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In a series of creative, provocative, and carefully argued contributions, Jody Davies has explored the largely uncharted territory of the analyst's erotic experience. Until quite recently, the literature on the erotic tension in the analytic setting was written almost entirely by male analysts about their experiences with female patients. In this context, Davies's contributions have been particularly welcome, as they have broken ground in illuminating the sexual subjectivity of the female analyst. Thus, it is a privilege and a pleasure to once again be invited to discuss Davies's latest contribution.
Arguing that analysts have tended to collapse all forms of sexual excitement in the analytic dyad into a form of infantile, usually oedipal, sexuality, Davies stresses that we have not done justice to the phenomenon of normal adult sexuality as it is manifested in clinical practice. I certainly share her concern about the relative neglect of postoedipal erotic experience. It is ironic that, in the midst of society's alarm at the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse, the subject of how to introduce adolescents to healthy sexuality is almost entirely ignored. We can infer that somehow this transition is so suffused with taboos that there has been a collective withdrawal from this problem.
Like Davies, I have long argued that love and desire in the analytic situation cannot be reductionistically viewed as stemming from one developmental phase (Gabbard, 1996a, b). Endless debates about whether erotic transference represents genital-oedipal wishes, breakdown products of selfobject failure, or the sexualization of fusion wishes have not advanced our understanding of the clinical phenomena