Braving the Erotic Field in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Children and Adolescents - Paperback

by Mary Brady (Editor)

Braving the Erotic Field in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Adolescents and Children is a groundbreaking collection of chapters by an international group of analytic authors. The book addresses the general lack of psychoanalytic writing on working with erotic feelings in the consulting room when treating children and adolescents. This lack is doubly odd given Freud's emphasis on childhood sexuality as well as the intensities of the adolescent body/mind.

This book takes the view that the subtle interchange of feelings, dreams, narratives and images that arise when erotic feelings are in the fore is better conceptualized as an erotic field, than with the binary of transference/countertransference. In contemporary psychoanalysis the idea that transference love offers the possibility of knowing the other in the deepest possible way is supplanting an attitude of suspicion. Clinical work with small children to late adolescents will be offered, including gay and gender-fluid adolescents.

This book makes a decisive contribution to assist clinicians to brave the erotic field with children and adolescents.

Author Biography

Dr. Mary T. Brady, is an adult and child psychoanalyst in private practice in San Francisco. She is on the Faculty of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. Her books, Analytic Engagements with Adolescents: Sex, Gender and Subversion and The Body in Adolescence: Psychic Isolation and Physical Symptoms were published by Routledge in 2018 and 2016, respectively.