Transference has been regarded as an important yet less accessible issue to analysts. Josef Breuer, Freud’s earliest collaborator, gave up his discovery in psychoanalysis, just because he could not handle the “management of transference” which Freud regarded as “ the only serious difficulties” of psychoanalysis. (Freud SE 12, 159)
As an analyst, it seems that this is a reliable signal that is between the client and us analyst. Why does the client keep complaining about an analyst’s wording that she thinks is not an appropriate description about her status? Why does she keep sending email to us at night and the emotion expressed on the email can never be reproduced during the session? Why the client does not want to terminate a session even though she can not show any progress but keep repeating the same pattern (love or hate) in relations with the analyst.
Lacan says, analysis starts with transference. What he says is perfectly true and is helpful to remind the analyst about the momentum of the clinical session. This short article is intended to investigate the work of transference as symbolic politics in clinical relation which mirrors the scene of internal (imaginary) work of desire that analyst shall follow as a force to open up the unconscious.
Some analysts after Freud have tried to analyse transference as what is done with dream images. However, this change in analytic technique has created even more problems than it expects to solve. If analysis is not intended to be didactic practice as to getting the subject to adopt consciously the kind of behaviour imposed by the analyst, transference should be the starting point to reconsider the position(s) of the analyst and the momentum peculiar to the analytic situation.
Read Theoretical Writings
Filed under: Lacan
