The Sounds of Silence: Embodied Registers, Erotic Reverie

This paper engages a Winnicottian formulation of the analytic field to highlight the often unspoken, implicit erotic dimensions of analytic work. Material from an analysis with a very inhibited, emotionally constricted man shows both patient and analyst encountering difficulty in "locating" each other within the analytic field. Paradoxically, a felt sense of connection was also palpable, and possibly/impossibly erotic. Movement in the treatment required the development of what the analyst came to think of as an "erotic sonar"-a "sounding" in the erotic body of each participant that could indicate the place of creative connection. A sensing in the body for the "feel" of the analytic dyad became a kinetic reading of emotional closeness or distance, as well as indicating the subtle, and shifting, tones of the relationship. Emphasis is placed on bodily experience in a subjective registering of the erotic, both as sexuality and as a more general experience of passion, vitality, and creativity.