Poetic Transformations of Erotic Experience: Commentary on Paper by Jody Messler Davies

“‘What if we do this,’ I suggested, ‘what if we don't close the door, but sit down just inside it, together? We won't go any further in … we'll just sit at the door and look inside and see if we can figure out what's so dangerous.’” In this evocative, poetic way, Jody Davies invites her patient David to explore with her the place of sexuality in their relationship at that moment. I believe that the psychoanalytic community, particularly its more progressive relational wing, bears a relationship to Davies much like David's. We are ready for something more and yet very hesitant and afraid to go further. And Davies has emerged as one of our most courageous and informed guides. She's at the frontier and has a sense of how it can be done, of how we can elaborate the simple truth that we have been confronting increasingly—namely, that the patient and the analyst are both human beings—to include the fact that they are both sexual beings. Davies challenges us, as she challenges David (in response, to be sure, to his cues and his bold initiative—“Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I think you're flirting with me”) to see and make constructive use of our own growing maturity as a discipline. In an article on the subject of erotic countertransference, Davies (1994) identified that maturity in terms of a general growth of sophistication on the interplay of transference and countertransference. “Within such a climate,” she wrote, “the essential absence of any informed discussions of the analyst's sexual and erotic experiences becomes even more