Transference (love or others): the symbolic politics of desire (Part II)
C Y SO
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.
Desire of Meaning/ Meaning of Desire
However, it is not enough to discuss the issue of transference as language, for language is not merely a system of signification. What is behind the language, and especially true to psychoanalysis, is the desire of meaning, the desire of making sense. Explain, discuss, interpret, advocate. Human beings engage in many aspects of communication, but what is behind language is always the desire to be understood, recognized, loved and controlled.
The French philosopher Emmanual Levinas suggests that the language is the ethical relationship between the subject and the Other. The subject ”I” experiences the Other as infinity that is not to be fully understood, but is also the radical alterity of the Other as an authority that puts the freedom of the subject into question. (Levinas, 115) While subject confronts the alterity of the Other – the love, hate and fear toward the infinity – there arouses in him the desire to work through the analysis. Language, to Levinas, calls into question the integrity, unity of the subject. It is with language, or the desire to meaning that the subject gives up his freedom and totality in exchange for the love and dominion of the Other. Language is continuously and predominately the facilities for the subject to refill his primitive lack. The desire to be recognised is the same experience as subject coming over to its own alterity. It is for the same reason that Freud regards transference as unavoidable.
Normal Love and Normality in Love
Freud took the issue of transference with care. It was in 1880 when Freud was told the case of Anna O, but it took him more than thirty years before he directly addressed the issue of transference. In 1915, Freud in his “Observations on Transferecne-love” gave an overall discussion of the technical problems related to it. In this famous technical paper, Freud takes a descriptive approach but is short of an ontological and conceptual discussion of how transference-love affects the analytic situation. Freud admits the difficulty in discussing the concept of normality as presented in transference-love. He tries very hard to distinguish between natural love and transference-love, but could not avoid the idea that transference-love, even as it is less “ normal” than natural love, has certain qualities and intensity of natural love.
We have to right to dispute that the state of being in love which makes its appearance in the course of analytic treatment has the character of a “genuine” love. (Freud SE12,168)
The purpose of analysis is to rebuild the patient’s capacity to love, his satisfaction from normal relationship. It would seem necessary to distinguish transference-love from natural love. Moreover, it is even more important to clarify the very idea of normality in psychoanalysis before we could come closer to an understanding of transference-love. However, in this point, Freud is far more opaque and ambiguous than we expect.
If it seems so lacking in normality, this is sufficiently explained by the fact that being in love in ordinary life, outside analysis, is also more similar to abnormal than mental phenomena. (Freud SE12,168)
What is normality in the analytic situation? Foucault called into question the very idea of normal/abnormal, sane/insane, stating that normality is historical and epistemological rather than biological and pathological. What is regarded as normal could in certain particular period in history be marginalized as abnormal. The very idea of normality can only be understood as norm or the rule of the game. In this game, the decision of the rule is not made from the one who plays, but in the exact opposition, it is from those who do not, who is absent. The truth to normality lies on the other side and beyond the reach of those who involve. To the subject, the analyst is the presence of the norm, the normality. He tries to approach the norm, and wants to be part of the normality that always promises recognition and safety. However, his way to approach the norm is not without obstacles in between. It is exactly with these obstacles the analyst is to remove.
Politics of Desire
Transference is viewed as an affect; but it is also transfer. It is the subject’s psychical migration from the position of fantasy to the position of resistance. In the first position, subject’s discourse is about his imagination over the other whose desire he can never assume. This is to Lacan the position of “empty speech,” which has not much value to analysis. It is with his fantasy that the subject directs the analyst’s attention to identify his own imaginative desire. (Lacan 1977,41) If his quest is not answered, he would turn to the second position and eventually the person of the analyst will become the object of the fantasy. In this critical moment, the subject first confronts his alterity as the analyst; his infantile impulse and fantasy will be diverted to the person of the analyst. However, the appearance of the Other does not mean the full exposure of the subject’s unconscious to the analyst. On the contrary, the subject’s desire is directed to the Other but he could not get his desire through to the language. In this critical moment the desire starts talking to the subject, but the subject could not recognize the resists. (Lacan1977,45)
Desire not only motivates the subject to talk, it establishes the norm, the relation, the idea of normality in an analytic session. By the force of its alterity, as Levinas suggests, desire leads the subject to self-recognition. Hegel claims that desire is to reveal itself as itself and thus “self-consciousness is desire (Begierde) in general.” (Hegel,104) Man’s desire drives him to be absorbed by an object, but by the very power of desire itself, man retains his own integrity and satisfaction. The first desire that absorbs the man toward the object is different from the Desire that draws him back. For the second desire, that’s the desire with a capital “D.” It is the Desire to take over the other’s desire, to win and to control. Alexandre Kojeve interprets that it is the negation of other’s desire which constitutes the final satisfaction of man and established his self-consciousness in human as different from the animal. (Kojeve, 5)
In 1960s, Alexander Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel interpreted Hegelian categorization on master and slave to explain the idea of desire. He claimed that human’s desire is the Desire of the other’s or the Desire of Desire itself. Most of the Paris intelligentsia attended his popular lectures and it was the influence from Kojeve’s interpretation of a theory of desire that stimulates Lacan’s formulation of his own version based on his analytic experience. (Borch-Jacobsen,3)
Kojeve says that man’s satisfaction is impossible except desire directs toward itself – that is the Desire of the Desire, the negation of negativity. As desire is the only object in the given reality that does not have any materiality in itself, if is the only object that can not be absorbed and thus always available. He says that man’s Desire is the Desire of the Other. “Man’s humanity ‘come to light’ only in risking his life to satisfy his human Desire – that is his Desire directed toward another Desire.” (Kojeve, 7) Negation of negativity or the pure negativity is to Kojeve the essential requirement for man’s awareness of being human. Within the absolute emptiness in the pure negativity, man comes to mediation with himself. This is the critical moment when man realizes himself as an I, and achieves his self-knowledge.
For Desire taken as Desire – i.e., before its satisfaction – is but a revealed nothingness, an unreal emptiness. Desire, being the revelation of emptiness, the presence of the absence of a reality, is something essentially different from the desired thing…. Therefore, Desire directed toward another Desire will create ….an I essentially different from the animal “I.” (Kojeve, 5)
Hegel rewrites the human history by adopting a system based on the struggle among members in the group we called human beings. The relationship between master and slave as being the basic structure of human relations is situated on the battlefield of desire. The supremacy of the master and the drive of the slave to revolution constitute the perpetual struggle among every individual.
Fallen in Love with What between a and o
In analytic situation, analysts usually avoid the master/slave system; it is only in negative transference that the rivalry between the analyst/subject is compared with the Hegelian system. However, Freud and other analysts have less to say on this issue. To Lacan, Hegel is right at least on his theory of desire. Kojeve’s interpretation of Desire as the negation of negativity stimulates Lacan’s formulation of desire as the lack-in-being (manque-a-etre). Subject’s speeches articulate the lack even though he may not be directly addressing the lack itself. In the scenario of Freud’s da/fort, infantile loss is articulated through a binary system which is the child’s earliest attempt to engage with the complexity of human’s language system. Henry Sullivan points out that ‘desire is also a principle of structuration in the genesis of the subject.’ Both Darwin and Hegel had tried to conceptualised the momentum behind human’s progress, either by way of biology and politics. But the “missing link” in evolution of human being, as Sullivan suggests, does not lie in biology but in language. It is language or the lack behind language that motivates and actualises human’s progress. (Sullivan, 44)
In order to avoid the battling opposition between subject and analyst, Lacan replaces the Hegelian dialectics with a system based on metonymic relation in language. He suggests that desire is emptiness from within, the lack-in-being. Not a single signifier can maintain a perpetual rapport with desire. Lacan says that you cannot name a desire but only circumscribes it. It is to circumscribe it within the limit of a metonymic tie, that is the signifying chain in Lacan’s terminology. (Lacan1979.254) Lacan writes that the metonymic structure, indicating that it is the connection between signifier and signifier that permits the elision in which the signifier installs the lack-in-being in the object relation….(Lacan 1977,164)
In the “game of occultation,” the kid who says the German words da/fort in a game with a string tied to a toy in a repeating action of abandon and resumption, Lacan suggests, is playing between the signifier and desire. When the kid says “fort”(away), it makes the mother disappear in his imaginary. As it says “Da”(here), Mother reappears. The mother’s absence/presence is transferred and articulated on the level of signification and by the same token, “he is raising his desire to a second power.” That is the domain of the signifier. In this game, the kid’s desire is fallen into the gap between the two phonemes “a” “o.” The gap itself is precisely the kind of circumscription Lacan suggests. From the gap, we locate the desire in the materiality of the signifier. Lacan writes that desire becomes human is when the child is born into language. (Lacan 1977,103)
Desire in Deferral
In analysis situation, the analyst/subject relationship is radically different from what is between the doctor/patient. If an analyst falls in love with the subject, he will get himself into the subject’s dialectic of desire. In the process of endless negativity, the subject roams from one thing to another, but find no satisfaction from the other. The analysis-in-love who enters the dialectic as being one of the others will also be negated.
As I have mentioned before, the subject’s unconscious aim in seducing the analyst is love and dominion. It’s exactly through the uses of his desire and the deferral of its being satisfied to lead the subject works through the analysis. In Lacan’s system, the frustrated desire will be drawn back to the signifying chain, in the operation of metonymic selection, to look for another signifier. With this operation, the subject will eventually confront the Master signifier and acquire real satisfaction. It is the analyst’s position of playing the “dummy” in a game of desire that defer the satisfaction of the subject’s desire and enables him to reach real satisfaction.
Lacan even goes further by comparing the position of the dummy with death. He writes that
The analyst intervenes concretely in the dialectic of analysis by pretending he is dead…. either by his silence when he is the Other with a capital O or by annulling his own resistance when he is the other with a small o. (Lacan 1977,140)
Freud regarded as the fundamental principle in analysis that the subject’s need and longing are to persist so that they may serve as forces impelling him to do work and make changes. Desire is the motivation for the subject and it is anything but the object of real satisfaction. It is when desire is not answered that the patient would discover her real satisfaction is somewhere else.
S.s.S
Freud intends to build up psychoanalysis as a new paradigm in scientific discourse. That’s why many analysts postulate their position as an objective observer or witness and some liken their position as a mirror that speaks to the patient about the patient himself. (Young 54) No matter how analysts select his position in the analytic situation, it is the transferential relations that seduce analysts to surrender and give up their achievement in analysis. Lacan suggests that analyst should enter analysis both as the Other and the other as in the previous quotation we have. From the distance between the other and the Other, The analysts are also playing a game of presence/absence, like the kid with his game of occultation. They can involve into the psychical drama as being the other – the object of subject’s imagination. Otherwise, they can also select, in the moment he deems right, to stay silent, to frustrate the demand of the subject from the position of the Other.
Of course, the analysts who play the game of “da/fort” is not for the primordial desire as the kid does. If there is desire, Lacan asserts, it should be the desire for the truth. The transference of positions is actually the analysts’ strategies to cope with the subject’s transference. With this strategy, the analyst can escape the mechanistic tendency in Hegelian dialectics and reveal the real power of the revolutionary position created by Freud.
It is in the fifties that Lacan elaborated the function of signifier in the working of transference. To Lacan, transference and all the related emotive reaction from resistance, repetition, and suggestion are diverse forms of what he called “le sujet suppose savoir –S.s.S.” He asserts that when there is the S.s.S., there will be transference. In psychoanalysis, Lacan claims that there is no absolute knowledge in psychoanalysis; if there are any, those who possess the absolute knowledge to unconscious can only be Freud while he was alive. All the analyst is a subject who is supposed to know. (Lacan 1979,232) The S.s.S. implies that there is always an expectation, presupposition either on the part of the analyst or subject. Lacan points out that in some cases, the subject may avoid mentioning some facts to prevent the analyst from imposing interpretation over him. While the subject who starts taking imaginatively a position he does not have possessing the knowledge over oneself), there is the transference.
Position of an Analyst (who is supposed to know)
Lacan regards that the S.s.S. is the consequence of the analytic discourse. In the analytic situation, the analyst assumes the position of a listener, and interpreter and the source of meaning. Even though the subject speaks something not understanding, the analyst’s presence “guarantee(s) that this work of speaking in no end into void.” (Grigg, 105) As we have discussed before, his position is the strategic settings, either as the other or the Other. He involves in the analytic discourse but not to be involved in subject’s emotive domain.
Lacan in 1970s formulated the four discourses in human knowledge: the master’s discourse, the discourse of the university, the hysteric’s discourse and the analyst’s discourse. The analyst’s discourse as taking the position of the Other, is not the master’s discourse that is closer to the position of the superego. The position of the Other is reflective and interpretative, rather than absolute and didactic. (Grigg, 106)
However, it is necessary to point out that the analysts are always under the risk and temptation of the S.s.S. which is the necessary condition behind transference. S.s.S. is a difficult concept which is formulated to replace the place of the absolute knowledge in every theories (especially the Hegelian Wise Man). Lacan rejects the idea of any possible absolute knowledge available, neither in psychoanalysis. In the analytic situation, it is necessarily a S.s.S. situation. What we have are [1] some knowledge we supposedly know, [2] someone who suppose we know some knowledge, and [3] we ourselves who suppose we know some knowledge. Those are the conditions of human knowledge and also what is behind the relations between the subject and analyst in the sense of transference.
The S.s.S. illustrates why transference is necessary and at the time dangerous. For the analyst should not imagine they have the absolute knowledge over the subject’s unconscious, their authority, as I have mentioned at the beginning of the article, is limited. The limitation they have is all within the boundary of the S.s.S. . However, it does not imply that S.s.S. have no positive values to analysis. It is precisely with this situation that the subject enters into the position of begin analysed and successfully rebuild his personal psychical order.
Michel Silvestre argues that only with the emergence of the S.s.S. could the analysts “ deflate the effect of the imaginary,” on the part of the subject and simultaneously let the analysts have the authority to activate the same imaginary effect, and with more force and weight, for the therapeutic purposes. If her interpretation is right, one would come to the impression that the S.s.S. situation in question is likened to the seesaw game the kids play. While the subject is on the lower side, the analyst use his weight (e.g. his imaginary power) to lever up the subject’s unconscious. (Lacan 1979,216-276;Grigg 104; Borch-Jacobsen 4-12)
The analyst/subject relationship is the most delicate form of human relations that should be directed with the appropriate strategies. As to the strategies, what is Freud’s recommendation? It is said that one cannot overcome and enemy who is “in absentia or in effigie.” (Freud SE 12,108)
Works Cited
Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. Lacan: the Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1991.
Freud, Sigmund. “Observations on Transference-love.” Standard Edition 12. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.159-171
Freud, Sigmund. “The Dynamics of Transference.” Standard Edition 12. London: Hogarth Press, 1958, 99-108
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. New York: Random House, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Random House, 1973.
Grigg, Russel, “Signifier, Object, and the Transference.” Lacan and the Subject of Language. Ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher. New York: Routledge, 1991. 100-115
Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1997.
Kojève Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1980.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis._Middlesex: Penguin, 1979.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: a Selection. New York: Norton, 1977.
Levinas, Emmanual. “Language and Proximity” Collected Philosophical Papers. Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987
Sullivan, Henry “Homo sapiens or Homo desiderans: the Role of Desire in Human Evolution.” Lacan and the Subject of Language. Ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher. New York: Routledge, 1991. 36-49
Young, Robert M. Mental Space. London: Progress press, 1994
