Between the Familiar and the Stranger: Attachment Security, Mutual Desire, and Reclaimed Love

Abstract

This article explores the idea that relationships of attachment security are simultaneously relationships of mutual desire. Seen through this lens, separation and reunion behavior become increasingly psychologically charged: infant and mother as well as patient and analyst must revisit their willingness to expose their desire in each encounter. By recognizing that personal agency is vital to both healthy attachment and romantic desire, we can begin to appreciate the dawning of romantic desire, not so much as promoting "separationindividuation" as often conceived, but as exerting a gravitational pull to revisit an original love-one that is now erotically reconceived. We reclaim an original love but now in a relational context between mother and the Other, the pre-Oedipal and the Oedipal, the familiar and the stranger.

To Tell the Truth, (Re)Tell One’s Tale: On Pedophilia, Taboo Desire, and Seduction Trauma-- Introduction to The Tale and Leaving Neverland: A Panel on Two Films on Childhood Sexual Abuse

“…The portrayal of childhood sexual abuse, including childhood rape, depicted in these films is perpetrated by that most vexing and exciting psychoanalytic figure: the "familiar/stranger" or the "strange/familiar" (Gentile, 2016), who pivotally awakens us to the strange of the erotic within the 1 We served together as consultants to The Tale, and also assisted with audience screenings for Leaving Neverland. Hence, we felt a kinship with each film but also came to feel that, because of their divergent forms but overlapping terrain, it would be of potential interest to the analytic community to put them in conversation with each other.…”