In this study of preoedipal erotic experience, Wrye and Welles focus on patients for whom early mothering did not sustain the flowering and subsequent transformation of early erotic desire. Such patients remain under the sway of a primitive eroticism tha

In this richly woven study of preoedipal erotic experience, Harriet Kimble Wrye and Judith Welles focus on patients for whom early mothering did not sustain the flowering and subsequent transformation of early erotic desire. Such patients remain under the sway of a primitive eroticism that is often sadistic and invariably perverse. Successful analytic work requires accepting and containing the patient's primitive erotic needs; reconstructing the mother-infant narratives that sustain these needs; and mobilizing the patient's transformative desire to grow out of maternal eroticism to an adult love of self and others.

"I believe that this work successfully addresses a very important issue in infant development, in psychoanalytic theory, and in clinical practice - the infant's sense of proper entitlement to an appropriate erotic launching of his or her career as a human being - and of its being candidly validated in the trial countersubjective response in that foremost of existential 'rewrites,' psychoanalysis itself." - James S. Grotstein, M.D., American Journal of Psychotherapy "With their candid and vividly detailed clinical accounts, Wrye and Welles illustrate how the coauthored story of transference/countertransference permit the rich history of a patient's love narrative to be retrieved and reviewed. The Narration of Desire is an intensely personal, highly instructive study of the erotic roots of conscious awareness." - Owen Renik, M.D., San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute "I believe Wrye and Welles have made a major contribution to the field. They establish to an impressively detailed degree the necessity of attending to communications transmitted through bodily feelings and sensations, a topic only now fully coming into its own" - Ethel Person, M.D., JAPA