Psychotherapy: An Erotic Relationship –
Transference and Countertransference Passions.
Routledge 1997.

‘Essentially the cure is effected by love’
Freud (1906)

‘Side by side with the exigencies of life, love is the great educator’
Freud (1916)

Psychotherapy: An Erotic Relationship challenges the classical psychoanalytic view that the erotic transference and countertransference are merely forms of resistance that jeopardize the therapeutic process. David Mann shows how the erotic feelings and fantasies experienced by patients and therapists can be used to bring about a positive transformation. Combining extensive clinical material with theoretical insights and new research on infants, the author suggests that the development of the erotic derives from interactions between the parent and child and is seldom absent from the therapist-patient relationship. However, while the erotic always contains elements of past relationships, it also expresses hope for a different outcome in the present and future. Individual chapters explore the function of the erotic within the unconscious; erotic pre-Oedipal and Oedipal material; homoeroticism in therapy; sexual intercourse as a metaphor for psychological change; the primal scene in the transference and the difficulties of working with perversions.

Psychotherapy: An Erotic Relationship offers practitioners a deeper understanding of the interaction between erotic transference and countertransference and explains how these aspects of therapy can be used to enhance the therapeutic process.

This book was translated and published in Germany in 1999 by Klett Cotta.

Erotic Transference and Countertransference:
Clinical Practice in Psychotherapy.
David Mann (Editor) Routledge 1999.

This book brings together, for the first time, contemporary views on how psychotherapists and analysts work with and think about the erotic in therapeutic practice.

Representing a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic perspectives including object relations, Kleinian, Jungian, self psychology and Lacanian thought, the contributors highlight similarities and differences in their approaches to the erotic in transference and countertransference, ranging from love and sexual desire to perverse and psychotic manifestations.

Erotic Transference and Counter-transference offers ways of understanding the erotic which should prove both useful and thought provoking.

Contribitors: Marco Chiesa, Ronald Doctor, Nathan Field, Fiona Gardner, Jackie Gerrard, Sheila Gordon, David Mann, Andrew Samuels, Martin Stanton, Jean Thomson.

Love and Hate: Psychoanalytic Perspectives.
David Mann (Editor) Brunner-Routledge 2002.

How do therapists work with love and hate?

Love and hate seem to be the dominant emotions that make the world go round and are a central theme in psychotherapy. Love and Hate seeks to answer some important questions about all these consuming passions.

Many patients seeking psychotherapy feel unlovable or full of rage and hate. What is it that interferes with the capacity to experience love? This book explores the origins of love and hate from infancy and investigates how they develop through the life cycle. It brings together contemporary views about clinical practice on how psychotherapists and analysts work with and think about love and hate in the transference and countertransference and explores how different schools of thought deal with the subject. An impressive array of international contributors present a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic perspectives, including Kleinian, Jungian, Independent Group and Lacanian psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists.

With emphasis on clinical illustrations throughout, the writers show how different psychoanalytic schools think about and clinically work with the experience and passions of love and hate. This book will be invaluable to practitioners and students of psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, analytical psychology and counselling.

Contributors: Kate Barrows, Francesco Bisagni, Peter Geissler, Jackie Gerrard, Sheila Gordan, Sue Gottlieb, Daphne Lambert, David Mann, Richard Mizen, David Morgan, Lesley Murdin, Ingrid Pohl, Hestor McFarland Solomon, Martin Stanton, Paola Vallerio, Robert C. Ware.