Davies, J.M. (2013). My Enfant Terrible is Twenty: A Discussion of Slavin's and Gentile's Retrospective Reconsideration of “Love in the Afternoon”. Psychoanal. Dial., 23(2):170-179
The following is a response to papers by Jonathan H. Slavin,
Ph.D., ABPP, and Jill Gentile, Ph.D., which both discuss my
1994 paper “Love in the Afternoon: A Relational
Reconsideration of Desire and Dread in the Countertransference,”
almost twenty years after its original publication in
Psychoanalytic Dialogues. I begin with some retrospective
thoughts of my own about this controversial paper, and then
respond to interpretations of the paper offered by Slavin and
Gentile. I conclude with my own thoughts about their original
ideas and elaborations on the subject of erotic
countertransference.
see also
Slavin, J.H. (2013). Moments of Truth and Perverse Scenarios in Psychoanalysis: Revisiting Davies' “Love in the Afternoon”. Psychoanal. Dial., 23(2):139-149
This paper addresses what I believe is one of the fundamental
implications of Davies' groundbreaking and controversial paper,
“Love in the Afternoon.” I suggest that the “perverse scenario”
between parent and child that Davies describes in the
developmental psychopathology of her patient may, in fact, occur
in many ways in the lives and histories of many patients. Such
“perverse scenarios” may sometimes be less overtly sexualized,
and more subtle, but they prove to be no less insidiously
destructive of patients' psychic cohesion. In this context, the
possibilities for perverse scenarios and confrontations with
“moments of truth” may occur frequently, albeit less in dramatic
ways, in the patient–therapist engagement. The paper suggests that
effective therapeutic action inevitably requires of the analyst the
kind of real “moment of truth” decisions that contain within them
the fate, and the hope, for the psychic integrity of both analyst and
patient.
see also
Jill Gentile (2013) From TruthorDare to ShowandTell: Reflections on Childhood Ritual, Play, and the Evolution of Symbolic Life, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 23:2, 150-169
