Publications and Presentation Announcement by Drew Tillotson (USA)
Body as Enemy: The Risk of Coming Alive
(2022). Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, Symposium Series, February 26.
Being and staying alive in clinical work is not always a welcomed experience: at times the analyst’s aliveness collides with patients’ anxieties, their psychic walls or dead spaces. These encounters penetrate barriers, awakening nascent or truncated psychic development, but for some patients this is experienced as dangerous and destabilizing, a Bionian “catastrophic change.” A case illustrates the impact of a chronic bodily illness on a patient’s object world and its interdigitation with his struggles to come alive psychically and bodily. For this patient, illness sealed an early object identification with a dead parent that preserved an unmournable object tie, blocking experiences of aliveness and bodily vitality. The experience of being with the analyst is foreign and confusing, accepted at times, rejected at others, even in the midst of bursts of aliveness and pleasure and relief from psychic isolation. In order to successfully mourn and come alive psychically, the patient faced substantial anxieties linked to his own bodily pleasure, excitement of mind, and encountering the analyst as an enlivening object. The ensuing catastrophe involved letting go of deadening object ties and relinquishing manic flights into a fantasied disease-free body.
Review of “Sexual Addiction: Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Art of Supervision” by V. D. Volkan
(2022). International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 103: 417-420.
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207578.2022.2045868
A Special Boy: Melancholic Terrors of Awakening the Erotic Man
(2022). In Braving the Erotic Field in the Treatment of Adolescents and Children, Mary T. Brady [Ed.]. Routledge, pp. 199-215.
This chapter focuses on a period in the analysis of ‘Cameron,’ a late adolescent, when his curiosity about and envy over the analyst’s fantasized erotic life came to the fore. Bodily distortions and symptoms emerged in the treatment as Cameron imagined capacities of the adult male’s erotic body. The birth of identificatory processes with his analyst and relinquishment of boyhood evoked deep anxiety and catastrophic repercussions. The author describes Cameron’s analysis as an attempt to liberate the hold of powerful object ties that paralyzed his erotic body and mind by helping him to mourn. Liberation from painful objects, however, produces its own terrors. Becoming an erotic adult man catalyzes significant risks; the benefits of change are unconsciously dreaded due to an inability to mourn a maternal object tie that shaped Cameron’s internal life. The author illustrates the adverse developmental impacts of the patient’s early object identification with a dead parent, a dread of potentially lethal sexual object choice in the midst of the AIDS pandemic, and a delayed Oedipal tussle with his attractive, professionally successful father.
Drew Tillotson, Psy.D., FIPA, BCPsa
San Francisco, California
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