Discussion of Gentile’s “Between the Familiar and the Stranger: Attachment Security, Mutual Desire, and Reclaimed Love”

Abstract

This discussion of Jill Gentile’s magma opus article “Between the Familiar and the Stranger: Attachment Security, Mutual Desire, and Reclaimed Love” notes her important and original contribution in wedding attachment theory and contemporary psychoanalysis. It is further noted that she very convincingly shows that attachment theory is insufficient without taking up the complexities of desire—so critical to contemporary psychoanalysis—while the latter is insufficient taking up the criticality of security in attachments, that is, in both developmental relationships and psychoanalytic pairings. It is also noted, however, that Gentile is opening up even further the Pandora’s Box in contemporary psychoanalysis wherein the traditional pillars of technique, abstinence, neutrality, and anonymity give way to the unruliness of therapist self-disclosure, removing the boundary from disclosing therapeutic desire. Where the profession of desire is to some degree wedded to any burgeoning sense of security, this creates a potential dilemma for the analyst when in fact he/she does not “desire” the patient, at least not in the manner that he/she longs for, or more to the point, comes to demand. This is then discussed in terms of the literature on “double binds,” “relational knots,” and “crunches,” all of which relate to intrinsic problems that emerge largely around collisions of desire in analysis.