The Psychological Intricacies of Affairs in Literature and Life

“The subject of affairs, I think it's of interest to everybody. We have all had an Oedipal experience - we've all been babies who have at some point realized that we are not the only person. We're not perfectly fused with our mother, and she has other things to do, and there may be a father. We've all known what rejection feels like, and probably betrayal, and I think that affairs are in our unconscious. I think that's sort of evident in the way that most great novels, most great films, or at least many, have an affair at their heart. From Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary to Fatal Attraction, I think this is something that is just interesting. I wanted to write about affairs because I think they are a way of showing what psychoanalysis can do in a field in which everyone has an opinion on, and probably most people, in some way, have been indirectly or directly affected by. That was really the sort of the genesis for wanting to write about affairs.”

Episode Description: We consider the challenge of writing about dynamic treatments in a manner that is accessible to the non-clinical reader. Juliet's book about affairs opens up this widely recognized experience and adds intrapsychic insights without using emotionally - distancing jargon. She introduces us to individuals who have been involved in affairs, with carefully protected confidentiality, who generally reveal the power of past experiences to influence adult choices. Some end happily, and some end in agony. Juliet demonstrates the usefulness of bringing a dynamic listening to both accepting and deepening each individual's lifelong search for love.

Our Guest: Juliet Rosenfeld is a psychoanalyst and a member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, London. She studied at Oxford before a 15-year career in advertising and marketing, ending up in Government Communications. During this time, she began a Master's at the Tavistock and Portman Trust in Organizational Consultancy and started training as a psychotherapist a year later. She qualified as an integrative psychotherapist in 2012. Juliet was an elected trustee of the UK Council of Psychotherapy for four years, and is presently one of two clinician Trustees at the Freud Museum London, Sigmund Freud's final home. Juliet is the author of two books, The State of Disbelief ( 2020) and Affairs, True Stories of Love, Lies, Hope and Desire. Juliet's broader interest is in how psychoanalysis might be more accessible, and its ideas put into non-clinical language for audiences who may never be able to access psychotherapy themselves but are curious about what the unconscious means and what goes on in the consulting room.

Recommended Readings:

Creativity and Perversion by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1984)

Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters by Ethel S. Person (American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2006)

Home Is Where We Start From by D. W. Winnicott (Penguin, 1990)

Love in the Time of the Internet by Martina Burdet (underbau, 2020)

Sex, Death and the Super Ego by Ronald Britton (Routledge, 2020)

Sexual Attraction in Therapy edited by Maria Luca (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)

Sexuality and Attachment in Clinical Practice edited by Joseph Schwartz and Kate White (Routledge, 2019)

The Bonds of Love by Jessica Benjamin (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1988)

The New Sexual Landscape and Contemporary Psychoanalysis by Danielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco (Confer Books, 2020)

Novels about Affairs

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (Penguin Classics, 2003)

A Very English Scandal by John Preston (Penguin, 2017)

Deception by Philip Roth (Vintage, 1991)

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022)

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Wordsworth Editions, 1993)

Middlemarch by George Eliot (Wordsworth Editions, 1993)

The End of the Affair by Graeme Green (Vintage Classics, 2004)