Flirting, Post-Oedipus, and Mutual Protectiveness in the Analytic Dyad: Commentary on Paper by Jody Messler Davies

It's a sobering realization for any psychoanalyst who writes about her work that the patient and analyst whose work is being described know each other far more intimately than the reader to whom the analysis is being described. This puts in some context both the courage that fuels Jody Davies's continuing effort to explore the complexity of sexuality in psychoanalytic theory and practice and the considerable demands on us to consider her work.

There are many issues worth exploring in her article—the place of oedipal and preoedipal development in our general theory of sexuality and development (in particular, the place of a developmental model within American relational theory); the variety of levels of interpretation and metaphor in analytic work, including the interpersonal-intrapsychic and imaginary-symbolic dialectics; the ways in which trauma truncates play in general and sexual play in particular and their implications for analytic therapy; and differences among analysts in their tolerance and creativity in the expressive use of countertransference. The issue of disclosure, as that of any dominant metaphor, defensively reduces the complexity of so many of these issues into the either-or structure of “Should she say this or not?” All issues become equally magnetized by the pull of this intervention and its emotional arc. Unfortunately, some of the most banal parts of these discussions involve the notion of whether or not we say this or that while minimizing the much more important discussion of how we understand or don't understand particular kinds of analytic processes