In this book, Elise deepens and contextualizes her explorations into these subjects both clinically and theoretically, but also broadens her scope to pursue new areas: notably, creativity and the analytic field. The book is enlivened by compelling clinical illustrations and infused with creative and unexpected turns of thought. Elise sets out a wide range of subjects to present a book grounded in thorough and impressive scholarship.
Elise elaborates her major theoretical contributions to sexuality and gender within the context of the erotic therapeutic field. She expands contemporary ideas of the analytic field to focus on its creative potentials and erotic dimensions. Taking as a foundation the work of Ogden, Ferro, and Civitarese, she describes the analytic field as “encompassing the subjectivities of both patient and analyst, where each is implicated in its formation and formed by it” (p. 10). To this conceptualization, she adds another important component: a libidinal force field marked by electricity and aliveness supplied by both parties. For Elise, clinical psychoanalysis is an erotic project.
The author turns to Kristeva’s ideas of the erotic maternal matrix: the source of all human subjectivity and the cradle in which analytic relationships are nourished.† Kristeva conceives of maternal reliance through which the mother lovingly, erotically both holds and releases another living subject into the world. Elise augments Kristeva with Winnicott; she finds erotic dimensions implicitly embedded in his idea of the analyst’s capacity to play within a metaphorical space co-created by patient and analyst.† She adds Ferenczi and Laplanche to the growing list of contemporary psychoana