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

<p><em>Braving the Erotic Field in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Adolescents and Children</em> 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. </p><p>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 <i>erotic field</i>, 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. </p><p>This book makes a decisive contribution to assist clinicians to brave the erotic field with children and adolescents.</p> <p>1. Types of sexual transference and countertransference in psychotherapeutic work<b> </b>with children and adolescents 2.Braving the erotic field in the treatment of adolescents 3.Traversing challenging terrain: discussion of Mary Brady’s 'Braving the Erotic Field' 4. On the new semantics of transference love 5. Child, parents and psychoanalyst: binocular vision in the erotic field 6. Elsa’s sexual fantasies in a narcissistic and erotic transference 7. The tears of a clown: dreaming the erotic in the service of integration<i> </i>8. A boy’s terror and fascination with the male body<i> </i>9. The play of Eros: The story of an adolescent boy, his body, and his analyst’s body<i> </i>10. Too close for comfort: the challenges of engaging with sexuality in work with adolescents<i> </i>11. Erotic, eroticized and perverse transference in child analysis<i> </i>12. A special boy: melancholic terrors of awakening the erotic man<i> </i>13.‘Sleeping beauties’:<em> </em>avoidance of the erotic in adolescence</p>