Transference (love or others): the symbolic politics of desire (Part I)
C . Y. So
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.
Transference: love or denial
Freud writes that the aim of transference-love on the part of the subject can be a strategy to “destroy the doctor’s authority by bringing him down to the level of a lover.” (Freud SE 12,163) Lovers are two persons who engage in the pursuit of the love and domination. It can be love or it can be the will to control. Analyst is playing on the margins of being “seduced/defeated” in a transferential game which he cannot avoid. Some of the analysts may give up all the progress they have made so as to avoid falling into transferential-love with the patient. However, for the benefit of the patient, this surrender can never stop the patient from repeating this erotic relations and falling into love with another doctors. (Freud, SE 12, 160) This is also an important moment for the analyst to understand the tendency to his own counter-transference. He should understand every single gesture or request may be a result of seductive act which intends only to bring the analyst into an intimate relations. One should always keep his own counter-transference in check.
Although the analyst shall aware that his work could only be the operation of the transference and it may undermine the position of the analyst as the master of the clinical session or even disturb the integrity of the analyst (as in the case of counter-transference), an analyst shall not evade from the emergence of the transference as this is the best time to progress ahead to what Freud describes as “the second stage” in analysis. The emergence of the transference is also what make psychoanalysis different from other psychotherapies. Without the dialectics of transference, or simply the analyst does not prepare for the coming of the transference, the effect of psychoanalysis shall fall short to the level we have in daily conversation with a friend.
Analyst is not supposed to be the friend for causal conversation or he is not even a counselor who does not prepare to play the unique position of being an analyst. What is the unique position of analyst, the answer can only be found in transference.
Freud stresses in two of his best technical papers, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-through” and “Observation on Transference Love” (Freud SE 12) that transference is major instrument to cure the patient her unconscious desire. And this may be regarded as the core of the psychoanalytic activities and the measure for the effectiveness of our career as analyst.
The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient’s compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of transference.We render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient’s mind” (Freud SE 12, 154)
To Freud, the analyst shall at this moment wait for the compulsive force of the transference-love to motivate the patient to aware what is repeating, as her love toward the analyst, is but the primal, infantile lust indulged with her familial ties. Her love toward the analyst only present the same structure (prototype) as her repressed love with her parents. The analyst shall keep himself clear from the unreal love relations and points out that this is the resistance to her treatment. As the patient may tend to devote all her mind to request for the return of the love, if the analyst can not retain his objective position as a “surrogate”, he will be side tracked and not be able to get the analytic content within the transference.
Freudian version of transference has opened up the basic criterion that governs the relations between the patient and the analyst: the independence of the analyst and the repeating compulsion for love of the patients. Besides he also points out how transference can be resistance that stops the treatment from going into the crucial region of the unconscious by seducing the analyst to give up his own “severity”. (Freud SE 12, 163) However, one shall go even further if we understand transference is almost the only game that is played in the clinical session. Analyst usually finds out that the patient will waste a lot of time for the return of love and the interaction itself is a kind of symbolic politics that at the end what she seeks is her desire. Desire is what behind the transference-love and it is what constitutes the position of the subject in its own right. In the second part of the article, we will discuss the symbolic politics in transference, especially how the subject seeks for love from the Other as the basic psychical structure of their existence within the analytic discourse.
The Analytic Asylum
The analytic situation has a peculiar position in human knowledge that should not be confused with that in a medical clinic. Medical clinic, even in the most liberal situation, is the manifestation of authority that Foucault depicts as the embodiment of knowledge and power. Knowledge (the medical know-how in this case) qualifies the medical practitioners to cure, but what lies behind the authority of the doctor is far more than the medical skill. His power originates from the articulation of the scientific and political establishment that incorporates the make-believe authenticity of the medical establishment. Foucault asserts that the very constituents of medical knowledge from classifications, concepts, therapeutic judgments to the directions of treatment are all implementations and expressions of the power itself. What make the doctor authoritative are more the establishments behind than his own professionalism.
Foucault did criticize psychoanalysis for retaining the structure of the asylum and the suppression from within. By liberating the patient from the asylum, Freud did not destroy the power that dominates the patients, but “regroups its powers, extended them to the maximum by uniting them in the doctor’s hands…. That psychoanalysis have not been able, will not be able, to hear the voices of the unreason….” (Foucault 1965,278) However, in just five years later, he once again came to psychoanalysis, but this time he credited psychoanalysis for its “contestation” against the established order, and its perpetual criticism of human knowledge. What is accounted and what makes Foucault feeling more comfortable is the incorporation of language in analytic praxis that opens up the dialectic possibility between the analyst and patient. (Foucault 1970,273-276)
In analysis, the only authority, if one would like to use the term, is the authenticity of language. Language creates a specific situation in which it is the materials under scrutiny as well as the faculty of curing. All the analytic materials are transmitted and articulated in language and the therapy in return is also realized in a way how the subject lives with his language. The truth in analysis locates in language in totality and perfection. That’s language consecrating itself to the purity of psychical truth.
Although this is only the perfect condition of language in analytic situation, his engagement in language does disturb the established power in psychoanalysis. The subject always already possesses the legitimate power to use a language while the analyst only stays on the same domain as the subject in term of the faculty for therapy. Although the subject is not supposed to have the “knowledge” of the unconscious, he possesses the power of language. Meanwhile, one should not ignore the danger in “knowledge” which could be the trap of transference. Subject’s innocence could maximise his capacity to use or misuse language.
