Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance Over Time by Stephen A. Mitchell (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2002, 224 pp.) - This article reflects on the importance of Mitchell's work in the United Kingdom, where notions of intimacy sit uneasily with psychoanalytic practice. The author argues that a reluctance to take up intimacy in the consulting room has a deleterious effect on intimate relations outside it. Drawing on her work with women, in particular, she posits that the erotic is still an undertheorized area of relational analysis. Although most orthodox theory has been jettisoned, new theory is necessary for an understanding of what the author observes to be a >false< erotic in many of her patients in whom the erotic is temporarily available but is unreliable as a desire and as a source of identity.
This paper examines a state of fear aroused in the analyst during a session. I suggest that the fear arose from the attempt to enter the patient's mental state – a state that was unfamiliar to the analyst. In entering what was essentially psychically foreign territory, I terrified myself with a version of the patient's experience.
In the last decade Bowlby's ideas on attachment have been taken up with tremendous flourish within psychoanalysis in general and by feminists, journalists, and politicians. This paper explores this new turn and suggests some historic reasons for the convergence between feminist ideas, politics, and attachment theory. While welcoming the wider dissemination of an attachment paradigm, it cautions against the too easy uptake of ideas that may be less than congruent with the fundamental challenge that attachment theory poses for conventional psychoanalytic models of the mind.