Transference (love or others): the Symbolic Politics of Desire (Part I)
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.
Transference (love or others): the Symbolic Politics of Desire (Part II)
Michel Foucault, in his Madness and Civilisation, explains the difference between the physical therapy and the psychological method as it was used in treatment of mental patient. He says that there is a difference in nature between those techniques which consist in modifying the qualities common to body and soul, and those which consist in treating madness by discourse. In the first case, the technique is one of the metaphors, at the level of a disease that is a deterioration of nature; in the second, the technique is one of language, at the level of a madness perceived as reason’s debate with itself. (Foucault, 183)
In analysis, what motivates the therapy is the confrontation of two reasons, two (un)consciousenesses. Language works between the two forces and calls into question the assumption of both parties. In this way, psychoanalysis can be understood as the practice of rhetoric, the politics of discourse. It is in this background that psychoanalysis could establish the possibility of intersubjectivity that makes psychoanalysis different from the traditional medical treatment.
