David Mann B.Sc. (Hons.), RA Th.

Psychotherapy: An Erotic Relationship challenges the traditional belief that transference and countertransference are merely forms of resistance which jeopardize the therapeutic process. David Mann shows how the erotic feelings and fantasies experienced by clients and therapists can be used to bring about a positive transformation.

Combining extensive and lively clinical examples with theoretical insights and new research on infants, David Mann 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.

The book is as relevant now as it was when originally published. This Classic Edition contains a new Introduction by David Mann, summarizing his current ideas since this book was first published in 1997.

It brings the therapy setting alive, offering clinicians both an accessible and deeper understanding of the interaction between erotic transference and countertransference; it also gives an explicit picture of how these aspects of therapy can be used to enhance the therapeutic process. It remains an essential resource for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and counsellors, their clients, and anybody with an interest in Eros, desire or mental health issues.

The Past in the Present:
Therapy Enactments and the Return of Trauma
David Mann and Valerie Cunningham (Editors) Routledge 2008

“Mann and Cunningham have brought together a fine collection of clinicians, from diverse backgrounds and both sides of the Atlantic, providing an unprecedented depth and breadth of exploration of enactment. This will be of great importance and interest to seasoned practitioners as well as those in training.”
Phil Mollon PhD, Psychoanalyst (British Psychoanalytic Society), Psychotherapist (Tavistock Society) and Clinical Psychologist

The Past in the Present brings together, for the first time, contemporary ideas from both the psychoanalytic and humanistic therapy traditions, looking at how trauma and enactments affect therapeutic practice.
Enactments are often experienced as a crisis in therapy and are understood as symbolic interactions between the client and therapist, where personal issues of both parties become unconsciously entwined. This is arguably especially true if the client has undergone some form of trauma. This trauma becomes enacted in the therapy and becomes a turning point that significantly influences the course of therapy, sometimes with creative or even destructive effect.
Using a wealth of clinical material throughout, the contributors show how therapists from different therapeutic orientations are thinking about and working with enactments in therapy, how trauma enactment can affect the therapeutic relationship and how both therapist and client can use it to positive effect.
The Past in the Present will be invaluable to practitioners and students of analytic and humanistic psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, analytic psychology and counselling.
 

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.