PDFs Of Book Chapters

Open To Desire – Chapter 7 – From Object To Subject – Epstein

Key Concepts
1) It is not possible to eliminate desire by pretending it is not there.  The problem with denying any aspect of our desire is that it persists as a shadow.

2) Opening to what we most desire can take us beyond just a craving for what the popular culture has conditioned us to want.

3) Unrest, instability and uncertainty are the three marks of existence that color our lives these days.  In the face of these qualities, we all feel the depths of our yearning or longing.

Vitalization – Chapter 3 – Activating Lifeness In The Analytic Encounter – Peltz

Key Concepts
1) The emphasis on this chapter is on activating, affective, vitalizing presences in the field of the therapeutic relationship – transformation in action – transformation in being, in we ‘use all there is to use’ to establish emotional contact.

2) The clinical task is to ‘enter into’ the field of the relationship, to move in close, while keeping a second eye on what we have entered and what it stirs in us.

3) A vitalizing presence is a presence that momentarily awakens the most rudimentarycapacity in a person to feel alive as her/himself.

Vitalization – Chapter 7 – Reawakening Desire – Messler Davies

Key Concepts
1) Instrumental to awakening this desire in the therapeutic encounter is the shared experience of what Davies defines as ‘analytic love’ – a kind of love that can flourish without threat to appropriate therapeutic boundaries between withholding and seduction.

2) Re-awakening desire requires a deep understanding of the patient’s unconscious experience, which allows something new to be created between therapist and patient that has never quite existed before.

The Enigma of Desire – Chapter 2 – The Enigma of Desire – Atlas

Key Concepts
1) The pragmatic aspects of desire are related to the early life experiences had with the actual mother, the real interactions that include patterns of arousal, regulation, touch, gaze, vocal rhythms, etc. 

2) The enigmatic aspect of desire is beyond our conscious knowledge of ourselves.  It refers to the perplexing implicit communication and transmission from the mother’s unconscious to the baby’s mind and body.  It is focused on the endless elusiveness and mystery of Otherness, and the existential aspects of sexuality.

Paper – 2. Davies – Love in the afternoon 

Key Concepts
1) This complex paper focuses on our tendencies to cast aside the reality that sexuality is still an outgrowth of shifting physical sensation as it occurs in relation to specific fantasied and interpersonal relationships. 

2) This particular aspect of self organization and experience grows increasingly elaborated and differentiated with time, and assumes a position of particular centrality in any attempt to understand the individual’s erotic life.  It addresses the experiences of self in relation to other in which love, shame, idealization, envy, and rage are not just words, but systems of physical sensation, elusive, ever-shifting, and rarely, if ever, verbalized in normal interpersonal discourse

3) We cannot, as individuals, come to know an experience that we have not first felt.  Nor can we integrate an experience of erotic desire until we have been able to explore it comfortably with another in an atmosphere safe from both intrusive overstimulation or silent humiliation.

Book Notes of Chapters

Open To Desire – Chapter 7 – From Object To Subject – Book Notes

Vitalization – Chapter 3 – Activating Lifeness In The Analytic Encounter – Book Notes

Vitalization – Chapter 7 – Reawakening Desire – Jody Messler Davies – Book Notes

PUBLISHED PAPERS

Sometimes, when available, you might prefer to read from one of the author’s published papers, instead of reading from their corresponding book chapter.  Most of the time, the content is very similar, if not the same.  It simply offers you another reading style.