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There are relatively few chronicles of analyses, even fewer authored by lay analysands, and almost none with a focus on the erotic dimension of the transference (Gunn, 2002; Lieber, 2020; Little, 1977). Frances H. Moore (a pseudonym) hopes to remedy this gap with her courageous account of a 5-year analysis, Growing Through the Erotic Transference: An Analysand's Journey (Routledge, ). The book begins, as the analysis does, with a short-lived couples therapy: Moore, a cis woman in her 40s, comes to treatment with her husband and sole sexual partner since age 17 upon learning of his extramarital affair with a much younger woman. After several sessions the husband exits both marriage and treatment, leaving a note, a justification for his departure transformed into an errand for the analysand: She is in some way too “masculine” (p. 10), that is, castrating. The observation repels but gradually acquires resonance for Moore, and she allows it to shape the first years, arguably the whole, of her analysis: ideas and experiences of phallic power inform her symptoms, the unfolding of transference phases, and the very act of writing the book. One might say that the husband's patently sexist and phantasmatic comment was ultimately apt: not due to its veracity, of course, but rather in its evocation of the analysand's oedipal conflicts. Moore's oedipal longings and aggressivity are everywhere manifest as they are both worked through and defended against in the consulting room and in the creation of Growing Through the Erotic Transference. Her account is a loving gift to us as reader-analysands as well as a message to her classically oriented, abstinent analyst.
After a brisk introduction in which Moore announces her intention of “telling a story,” forgoing a comprehensive literature review and a strict definition of “erotic,” the book proceeds in two parts totaling an economical 80 pages, “Part One: The Story” and “Part Two: Reflections.” The first is based on notes kept by Moore