Transference, Love, Being

by Andrea Celenza

Through a series of expansive essays, Transference, Love, Being explores the centrality of love in psychoanalytic practice. Starting with the immersion of the analyst, this book reimagines several aspects of the psychoanalytic process, including transference, countertransference, boundaries, embodiment, subjectivity and eroticism. To love is to cultivate to be . Psychoanalysis, as essentially vitalizing, is a playspace for taboo subjects within clear and safe parameters. Interweaving loving, being and perceiving, this book provides challenging new perspectives on the analysts's subjectivity, receptivity and its immersive influence on the analytic process. These essays refine theoretical understandings of the irreducible and omnipresent nature of love in psychoanalysis, thereby offering clarity to psychoanalysts, psychodyanmic therapists and scholars through the often-prohibited love and eroticism, here viewed as indispensible psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Genres: Psychoanalysis

212 pages, Paperback

Published July 8, 2022

Reviews

[Hope Marie]

3.5 ⭐️ this book began as a pick for a therapist book club I am a part of, but we ultimately chose not to finish it together because it did not explore the countertransference themes we had hoped to. i finished it on my own a few months later.
while there are many moments of genuine insight in the writing, they are frequently weighed down by excessive wordiness, as if clarity and brevity would somehow diminish their depth. this tendency is familiar to me in psychoanalytic writing. i often wish i could offer that sometimes, we can say more with less.