The Erotics of Knowing: A Neglected Contribution to Analytic Erotism

Forbidden Fruit and Carnal Knowledge

It could be said that the relationship between knowing and loving is as old as man. In the biblical creation myth, the serpent tempts Adam and Eve into partaking of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which allows them to “see” their nakedness and hence to experience the shame of being seen. ¹ In Titian’s rendering of the myth (c. 1550), Adam looks on as Eve reaches for the apple offered by the serpent in the disguise of an innocent Cupid (Figure 1, left). The Tree of Knowledge bisects the painting: on its left is the seated, passive Adam (and the Cupid’s head), representing Innocence, and on the right the standing, active Eve (and the serpent’s tail), representing Experience.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Upper left, Adam and Eve, Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 1550. Upper right, Adam and Eve, Peter Paul Rubens, after Titian, 1629. Both, Museo del Prado, Madrid. Below, details

Some eighty years later, this painting so moved Peter Paul Rubens that he copied it (Figure 1, right). Rubens’s Eve is faithful to Titian’s, but his Adam is not. Rubens reinterprets Adam as older, and presumably wiser, whereas Titian’s Adam leans backward, perhaps the better to view Eve. Rubens’s intervening Adam moves forward, his face full of consternation; he gently prods Eve with his fingertips, entreating her to reconsider (Figure 1, detail). Both versions enlist the fox at Eve’s feet as an iconographic symbol of treachery, but Rubens enhances Adam’s moral stance by embellishing his side of the canvas with a parrot, an iconographic symbol of goodness. Titian’s Adam inhabits a far more ambiguous position: he might express alarm, but might just as well be mesmerized with desire. He rests his hand flat against Eve, more of a caress than a caution (Figure 1, detail). His thumb grazes Eve’s nipple, sensuously melting into the indistinct space between her breast and underarm—in contrast to Rubens’s Adam, whose thumb is near, but respectfully distinct from, Eve’s breast. Situated well into the Counter-Reformation, Rubens’s Baroque Adam warns of the dangers of the forbidden knowledge to which Titian’s Renaissance Adam has already succumbed: he desires what he sees. Titian’s canvas and Rubens’s reception to it crystallize the lure, and the fear, of forbidden fruit. ²

Thinkers engaged with the erotic aspect of knowing long before the rise of monotheism. Loving and knowing are married in ancient myth: Cupid (Latin, cupido: desire) weds the beautiful girl Psyche (Greek/Latin: animating spirit, intellect, understanding), whom he ravishes in the dark. The commonplace sexual relationships between adolescent boys and the older men who functioned as their mentors and teachers in ancient Greece were considered a natural extension of the special intimacy of this relationship: a corporeal performance of the inherent erotism of the transmission and reception of knowledge.

The erotics of knowing is also specified in language. Befitting the enduring symbolic relationship between sight and carnal knowledge so well illustrated by Adam and Eve, as well as the function of vision as the prime mediator of desire, the Hebrew yada means “to know,” “to have sexual intercourse,” and also “to see.” The word insight, that central goal of analytic treatment, derives from the Old English innsihht, and originally meant “sight with the ‘eyes’ of the mind, mental vision, or understanding from within,” but evolved into a “penetrating understanding into character or hidden nature.” Insight is thus implicitly bound up with the concept of an “inside” into which one can see: a physically delimited interior space and visual field corresponding in fantasy to the embodied inner world. To know or understand the other is thus to “see into” or “enter” that private space, the otherwise unseen and unknown interior: an intrinsically erotic proposition. Also conveying the physico-spatial dimension of knowing is the word intimate, from the Latin intimare, “to make known, announce,” which in turn derives from intimus, “most personal friend, secret, innermost, deepest.” Today the noun intimate denotes “a very close and familiar relationship,” while the verb means “to suggest”—a softened version of “to make known.” Evoking the confluence of meanings specified by yada (and also Socrates’ specification of the “seeking” nature of eros), the word inquiry—the theoretical core and beating heart of the psychoanalytic project—derives from the Latin in, “into,” and quaere, “to ask,” “to seek,” “to perceive or see.” Thus implicated in intimacy are seeing, seeking to know, and making known the other’s most private and innermost depths.

While knowing is usually presumed to mainly involve thinking—the gathering, processing, and synthesizing of information—these processes are not without affective charge; this is especially true when the subject in question is another human being, or one’s own self. The interpersonal experience of knowing and understanding, and of being known and understood, engages a variety of complex embodied feelings across a spectrum of qualities and characteristics, ranging from the feeling of being lovingly held to the feeling of being shamefully exposed. More penetrative, erotic sensations may be activated in analysands as they experience the analyst gaining new access to their inner world via observations, connections, and interpretations that are perceived as particularly accurate, observant, or enlightening, and which are commonly described as “sharp,” “piercing,” or “penetrating.” For example, a man whose transferences to me were not particularly erotic nevertheless feels a sexual frisson when “taking in” an unexpected and illuminating interpretation. The analyst may also respond: an eminent supervisor once admitted to me that when unconscious psychic material under some tension gradually and consistently “yields” to serial interpretations, the cadence of the session can begin to simulate the arousing rhythm of sexual intercourse.

In keeping with the notion of transference as pervasive even when not overtly manifest (Joseph 1985), the erotics of knowing can be theorized as both supplying and supplied by transference dynamics. Thus this erotics does not exist independently of the transference, but is knitted together with and contextualized by the dynamics of the individual dyad, and varies according to its current status. For example, the transference contributes to the present balance between the analysand’s wanting and not wanting to be known, an essential conflict in every analysis. When being knowing is on balance unwanted, unfamiliar, or unexpected, analysands can experience the analyst’s intense interest and curiosity as frightening, dominating, or controlling, and their entrée to and exploration of their inner world as intrusive or violating. It can also compromise the sense of separateness and engender fearful fantasies of merger. When the balance tips toward the desire to be known, analysands are more likely to experience the analyst’s attempt at understanding as loving, caring, containing, or desirous. These responses to being understood in the analytic setting are well known and often described. However, I propose that these responses to being understood, while always and necessarily colored by the transference in all its permutations and shifts, also draw on an intrinsic aspect of the experience of knowing and being known that involves feelings, conscious or unconscious, of sexual desire and its gratification.

Sight is often the metaphorical vehicle of insight. Just as the fruit of the tree of knowledge allowed Adam and Eve to see their nakedness, so too do analysands often express intensely intimate feelings of being “undressed,” “seen through,” “seen inside,” or “read like a book.” Seeing the other creates an “impression” on the one who sees: Freud often alludes to the penetrative aspect of seeing by using the word Eindruck (impression, indentation, feeling) to characterize the impact of visual perception. ³ And just as the analyst penetrates the analysand’s psyche in an attempt to understand, so too is the embodied other seen and taken in; they make an impression. Seeing, knowing, loving.

It is the carnally embodied, incorporative/penetrative aspect that distinguishes the feeling of being known from other embodied feelings, a quality highlighted by the directional gradient of knowing in the analytic setting. Knowing and being known are thus inevitably constructed as an erotic binary, one that is traditionally gendered by the specification of male activity and penetration vs. feminine passivity and reception, but that can and should be opened up to include all manner of penetration and reception. This dialectic is inscribed in our culture: to wit, contemporary love songs speak to the intense curiosity about the object of desire, the urgent need to “know” them, often describing the embodied experience of incorporating or “getting inside” the desired other—erotic actions that operate irrespective of gender (for an incisive discussion, see Corbett 2002).

That the analytic dyad has a special, specific erotic appeal has long been exploited in the cinema, the trope of analyst and patient falling in love the subject of many films that, while tacitly normalizing and glamorizing boundary violations, can be understood as expressions of a ubiquitous cultural fantasy, a collective imagined response to the analytic project. In virtually all these films, the therapist demonstrates a passionate, undeterred interest in the patient, and a devotion to cure via knowing, usually through the uncovering and understanding of repressed material. ⁴

Unsurprisingly, the mingling of desire and curiosity that characterizes intimacy is not lost on our patients, who experience it firsthand. A common scenario in our digital age is the analysand’s search for information about the analyst on the internet, an activity often confessed with a guilty feeling, as if taboo secrets had been accessed, rather than public knowledge. And often enough there is indeed an aggressive or competitive component to these investigations, the analysand seeking to level the power imbalance in the relationship. The same can be said for the analyst, a point to which Kravis (2017) speaks. But at other times it is the wish to gain a greater feeling of closeness that underlies the search for knowledge. One patient reports: “I Google you sometimes, now and then, to see if anything new turns up. . . . Although in some ways I know a lot about you, you’re still a mystery. I want to know more about you and your family, I want to know what goes on inside your house . . . mmm, there’s a lot of ‘wanting’ going on here.” The inextricable link between knowing and loving allows the exciting, “invasive” act of spying to contain and screen a far more transgressive wish: when contextualized by Loewald’s description (1970) of the dynamic of the analytic dyad as essentially filial, the wish to “spy” on the analyst resonates all the more with the child’s resented exclusion from the primal scene. The wish to know “what goes on inside your house” can represent the leading edge of shameful wishes for familial inclusion and frustrated erotic desire, and screen a wish to access the hidden erotic life of the analyst.

Some individuals apprehend the inherent erotism of the psychoanalytic encounter immediately. When I brought up the option of psychoanalysis to a woman who presented for a consultation, she responded, “That’s the sexiest idea ever. It’d be like coming in and taking my clothes off. And you even have a bed! Lying down on it, showing you everything, more private than a lover. That’s the sexy part—knowing a mind. You don’t have to get undressed to get naked.” This person went on to develop a set of transferences that shifted in character from maternal to paternal, oedipal to preoedipal, none of them floridly erotic; it was the anticipation of “naked” disclosure and “heady” intimacy that excited her.

Common too, of course, is the avoidance of being known (Joseph 1983), or of knowing anything at all about the analyst. As more than one patient has explained, “if I know more about you, you become more of a ‘real’ person. I want to keep things less ‘personal.’” Such purposeful “not knowing” no doubt often functions as a resistance to the experience of erotic feelings in the dyad, in addition to other aspects of the analysis. Accordingly, the ability to experience and tolerate erotic connection alongside the challenge of achieving psychological and emotional intimacy—no mean feat—may well be seen as a measure of analytic progress.

Freud’s Conceptualization of Analytic Erotism

If the erotics of knowing is central to our language, our origin stories, and other cultural narratives, if our patients are aware of and receptive to it, then why is it literally absent from psychoanalytic discourse? Tracing its treatment in the history of psychoanalysis provides some answers.

Early in the history of psychoanalysis, Freud, in a 1902 letter to Jung, asserted that psychoanalysis “is in essence a cure through love” (Jones 1955, p. 485)—a statement that can be read in many different ways. From the start, Freud had associated psychopathology (initially, hysteria) with disturbances in sexuality, first in its association with abuse, and later in its repression. Before he formulated the techniques of accessing unconscious material with free association and dream interpretation, he briefly used the “pressure” method, pressing his hand against his patient’s forehead to stimulate recollection when none was forthcoming: “[I] placed my hand on the patient’s forehead or took her head between my hands and said: ‘You will think of it under the pressure of my hand. At the moment at which I relax my pressure you will see something in front of you or something will come into your head. Catch hold of it. It will be what we are looking for” (Breuer and Freud 1895, p. 109; emphasis added). Linking the accessing of suppressed or repressed knowledge with sight, Freud tells the patient, with certainty, that the patient will “see something” under his pressure. It is a detail he will repeat: “I carried this out by instructing the patient to report to me faithfully whatever appeared before her inner eye or passed through her memory” (p. 145; emphasis added). Essentially an exercise in suggestion, this literally “pressurized” gesture constitutes a sexualized intolerance of refusal: a forcible, “upwardly displaced” (to use Freud’s own terminology [1905a, p. 82]) demand to penetrate, expose, and bring to light the secrets hidden in the embodied female mind.

Freud clearly appreciated the risk of untoward inducements in the consulting room. After the disaster of Josef Breuer fleeing Anna O.’s love, Freud took pains to address it upfront in Dora’s case history. Not three pages into it, he writes:

Now in this case history—the only one which I have hitherto succeeded in forcing through the limitations imposed by medical discretion and unfavourable circumstances—sexual questions will be discussed with all possible frankness, the organs and functions of sexual life will be called by their proper names, and the pure-minded reader can convince himself from my description that I have not hesitated to converse upon such subjects in such language even with a young woman. Am I, then, to defend myself upon this score as well? I will simply claim for myself the rights of the gynaecologist—or rather, much more modest ones—and add that it would be the mark of a singular and perverse prurience to suppose that conversations of this kind are a good means of exciting or of gratifying sexual desires [Freud 1905a, p. 9].

Freud begins the case report with a teaser—an amuse-bouche, so to speak—that implicitly promises a singular account that he had “succeeded in forcing through the limitations imposed by medical discretion.” Having couched this struggle in phallic terms, he intends to defend himself “upon this score”: “even with a young woman,” he will for the sake of the treatment “claim . . . the rights of the gynaecologist.” He immediately qualifies his bold entitlement with a disclaimer: said rights are in fact “much more modest ones,” from which no sexual gratification will be derived. Indeed, to imagine that it would “would be the mark of a singular and perverse prurience.”

Some forty pages later, Freud revisits the charged issue of professional discretion:

It is possible for a man to talk to girls and women upon sexual matters of every kind without doing them harm and without bringing suspicion upon himself. . . . The best way of speaking about such things is to be dry and direct. . . . I call bodily organs and processes by their technical names, and I tell these to the patient if they—the names, I mean—happen to be unknown to her. J’appelle un chat tin chat [I call a cat a cat] [Freud 1905a, p. 48].

Counseling that intimate sexual matters must be spoken of in a way that defuses “such things” of their power to arouse, Freud thereby confirms this power—even in the absence of “perverse prurience.”

As is well appreciated, Freud’s writing is replete with conventionally gendered linguistic representations of the physico-spatial aspect of knowing, including the metaphorical imagery of the excavation, dissection, and penetration of layered depths, which he uses to describe the accession of unconscious material. Typifying this rhetorical device and underlining its erotic coloring is his familiar identification of Dora’s reticule and jewel-case as symbols of female genitals—containers waiting to be opened and probed. Mahony (1996) argues that “in spite of his conscious denial, [Freud’s] dry technical language was not just eroticized but seductive” (p. 99); Sprengnether (1990) further interprets “Freud’s furious denial of the charge of titillating his patient with sexual language,” and his anxiety over the possibility of reproach, “as an indication that he is doing just that” (p. 48).

I posit that Freud worried about more than such criticism, however, and suggest that his overdetermined and now exhaustively analyzed detour into French—J’appelle un chat tin chat—also enacts an unarticulated and perhaps unconscious doubt about his capacity to brace himself and put into practice the abstemious “dry and direct” stance that he prescribes. As is well known, chat is also slang for female genitalia; having promised to “call bodily organs and processes by their technical names,” he lapses into vulgar colloquialisms, casting aspersion on his presumption that “there is never any danger of corrupting an inexperienced girl” with “technical” knowledge (not to mention his ability to remain “dry and direct” with them). These critical tensions lace the case history, and remain unresolved.

In Three Essays on Sexuality, published the same year as the Dora case, Freud (1905b) formalizes the age-old connection between the desire to know and the desire to see, understanding epistemophilia as a sublimation of infantile sexual curiosity that borrows from the scopophilic instinct: “the instinct for knowledge [Wißtrieb] . . . cannot be counted among the elementary instinctual components, nor can it be classed as exclusively belonging to sexuality. Its activity corresponds on the one hand to a sublimated manner of obtaining mastery, while on the other hand it makes use of the energy of scopophilia” (p. 194). I have already discussed the heavy endowment of curiosity, inquiry, and discovery with affective charge; thus, Freud’s Wißtrieb (or Wißentrieb) is better translated as a more passionate “desire” or “thirst” for knowledge. Making the famous observation that “all comparatively intense affective processes, including even terrifying ones, trench upon sexuality” (p. 203), Freud by no means excludes Wißtrieb from libidinal fuel: “the progressive concealment of the body which goes along with civilization keeps sexual curiosity awake. This curiosity seeks to complete the sexual object by revealing its hidden parts” (p. 156). Nor does he see the need to distinguish whether the exciting pull to know represents a primary libidinal drive, or is only secondarily invested with libido. Just a few years later, Freud in “Little Hans” (1909) takes the connection a step further, clarifying that “the search for knowledge seems to be inseparable from sexual curiosity” (p. 9; emphasis added). Yet he leaves it up to the reader to extend this observation to its logical conclusion: that the search for analytic knowledge—the search to “reveal,” “see,” and “know” the heretofore unseen and unknown “hidden parts” of the other—may also be “inseparable” from sexual curiosity. And he does so again when he revisits the topic in his essay on Leonardo (Freud 1910).

A decade after Three Essays, Freud in the consummately ambiguous “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915) formulates the analysand’s erotic feelings for the analyst as a manifestation of the transference, warning that the analyst “must recognize that the patient’s falling in love is induced by the analytic situation and is not to be attributed to the charms of his own person” (p. 161). The analysand is not really in love with the analyst, Freud seems to indicate, but with the revenant of an infantile imago. Note that Freud never explicitly questions whether such feelings can ever derive from anything other than the transference, but implies that they do not when he subsequently characterizes them as Liebesübertragung, “the erotic transference” (p. 161), and as Verliebtheit in der Übertragung, “falling in love in the transference” (p. 162). Indeed, the use of the term “transference-love” in the title of the essay (Übertragungsliebe) essentially equates erotic feelings and erotic transference. The gravity of the situation is clear, and the stakes are high: “the experiment of letting oneself go a little way in tender feelings for the patient is not altogether without danger. Our control over ourselves is not so complete that we may not suddenly one day go further than we had intended” (p. 163). Assigned this special transferential status, the analysand’s love is suspect, its “genuineness” (Echtheit, authenticity) questionable at best (p. 167). Thus, Freud advises the analyst to “keep firm hold of the transference-love, but treat it as something unreal [Unreales], as a situation which has to be gone through in the treatment and traced back to its unconscious origins” (p. 166; emphasis added). Titian’s transfixed Adam, who suggests “a cure of love,” has become Rubens’s abstinent Adam.

But note the flicker of indeterminacy in Freud’s command that transference love be treated as unreal [behandelt sie aber als etwas Unreales]—he never quite says that it is unreal. Indeed, he concedes that “if one looks into the situation more closely,” all is not so simple: “one recognizes the influence of motives which further complicate things—of which some are connected with being in love [Verliebtheit, ‘infatuation’ or ‘falling in love,’ rather than Übertragungsliebe] and others are particular expressions of resistance” (Freud 1915, p. 163; emphasis added). Despite his stated intent to discriminate between those aspects involved in “being in love” and those implicated in the resistance to the treatment, the examples he gives make no such distinction.

Likewise, in what seems like a return of the repressed, five pages later Freud himself undoes the “second argument against the genuineness of this love”—namely, “the fact that it exhibits not a single new feature arising from the present situation, but is entirely composed of repetitions and copies of earlier reactions, including infantile ones”—with the admission that “there is no such state [of love] which does not reproduce infantile prototypes” (p. 168), and even asserts that there is little difference between love within and without the analytic setting: “transference-love has perhaps a degree less of freedom than the love which appears in ordinary life and is called normal; it displays its dependence on the infantile pattern more clearly and is less adaptable and capable of modification; but that is all, and not what is essential” (p. 168; emphasis added). Moreover, while transference love is the product of the analytic setting, Freud claims that it does not derive from the resistance—in other words, the transference:

can we truly say that the state of being in love [Verliebtheit ] which becomes manifest in analytic treatment is not a real [reale] one? [emphasis added] . . . the resistance did not, after all, create this love [emphasis in original]; it finds it ready to hand, makes use of it and aggravates its manifestations. . . . We have no right to dispute that the state of being in love which makes its appearance in the course of analytic treatment has the character of a ‘genuine’ love [p. 168].

Thus redrawn is a tension—between, on the one hand, “real” love that is exploited but not “created” by the resistance (i.e., transference) and, on the other, “unreal” transference love, which has only the “character” of “genuine” love—a disparity that Freud again does not even try to reconcile. Perhaps to do so would have been tantamount to the forbidden notion that in at least some instances the analysand’s love might be “real”—an inflammatory idea that could be used to justify just those cases that propelled Freud to write the essay on transference love in the first place, including, most notably, Jung’s affair with his patient Sabina Spielrein. Just as Freud leaves it up to the reader to make the link between epistemophilia and sexual curiosity, he likewise leaves it up to the reader to tolerate the tension between “real” and “unreal” analytic love—between Verliebtheit and Übertragungsliebe. This does not necessarily mean that Freud was not able to make the link or address the tension; rather, I venture that if in fact he could, he nevertheless may not have felt able to do so in print. ⁵

The political philosopher Leo Strauss (1952) observes that when objectionable published material is subject to official suppression, writers resort to dissimulation, using operations remarkably parallel to the processes of the dreamwork, which act to distort and disguise unconscious psychic material in manifest dreams and conscious thoughts. As outlined by Strauss, these include selective omission, as in the missing connection between epistemophilia and sexual curiosity; the use of the negative, in generous evidence in Freud’s transference love essay (“we have no right to dispute”); and as ambiguity, as we have just seen. Strauss also specifies a drawn-out, formalized inversion, in which the author makes an argument opposing the disallowed one in a “quiet, unspectacular and somewhat boring manner” with “many technical terms”; then, “only when he reached the core of the argument would he write three or four sentences in that terse and lively style . . . that central passage would state the [opposing] case more clearly, compellingly and mercilessly than it had ever been stated,” when the “reader would for the first time catch a glimpse of the forbidden fruit” (pp. 24–25). Strauss may well have used as an example the “terse and lively” passage in which Freud turns and suddenly plays the devil’s advocate: “can we truly say that the state of being in love which becomes manifest in analytic treatment is not a real one?” I suggest that Freud is not simply using a rhetorical device, but is also offering, if ultimately obligated to withdraw, a glimpse of the forbidden fruit.

Perhaps Freud’s notorious ambiguity around the reality of analytic erotism need not be resolved: if we accept the proposition that it contains both transferential and extratransferential aspects, then it is no longer a question of whether it is “real” or “unreal,” because it is at the same time “real” and “unreal.” Did Freud avoid attempting such a solution by using the subtitle “Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis,” to cast the essay on transference-love as a methodological rather than theoretical contribution? Thus, rather than hazard the inflammatory confirmation of the potential “reality” of analytic love—trenching as it would on justifying the partaking of “forbidden fruit”—Freud falls back on a technical argument, a version of “just say no,” insisting that as an artifact of the treatment, the analyst cannot return the analysand’s love, real or not, because it would endanger the treatment. As a professional, he must not act on this love, as it would be unethical to do so: “the analyst has evoked this love [Verliebtheit] by instituting analytic treatment in order to cure the neurosis. For him, it is an unavoidable consequence of a medical situation, like the exposure of a patient’s body or the imparting of a vital secret” (Freud 1915, p. 169).

Let us linger on this remarkable statement. Freud first terms the analysand’s love—again, using the word Verliebtheit, and not Übertragungsliebe—an unavoidable consequence of the medical setting. Next he compares the analyst’s experience of this love first to seeing an exposed body, which he then justifies as a medical necessity, though a prudent one. Finally, he moves on to a rather less prudent prospect, the learning of secret knowledge. And what is sexier than a secret? Meant as heuristic analogies for students of psychoanalysis, Freud’s associations nevertheless run deeper, evoking as they do the unavoidable confluence of meanings joined by their common signifier, yada: seeing, knowing, loving.

Following Freud: Ella Freeman Sharpe and Harold Searles

Writing during Freud’s lifetime, Ella Freeman Sharpe (1930) makes the connection between sexual and analytic curiosity that Freud does not: “the very task of eliciting, evoking, finding out what is in another person’s mind bears a very close analogy to the primitive desire to find out and bring out the desired possessions that are inside another’s body” (p. 259). As Michael Shulman (2016) points out, Sharpe appreciates the analyst’s “insatiable curiosity” about the analysand’s mind (Sharpe 1930, p. 253; cited by Shulman 2016, p. 717). Note that although Sharpe uses the word “analogy,” which connotes resemblance, and not equivalence, the resemblance is nonetheless “very close.” Shulman suggests that the “maternal, receptive, protective, and containing dimensions of female analysts’ desires concerning their patients . . . allowed them to be more safely, and thus freely, ‘active’ with their patients” (p. 717). I would argue, however, that it is not so easy to distinguish the desires of female and male analysts and propose, as an alternative explanation, that given that most sexual boundary violations are perpetrated by men against women, being female may have helped Sharpe go against the grain and challenge the prevailing emphasis on the analyst’s neutrality, anonymity, and repudiation of instinctual aims in the analytic setting. This challenge seems to have been short-lived, however. Years later, a more sober Sharpe (1947) seems to enact in sequence Freud’s own conflicts and concerns around the erotics of the analytic setting: in something of a correction to her earlier writing, she warns in no uncertain terms that “through personal analysis [the analyst’s] sexual curiosity is purged of its infantile characteristics” and is thus rendered “adult and benevolent”; any gratifications a psychoanalyst gains from an analysis must “be genuine sublimations” (p. 6).

Theorizers following Freud and Sharpe more or less heed their warnings, situating the “cure through love” and sexual feelings in the analytic setting within the qualified reality of transference-countertransference dynamics. In one of the most important early writings on countertransference, Harold Searles (1959) candidly admits to erotic feelings toward his patients, often transcending the simply sexual: “in the course of my work with every one of my patients who has progressed to, or very far towards, a thoroughgoing analytic cure, I have experienced romantic and erotic desires to marry and fantasies of being married to the patient” (p. 284). In describing a variety of clinical experiences, Searles squarely and consistently formulates these wishes as countertransferential in origin and oedipal in quality.

Then, at the close of his essay on countertransference, comes an extraordinary passage: “Returning to a consideration of the therapist’s oedipal-love responses to the patient, it seems to me that these responses flow from four difference sources. In actual practice these responses . . . are probably so commingled in the therapist that it is difficult or impossible fully to distinguish one from another” (p. 298). Certain components of “the therapist’s oedipal-love responses,” Searles stresses, are not countertransferential, but nevertheless “promote feelings of deep love with romantic and erotic overtones,” as well as grief, anxiety, and other feelings (p. 300). Most notable, and apparently most important to Searles, is the fourth and last component he lists, which bears the echo of Freud’s vague differentiation of “real” love from “unreal” transference love. This source of “oedipal-love responses” is

based on the genuine reality of the analyst-patient situation the nearer a patient comes to the termination of his analysis, the more he becomes, per se, a likeable, admirable, and basically speaking lovable, human being from whom the analyst will soon become separated. . . . This real and unavoidable circumstance . . . tends powerfully to arouse within the analyst feelings of painfully frustrated love which deserve to be compared with the feelings of ungratifiable love which both child and parent experience in the oedipal phase. . . . Feelings from this source cannot properly be called countertransference, as they flow from the reality of the present circumstance [p. 300; emphasis added].

In a departure from the many descriptions Searles offers to illustrate what he characterizes as countertransference, he does not provide a clinical example of this “real” component, either from his own work or that of a colleague or supervisee; this may relate to his observation that “in practice” the countertransferential and extracountertransferential sources of the analyst’s love that he outlines are “difficult or impossible fully to distinguish one from another.” Evidently, they are also difficult to distinguish in theory, as Searles here thrice relates the posited extratransferential love to “reality,” while at the same time he implicitly evokes the transference by comparing this love to the historical oedipal situation (and its frustration) that it recalls (and perhaps revives)—the very difficulty with which Freud struggled. Perhaps only during the termination phase could Searles tolerate his own erotic countertransference feelings, let alone the conceivable “reality” of analytic erotism—witness the hesitance with which he describes them “as basically speaking, lovable”—and allow those feelings to breach what he himself calls the “simultaneous, unceasing, and rigorous taboo” against them (p. 299).

A Split in the Discourse: The Separation of Knowing from Loving

Searles’s work encouraged the psychoanalytic community to become increasingly engaged around the dialectics of reality in the transference, and to consider the notion of the “real”—in other words, extratransferential—analytic relationship, including such formulations as rapport and the therapeutic (or working) alliance. However, the great ambiguity around erotism in the analytic setting—which Freud inaugurated, and which Searles began to interrogate by discriminating between its “real” and “unreal” aspects—was not absorbed into this discourse. Instead, a split in the discourse ensued, wherein erotism remained sequestered exclusively within the realm of transference-countertransference dynamics. Thus, both the erotic transference, which draws on and recapitulates early dynamics, and the erotized transference, a perverse and often destructive resistance to the analysis (a simplistic but heuristically useful distinction), were treated not, strictly speaking, as Freud dictated (“as if unreal”), but as if real—essentially artifactual (and therefore artificial) by-products of the analytic process that are (at least theoretically) resolvable by interpretation: as if real, but in reality, Unreales.

At the same time Searles was writing, the concept of the “real” relationship was expanding to include the new construct of “analytic love,” which, as epitomized by Hans Loewald’s formulation, comprises the appreciation, caring admiration, and above all the understanding of the analysand, Explicitly specifying that “analytic love” is fully independent of transference dynamics, and yet an integral aspect of the analytic setting, Loewald asserts that this love is best compared to that between mother and child—not because the analysand perceives and experiences the analyst as acting like a mother within the fantasy realm of the transference, but because the analyst, in his or her professional and ethical responsibility to support the analysand’s growth and maturation, does in fact provide important maternal functions (and often a needed improvement on the original mother). ⁶

In a cogent analysis of Loewald’s theories, Jonathan Lear (1996) states that “for Loewald, the analytic relationship is a recreation, at a higher level of organization, of the mother-infant field” (p. 684). But if Loewald’s formulation of “analytic love” is most like the love between mother and child, then it is entirely divested of erotic force, explicitly, if inexplicably, excluding the erotic aspects of the love between parent and child that Freud so clearly outlines in Three Essays. Rather, Loewald (1970) asserts that the analyst’s generative love for the analysand is the very essence of the analyst’s “objectivity and neutrality”; thus, it is “in our best moments of dispassionate and objective analyzing” that “we love our object, the patient, more than at any other time and are compassionate with his whole being” (p. 65). Couched in purely cerebral terms, this “love” is literally neutered, and hardly passionate. Note the disparity between the goal of “dispassionate and objective analyzing” and the prospect of being “compassionate with his whole being”—a being that is, however, not quite whole. Loewald also elaborates an implicit moral dichotomy between, on the one hand, irreproachable, “real,” and presumably fully sublimated analytic love, and the much more concerning and “unreal” erotic transference-countertransference on the other. Moreover, Loewald’s de-erotized analytic love—which, in Roy Schafer’s compelling explication (1994), is a love born of understanding—is at odds with his own conception of eros as intimately bound up with meaning, and thus with knowing. In agreement with Schafer, Lear (1996) observes that “eros, for Loewald, constitutes the field through which meanings flow” (p. 684); yet in ridding “analytic love” of erotism, Loewald divorces knowing from eros, Psyche from Cupid.

Loewald is not alone in disavowing the erotism in the “real” love between analyst and analysand. Various formulations of “analytic love” have remained uniformly sterilized and devoid of libidinal passion: as Lawrence Friedman (2005) notes in his excellent review of the construct, “understanding seems a rather bloodless sort of love” (p. 365). ⁷ Sheldon Bach (2006) notes in his more recent and considerably less cerebral consideration of analytic love that “many of the technical terms and concepts of psychoanalysis can be seen as part of a programmatic effort to specify the parameters of love in an experience-distant language” (p. 126), in contrast to his own observation that “you find yourself totally emotionally involved in . . . a process that is larger than yourself. A part of you is still able to observe professionally, to reflect and exercise control, but another part is hopelessly entangled, and you simply cannot help it. You have, to speak quite frankly, fallen in love with your patient” (p. 133). Yet Bach, too, sets clear boundaries around this particular “falling in love,” specifying that it is “the sense of knowing, appreciating, and admiring without carnal knowledge or seductive feelings but in essentially the same way one appreciates the body and flesh of one’s closest friends or one’s own children in their entirety” (pp. 129–130; emphasis added). Like Searles and Loewald, Bach de-erotizes filial relationships, pointedly exempting “carnal knowledge or seductive feelings” from the “entirety” of the equation (reminiscent of Loewald’s “dispassionate” love for the patient’s “whole being”). Still, a preconscious understanding of what goes missing may be intuited in Bach’s description of the “mutual assimilation and interpenetration” of the analytic dyad (p. xix).

Glen Gabbard (1996) brings the very notion of analytic love much closer to its logical conclusion, stating that, despite meticulous neutrality, “constructive analytic love may nevertheless inspire passionate desire in the patient, who not only feels safe to express such feelings, but also feels that the analyst’s concern and analytic understanding make the analyst an enormously appealing figure” (p. 264). By virtue of his “concern and analytic understanding,” he suggests, the analyst is the analysand’s de facto love object—a provocative and important statement that remains unpacked. It is also not a one-way street; Gabbard stops just short of allowing that the analysand’s “real” gratitude, appreciation, respect, and indeed love for the analyst may reciprocally “inspire passionate desire.”

More recently, in the tradition of Loewald and other theorizers of the “real” analytic relationship, Shulman (2016) outlines a variety of what he calls the analyst’s “unavoidable satisfactions.” While decidedly warmer in register than Loewald’s “dispassionate objectivity,” Shulman follows Loewald and others in that the “unavoidable satisfactions” he describes barely trench on erotic experience. While he cites Sharpe and her “insatiable curiosity,” as well as another early writer, Barbara Low (1935)—who characterizes the analyst as something of a “lover” and psychoanalysis as a “collaborative love-feast” (p. 7)—Shulman’s own tone remains bemused and playful. And of all the examples of “the analyst’s pleasure” he presents, the one that comes closest to the erotic appears (at least) hypothetical: the possibility that he “might enjoy [a patient’s] wiggling tauntingly at [him] on the couch” (p. 709). Diametrically opposed to Loewald’s de-erotized analytic love, however, Shulman neither characterizes nor conceptualizes his G-rated “unavoidable satisfactions” as intrinsic to or derived from the analytic aims of knowing and understanding; although associated with the intimacy of the analytic setting, they seem practically incidental. We see something similar in Salman Akhtar’s essay on curiosity (2017): while noting that the Hindi word for curiosity, jigyasa, is derived from the Sanksrit gya, to know, and san, desire, he curiously fails to include desire or its fulfillment on his extensive list of the aims of curiosity—which is, after all, another word for epistemophilia. A far cry from Sharpe’s “primitive desire to find out and bring out the desired possessions that are inside another’s body,” there is nothing desirous about curiosity in Akhtar’s description.

From a more affect-near perspective, Ilany Kogan (2003) turns to the analysand’s experience of being “touched” by the analyst’s words—touch being a word that conveys a certain physicality, the embodied, visceral quality of emotional impact. The words that “touch” her analysand express Kogan’s loving concern for her, and her corresponding desire to keep her in treatment—significantly, an entreaty that incorporates a quote from Rilke, and thus recognizes their shared familiarity with the poet: “You shouldn’t turn away from treatment. ‘Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other’” (p. 124). It is no surprise that her analysand felt “touched” and “protected,” and chose to stay with the analyst who reached to “greet” her. Yet Kogan attributes the emotional impact of her words to the sensuous music of the affectively laden verbal exchange—and not to the desire articulated therein. Hypothesizing that “insight correlates with seeing, feeling correlates with touching,” Kogan concludes, “my statement conveyed a clear emotional message and the tone of my voice, impregnated with affects that embodied my words, enhanced its impact. . . . In contrast to insight, which is the result of a correct interpretation, my intervention resulted in a feeling” (p. 127). ⁸

While respecting the human voice’s capacity as a singularly seductive instrument, I disagree with the implication that proffered insight does not in itself “touch” or elicit feeling, as words can and do result in feeling, including the feeling of being profoundly understood, whereby we feel “touched.” I venture that Kogan’s emotional message was “embodied” not only by the affect with which it was imbued, but also and perhaps even more so by virtue of its clear articulation of her desire. Perhaps Kogan deflects any latent erotism of her interventions—explicitly separating its tone of loving feeling from the knowledge it verbalizes, the fact of her desire—because she needed to deflect her analysand’s conspicuous sexual demands. Indirectly, however, she may acknowledge the impact of her desire, if through the voice of another, by quoting Grunes’s assertion (1984) that “words do convey affectively alive experience and can also be experienced as expressions of volition and desire’” (p. 127; cited in Kogan 2003, p. 128). Summoned here, it seems, is the common outcome of a productive analysis, the sense of becoming newly alive; I suggest that the intimate developmental process of recognition and understanding includes and recruits an element of erotic power that makes us feel alive, and without which we feel dead.

While Lacan (1966) takes a different approach to the erotic and the transference, he too splits loving from knowing. For Lacan, desire is a product of instilled cultural fantasy rather than an endogenous drive; residing within the Symbolic, it remains distinguishable from the bodily sensation of jouissance. Lacanian metapsychology divides the transference into two components: the “Imaginary” aspect, characterized by the emotions of love and hate, which serves as a resistance to the analysis (as does the erotized transference); and the “Symbolic,” pro-analytic aspect. The latter component includes the fundamental love for the analyst—the “Subject Supposed to Know,” who is presumably able to “know” the analysand—that motivates the analysis. In accord with Lacan’s view of sexuality as autoerotic, the “truer” love is that for knowledge about the self (savoir). While Lacan eludes the question of reality in the transference by arguing that that analyst cannot arbitrate reality, and can only impose his or her own subjectivity, he implicitly differentiates between surface appearance (Imaginary, anti-analysis) and genuine essence (Symbolic, pro-analysis), which verges on the distinction between the Unreales erotic transference and “real” “analytic love.” This is not an exact parallel, of course: for Lacan the Symbolic aspect of the transference is still transference—the “Subject Supposed to Know.” Moreover, this transference is really about the self—it is a “subject” not an “object” that is “supposed to know.” There are several splits here: the splitting of desire from the body; of desire from object relations; and of knowing from loving, a “superficial” affect of the Imaginary.

Anticipating the pervasive split between knowing and loving, Klein (1930) specifies epistemophilia as an independent drive, a primary inborn thirst for knowing that is secondarily invested with libido, thereby splitting the drive to know from the drive to love. Drawing on Klein, Bion (1962) emphasizes this distinction, differentiating “K,” the “knowing link,” from “L,” the “loving link.” Like Klein’s de-erotized breast, Bion’s radical conceptualization of thought as embodying the somatic experience of the container and the contained (penis and vagina, mouth and nipple) seems relatively emptied of eros. Indeed, save for Olson’s discussion of identification (2017), I am not aware of a body of literature that addresses the erotic potential of the mechanisms whereby parts of one person enter another person’s mind (e.g., the “colonization” of the mind through projective identification).

This omission is especially striking given the growing appreciation of the embodied self, a discourse initiated by Freud (1923): “the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; not merely a surface entity, but the projection of a surface” (p. 26). In the less familiar footnote added in the 1927 English translation, he further specifies that “the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides, as we have seen above, representing the superficies of the mental apparatus” (p. 26). This notion is entirely consistent with the proposition that the penetrative and incorporative qualities of knowing and being known are perceptually, affectively, and cognitively embodied in the mind. Indeed, if considered alongside this conjecture, both Klein’s model of projective and introjective identification and Bion’s model of the release, containment, and return of psychic parts offer beautiful intuitive models of the dynamics of the erotic aspects of knowing.

A Second Split: The Erotization and De-Aggressivization of the Maternal Transference

In the New Testament story of the Annunciation, the Archangel Gabriel appears to the Virgin Mary to tell her that she will bear God’s child. In Fra Angelico’s Fiesole Annunciation, a concentrated sunbeam streams from the heavens toward Mary, denoting her virginal conception of the Christ child (Figure 2). But in the later Cortona Annunciation, Fra Angelico replaces the golden rays with threads of golden words that spell out Gabriel’s verbal message to Mary, and her obedient assent (Figure 2): “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee. . . . that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. . . . And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:35, 38).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Upper right, The Annunciation, Fra Angelico, 1426, Altarpiece of the Convent of San Domenico, Fiesole; Museo del Prado, Madrid. Middle right, The Annunciation, Fra Angelico, 1434, Altarpiece of the Church of Gesù, Cortona; Museo Diocesano, Cortona. Left and lower, details

The Cortona Annunciation’s compositional equation of the articulation of Mary’s imminent conception via divine penetration with its achievement signifies a symbolic equation, breathing new meaning into the words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Moreover, this equation of thinking and doing—a extraordinary example of the omnipotence of thought—reverberates with the dual aspects of “knowing,” cognitive and carnal, implicated in Adam and Eve’s partaking of forbidden knowledge. Indeed, the secondary groups in the two Fra Angelico Annunciation frescoes discussed here illustrate their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the remains of the eaten forbidden fruit at their feet (Figure 2, detail), alluding to the Christian doctrine that the birth of Christ to the Virgin Mary—herself “immaculately” conceived without original sin—redeemed man from his: “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14). The erotic knowing in which Adam and Eve indulged, and which instigated man’s original sin, is replaced and thereby undone with a cleansed version—indeed, an “immaculate” one.

A parallel may be made with one recent fate of analytic erotism. Laplanche (1976), who has encouraged renewed interest in the topic, departs from Lacan in understanding sexuality not as fundamentally autoerotic, but as originating in the other; he, too, keeps his clinical focus rigorously trained on the transference. Similarly, Julia Kristeva (1983) privileges the transference in her evocative assertion that “the psychoanalytic cure continues to feed on a love that transcends the hazards of loves” (p. 382), which she unequivocally identifies as derived from the maternal transference—a sensual, erotic, often frustrating, but ultimately idealized dyadic love. ⁹ Drawing heavily on Kristeva, and making links with Laplanche and Levinas, Viviane Chetrit-Vatine (2012) explicates the “ethical seduction” of the analytic setting, which in her formulation is transferential and fundamentally asymmetrical: in her view, the analyst is firmly located in “the matricial position” and “provokes a matricial space transference in the patient” (p. 94). While she goes further than Kristeva in emphasizing the analyst’s seductive role, Chetrit-Vatine nevertheless veers away from both the erotic and the aggressive in her fairly barren formulation of “ethical passion” (p. 95). In agreement with Kristeva and Chetrit-Vatine, Dianne Elise (2017) categorically confines analytic erotism to the maternal, which she more narrowly specifies as derived from early development: the “mother-infant dance is maternal eroticism” (p. 38; emphasis added). While I quite agree with the proposition that psychoanalysis is “an erotic project” (p. 49) and that analytic erotism has been “quarantined under the rubric of the erotic transference and countertransference” (p. 54), ¹⁰ Elise’s conceptualization of analytic erotism nevertheless remains quarantined—within the maternal, rather than the erotic, transference.

Like Kristeva and Chetrit-Vatine, Elise construes maternal analytic erotism as creative, constructive, generative, and therapeutic, stressing its “vital” and “vibrant” qualities. Devoid of friction, tension, or aggression, and lacking conflict or conquest, this picture bears little resemblance to adult erotic life. There is no ecstatic physicality, weak-kneed surrender, or convulsive abandon here, the metaphor of “dance” suggesting instead a measure of performative distance and choreographic control. Such a tightly circumscribed maternal-infant erotism abjures more frightening aspects of fusion with its chaotic dissolution of boundaries, let alone the dark heart of the Garden of Eden—the dirty secret, the primal scene, the sinful specter of forbidden oedipal knowledge, indeed, the entire dangerous equation of sex, knowledge, and power that, as Foucault (1976) has shown, crested during Freud’s time. If Klein de-erotizes the breast, Kristeva, Chetrit-Vatine, and Elise de-aggressivize it. The apple of this mother’s eye is hardly forbidden: implicitly, the analysand’s sexuality is infantilized, as immature as a baby’s. ¹¹ If this is “love that transcends the hazards of love,” then this is love without lust—not very erotic at all, and more reminiscent, though more rhapsodic, of Loewald’s irreprehensible analytic love. ¹² Indeed, in an echo of Kristeva’s “love that transcends the hazards of loves,” Elise emphatically differentiates maternal analytic erotism from the “lamentable examples of the destructive aspects of erotic desire in the treatment relationship,” implying that the maternal flavor of eros is somehow immune to enactment (p. 49).

I suggest that the wishful construal of analytic erotism as inhabiting an idealized maternal version of the transference that is free of mature sexuality reflects (at least in fantasy) an attempt to defend against the grave potential for enactment. But it is also possible that it points to a more general preoedipal retreat from the oedipal. This defense is as old as myth: Ovid enacts a textual—indeed, a literal—version of preoedipal regression in his replacement of the story of Oedipus with that of Narcissus in his poeticized narration of the Theban cycle of myths in Books III and IV of the Metamorphoses, excising the entire House of Laius from Thebes as neatly as erotism was excised from “analytic love” (Tutter 2014, 2016). Indeed, the relocation of analytic erotism from the hot province of the erotic transference to the ostensibly benign maternal transference can be analogized to the redemption of mankind from original sin via the Virgin birth of the Christ child. The expulsion of Adam and Eve achieved, analytic erotism is rehabilitated within the maternal-infant dyad, the forbidden fruit repudiated, shame and sin subdued. Yet as appealing as it may be, the proposition that adults can recapitulate in more or less pure culture a cleaned-up version of maternal-infant love is at heart problematic, as adult sexuality necessarily informs and infuses any revival of infantile sexuality through the après-coup.

The Reality of Analytic Erotism

I hope to have shown that one of the most fundamental aspects of the analytic project, the profound knowing and understanding of the subject, has been effectively delinked from its powerful erotic potential, leaving analytic eros decorticated and relegated to the fantasy-based realm of the transference. The split between the rampant passion of the erotic transference and the cerebral understanding of “analytic love,” and, more recently, the lauded generativity of the maternal transference, persists despite a sophisticated parallel discourse that continues to challenge and interrogate the nature of the transference and its fraught, if not impossible, discrimination from the “real” relationship with the analyst. Legitimate concern over potential boundary violations and the requirement of abstinence power this split, cleansing the analyst’s “real” experience of pleasure, curiosity, and even love of the possibility of enacted seduction—in theory. Given the magical omnipotence of thought, for some, the conjecture of “real” as opposed to transferential analytic erotism might constitute a prophecy of doom, the specter of analysts allowed or even destined to act on their more imprudent impulses. Indeed, some analysts have justified their boundary violations in just this way, minimizing or even denying the element of countertransference enactment (see Celenza and Gabbard 2003; Celenza 2007). I suggest that the extraction of analytic erotism from the “real” relationship and its sequestration within the transference has been a divorce of convenience; the selective absence of analytic erotism from the discourse around reality in the analytic dyad circumvents its highly problematic and threatening reality aspects, enacting Searles’s “simultaneous, unceasing, and rigorous taboo” against it in theory, as well as in practice (1965, p. 299).

Shifting analytic eros into the maternal sphere, Kristeva and Chetrit-Vatine understand maternal erotism as a more universal, inevitable product of the analytic situation, one specific to analytic process, and not the individual analysand’s dynamics, more like Lacan’s “Subject Supposed to Know” than the erotic transference. This raises the question, Why still use the term transference as a descriptor? Recall Searles’s contention that certain feelings “cannot properly be called countertransference, as they flow from the reality of the present circumstance” (p. 300; emphasis added). Perhaps use of the term transference itself serves a vestigial defensive function, a shield of illusory illegitimacy, as we move toward a greater appreciation of an inherent, “real” analytic erotism.

To this end, I suggest that there is an erotics of knowing that is not derivative of the transference—neither the “erotic” transference that represents a repetition of unconscious dynamics, nor the “erotized” transference that presents a formidable resistance to the treatment, nor the de-aggressivized maternal transference, nor the transference of the elusive “Subject Supposed to Know.” Rather, it is an elemental, vital aspect of the analytic relationship that is stirred by seeing and being seen, understanding and being understood, knowing and being known—not as perfectly as we may (or may not) wish, but substantially and meaningfully enough to arouse and enliven us. While I suggest that this erotics issues from intimacy rather than transference dynamics, I do not suggest that it can be dissected with any precision from the transference—or, for that matter, that it can be dissected from the transference at all. Rather, I argue that mature analytic erotism is no less “real” and no more “transferential” than any other aspect of the relationship—a notion entirely consistent with the theories of Searles, Laplanche, and others, which hold that the transference constantly permeates and shapes all aspects of sexual life. In this conjecture, all factors that contribute to the total erotism fuel, color, and activate each other.

The erotics of knowing is only one source of analytic erotism. While the discussion of others is beyond my scope here, a preliminary list might include immediate physical attraction; the tempting erotic games of court and spark, tease and pursuit, that often lend the analytic hour a particular charge; and the sometimes not so playful wrestle with the resistance that stimulates the more aggressive erotism of power inequities, of domination and submission, and of shameful exposure. There is also the well-known erotic aspect of aesthetic pleasure. For example, I have sometimes fallen into what could be called an erotic swoon when the intensely intimate collaborative process uncovers the startlingly brilliant structure of a dream in all its revelatory glory. There is also the reflexive arousal generated by exposure to analysands’ erotic thoughts and reports, and the simple stories that arouse and excite—stories told not only to colonize or to control, but to be seen and be known.

Pauline Kael (1968) describes this quite well in her essay on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, in which a nurse (Bibi Anderson) takes care of a woman (Liv Ullman) who as a consequence of an ill-defined mental collapse has become, aptly enough, mute. In an inversion of the analytic scenario, the nurse, frustrated by her charge’s refusal to be known, naturally begins to talk about herself. Kael singles out in particular a scene in which the nurse tells her patient a story of a day and night of love on a beach: “as she goes on talking, with memories of summer and nakedness and pleasure in her voice and the emptiness of her present life in her face, viewers may begin to hold their breath in fear that Bergman won’t be able to sustain this almost intolerably difficult sequence. But he does, and it builds and builds and is completed. It’s one of the rare, truly erotic sequences in movie history” (p. 171).

Yet it is not as much the mechanical details of the sex, or the remembered emotion in the nurse’s voice, as her extraordinarily prolonged and almost painful candor, her unbidden naked self-exposure, that infuses this moment with tender intimacy and formidable erotism—despite the fact that the nurse and her charge remain fully clothed and physically separated. Building on the foundational thought of Loewald, who half a century ago emphasized the necessary reciprocity of emotional experience in the analytic setting, I suggest that if we as analysts may offer penetrating insights, then we also respond to the analysand’s offer to expose and reveal herself, in “words that touch.”

In the context of a discussion of masochism and masochistic surrender, Emmanuel Ghent (1990) suggests that resistance in the psychoanalytic setting counters a “general longing to be known, recognized.” Might this longing, he asks, “also be joined by a corresponding wish to know and recognize the other,” a striving “rooted in the primacy of object-seeking as a central motivational thrust in humans”? (p. 110). In agreement, I would add only that the mutual desire to penetrate and know the other is at the heart of eros, a potential contact point for both love and lust. The very act of entering analytic treatment may be construed as an act of willful surrender, a purposeful loosening of boundaries and abdication of control similar to that experienced in sexual intimacy. And yet the physical enactment of the desire to know and be known obviates the far more complex, difficult, and meaningful task of psychically knowing and being known—which, as in the sequence in Persona, can be “almost intolerably difficult.” Paradoxically, the enactment of the erotic transference may defend against—and indeed, destroy—the possibility of sustaining and exploring a more truly generative, more genuinely analytic erotism.

Back to the Garden

I will conclude with a brief clinical vignette. A patient who had just returned from a vacation in Scotland reported that during his time away he had experienced an intense, and intensely shameful, wish to know more about me. He felt it made perfect sense that the analysis was “about” him, but he felt that it would have been “comforting” if he knew more about me during times of separation—as if this knowledge, these “facts” about me, were things he could “hold on to.” He associated to the order and rationality of the Georgian architecture he admired in Edinburgh, describing its stately townhouses laid out around square blocks of enticing walled gardens. He spoke of his dismay as he realized that they were almost all private, accessible only via keys given to residents of neighboring flats. He recalled a dream:

I came upon a walled garden with a high iron gate that I could see through. It was beautiful but the gate was locked. A woman eventually came with a small dog and opened it, smiled at me, but carefully shut it behind her. I was aware that she saw that I was just waiting to be let in, but she didn’t let me in, and I was ashamed. She was very polite . . . but still. I was intensely jealous of the dog that she was carrying in a basket.

I remarked that he remembered a dream about a locked, inaccessible garden after talking about wishing to learn some forbidden “facts” about me to “hold on to.” He replied, “Of course. Not knowing about you is like not being able to get into the garden. Actually in the dream it is more like being invited in and then getting expelled from the garden.”

I then remembered that a year earlier I had brought my dog, who was ill, to the office one day when there was no one to look after her at home. He had liked meeting her—an “unexpected pleasure”—because he liked dogs, but also because he liked knowing this previously unknown, “secret” aspect of his analyst. At the time, he had admitted no jealousy of my dog, and so I commented on the one in the dream. In response, he stated, “the dog was granted access to the private garden. I love dogs because they are shamelessly happy. I think that the garden in Edinburgh is the garden of Edin—Eden, and I am thinking about being expelled like Adam and Eve in their shame. Except I am expelled without Eve.”

After a pause, I added, “Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden of Eden because they partook of forbidden knowledge.” “Yes,” he answered, “and the dog gets to stay in the garden, with Eve.” This led to a prolonged discussion of his frenzied search to learn about me before and during the break in the treatment, an experience that felt both transgressive and exciting, with penetrative, incorporative, loving, and violent aspects. Overriding all was the shameful exposure of his desire.

None of us are untouched by the erotism embedded in the matrix of the exquisite intimacy of the analytic setting that we cultivate. Rather, we negotiate it and manage it; we respect it and we fear it, in our day as in Freud’s, not least because of the disturbing and consequential reality of sexual boundary violations. Yet it would be entirely wrong to postulate that acting on erotic feelings in the analytic dyad could or should ever be warranted or excused. This is not because they fail to exist in pure “extratransferential” culture. It is because Freud’s ultimate argument against their gratification—that to do so with one’s patient would be unethical—still holds. But the fact that we are all more or less vulnerable to boundary violations gives us more—not less—reason to explore the erotics of knowing and other extratransferential aspects of analytic erotism, while at the same time continuing to subject it to the same professional and ethical constraints as any other contribution to the analytic eros. To confine eros to the theater of any kind of transference is to disavow its reality and ubiquity in the analytic present—a reality that pulls us, sometimes all the more when questioned and qualified as a reenactment of the past, the revival of a disembodied ghost not fully alive. The alternative—to continue to deny analytic erotism or its oedipal aspects an equal claim on present reality—is to subscribe to what Low (1935) called “a fiction of immunity” (p. 7). It is to enact Adam’s hesitance to pluck the forbidden fruit, or Freud’s hesitance to link sexual curiosity to analytic curiosity.

Yet in another sense, he did make the link. In Three Essays (1905b), Freud lists what he calls “the sexual researches of childhood,” the first of which, “the instinct for knowledge” (Wißtrieb), is followed by the “the riddle of the Sphinx.” Freud himself recognizes that his curious reading of the riddle—one he would later retract—is not without strain: “the riddle of where babies come from,” he initially writes, “is the same riddle that was propounded by the Theban Sphinx”—albeit, he admits, “in a distorted form which can easily be rectified” (pp. 194–195). Yet the riddle of the Sphinx, which concerns the cycle of life—what happens to babies after they are born—is hardly the same riddle of “where babies come from,” which concerns what happens before babies are born—in other words, sex between mother and father. It is hard to believe this is the same Freud who identified the oedipus complex, and who knew full well that by solving the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus unlocked the door to enacting the forbidden—the foretold knowledge of which he will reject over and over until he is forced to confront the answer to “where baby Oedipus came from,” in spite of his best efforts not to (Zachrisson 2013). Freud’s interpreting the riddle of “where babies come from” as the “same” as the riddle of the Sphinx desexualizes it; yet in making this link, he adumbrates the impending unfolding of the oedipal narrative—in life, just as in myth. Like the blind oracle Tiresias, who could foresee the future, this somewhat blind Freud nevertheless preconsciously “sees,” linking in his text the transgressive oedipal wish with the burning curiosity, the desire to know “where babies come from.” The dialectics of sight resurfaces later in the essay, when Freud notes that children “are afraid in the dark because in the dark they cannot see the person they love,” and thus cannot know for sure that they are still there, and still alive (p. 224; emphasis added). Seeing, knowing, loving.

Splitting undermines knowledge, blinds us to the connections that turn individual components into more complete wholes. As much as we desire knowledge, our apparent need to break connections subverts our attempts to acquire it, which Bion (1959) demonstrates so well in his seminal essay “Attacks on Linking.” The fragmentation of scholarship into encapsulated, isolated disciplines enacts this on a collective level (Tutter 2016), resulting in what José Ortega y Gasset (1930) calls “the barbarism of specialization” (p. 94). No doubt this intellectual siloing has facilitated our field’s lack of engagement with the erotics of knowing. For Lacan, knowing is in any case a futile exercise, undermined by the limits of language and the ubiquity of fantasy, but perhaps this futility also reflects our pervasive tendency to split. And so we do: hobbling our attempts to learn within the interstices, we split between real and unreal, desiring and loving, loving and knowing—and, for that matter, between loving and hating. One could understand Oedipus as an allegory, forever doomed to be blind despite what he learns, insisting on cleaving the libidinal and aggressive drives along the fault lines Freud assigned to mother and father, never to recognize the electric mix that for Laplanche is so fundamentally inseparable as to approach unity. ¹³ Like Freud, we must not know Oedipus—at least in the consulting room. Armed with foreknowledge, we can escape Oedipus’s fate. But if to know we must hear the sirens’ song, we are all Odysseus strapped to the mast.