Working with Sexuality: Bodies, Desires and Imagination

Sexual Desire and Psychoanalytic Time

Psychoanalyzt Chris Oakley argues that both analysts who deny any erotic feelings for clients and analysts who stress ethical behavior towards clients misunderstand the psychoanalytic method and the altered state generated by the analytic encounter. By its very nature, psychoanalyzis allows all feelings and thoughts, including sexual ones.

Drawing on the candor of analyst Harold Searles, Oakley suggests that sexuality is always present between analyst and client and that this generates the ‘alive’ quality that patients experience during the encounter. However, it is only the non-enactment of that sexual possibility that allows the client to become more fully alive to them-selves, which is the therapeutic goal. Sexual restraint on the part of the analyst is therefore not so much a ‘moral’ issue per se but more intrinsic to the basic method, aim and successful outcome of the analysis.