(Lecture in the 7th Clinical Study Days of The Lacanian Compass, February 15, 2014, New York City)
If we define a
paradox as a statement that apparently contradicts itself and yet still might
be true, then the concept of transference is the best example of this in the
field of psychoanalytical experience*. Transference is both the condition of
this experience, and also the most difficult obstacle to overcome. Sometimes it
is the most apparent reason for the subject’s cure, the cause of spontaneous
therapeutic effects, especially if the analyst doesn’t intercept or block them.
Sometimes, however, it is also the reason for the subject’s remaining attached
to the secondary benefits of the symptom, according to that phenomenon Freud
detected very soon as a “negative therapeutic reaction”.
In fact, any
practice in the wide field of therapeutics is aware of this circumstance that
psychoanalysis interprets according to the varied effects of transference. When
specialist physicians observe that there are a lot of therapeutic effects due
to the placebo phenomenon, or due to the mere presence and response of a
professional, they verify, even without knowing it, the effects of transference
upon the subject. They also verify these effects, moreover, when they complain
about the lack of collaboration or about the subject’s negative reaction to the
treatment. The problem consists in the attribution of these effects to a
distortion, or even a falsification, of the correct and calculated effects of
the treatment. The effects of transference, also in what we consider to be
suggestion, often occur quietly, secretly, but in full view of everyone.
The first
paradox of transference, therefore, is that it acts and works in the clinic
like that intriguing object described in Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Purloined
Letter”, commented on by Jacques Lacan in one of his firsts seminars.
Transference is a hidden object that is at the same time in everybody’s view; an
object that acts and works as a signifier of that which we don’t know the
meaning of, and that secretly determines every character’s fate. Transference
is the purloined letter that determines a full range of effects in the everyday
clinic.
The merit of
having discovered this purloined letter in the clinic, of having discovered the
power and the mechanism of the transference phenomenon and of having designated
it as an operative concept in the origins of psychoanalysis, clearly falls to
Sigmund Freud. Freud also brought into the light of day the secret link between
the unconscious and transference.
The Freudian
term for transference is Übertragung,
which also means translation, transcription, displacement from one point to
another. The transference phenomenon was considered at first as a repetition of
an original relation, a sort of transcription or translation of an original
text. However, the question about what is repeated in transference is not
answered as easily as the post-Freudians analysts thought. They reduced
transference to a simple repetition of an original object relation, usually the
mother-baby relation, which should then be recalled and even corrected in
analysis. In the first place, this repetition would have to be interpreted to
the subject as such. Lacan criticized this conception of transference as a
simplistic reduction.
In fact, in
his text “Psychotherapy of Hysteria”, Freud speaks of transference as a “false
link” between the patient and the physician. It is a false link because of an
unconscious representation that is tied, in its turn, not to an object but to a
desire, an unsatisfied desire, a desire that already existed before any object
relation was conceived. Transference as a false link with the analyst tells us,
therefore, about the truth of an unconscious desire. We can see a new paradox: on
the one hand, a false link, on the other, a true desire. The problem is not the
supposed object that would be in the original relation, and that the transference
phenomenon repeats. The question is the translation, the displacement of an
unsatisfied desire, a desire that is always already a translation, a
displacement in itself.
That is to
say: there is no original text of the purloined letter of transference. The
original is already a translation, a transcription of a lost original text, a
loss that is desire itself, desire as caused by the lack of the object. If
Freud can conceive of transference as a “false link”, this is not because there
is an original or true object of desire, but instead because transference is
always the question about the desire of the Other. There is no “true link”
between the subject and the Other, but instead always a “proton pseudos”, an
original lie at the origin of desire, as Freud was taught by the hysterical
subject. This “false link”, then, will always be at the center of the question
of desire.
And this is
the moment when transference emerges as a phenomenon in the treatment, usually
as the question about the desire of the Other. The analyst is the one who can assume
this question that will constitute a knot in the subject’s relation, not to an
original object, but to the unconscious itself.
I will give a
short example of this — of transference as the question of the Other’s desire,
a question that cannot be reduced and explained as a simplistic repetition of
an original object relation.
The first time
a young man comes to meet me, he says that he has dreamt of me the very night
before he called for an interview. He didn’t know anything about me, except my
name. In his dream, he drives me in his car. I am in the back seat. He cannot
see my face, a face he doesn’t know and which he tries to discover in the rear-view
mirror. There is a moment of anxiety in the dream when he realizes that the
other can see him but that he cannot see the other. —What am I in the desire of
the Other?— this is the question that will become a central question both in
his life and in his analysis, as is the case for everyone. He knows where he is
going to, to the analyst’s consulting room, but he doesn’t know where he comes
from. At the precise moment when he is telling me about all this, in our very
first meeting, and before any intervention on my part, he realizes the
following: the problem that has brought him to the analyst is a conflict with
his father, a father who was… a taxi driver. At this point, I agree with an
emphatic and short intervention: —“Aha!” — “You know, —he adds quoting his
father— one can never know who one is driving in the car”. And he is right, especially
when the person you are driving in the car is the person to whom you will tell
the most secret things of your life, the person you usually have in the back
seat when you lie on the couch.
But here we also
have the paradox of transference: in his dream he is going to the analyst driving
the analyst himself. And not only this for, in addition, he is now telling his
dream to an analyst that he is meeting for the first time. There are,
therefore, at least three analysts in this short story: 1) the analyst the
subject is driving in his car, the person he cannot see; 2) the analyst he is
going to see and of whom he only knows the name; and 3) the analyst as the real
person to whom he is telling all of this in the first interview.
It is worth
underlining another fact that constitutes the turning point of this whole short
story. The real presence of the analyst was necessary to open up the question
about the desire of the Other that was included in the dream. The real
encounter with an analyst was necessary, and also necessary was the act of
speech, the word addressed to the Other, this real act that is impossible to
predict, impossible to repeat. It is in this act of speech that the subject
realizes the link between his dream and the question of his father’s desire
that brought him to the analyst.
In any case,
as Lacan posits, transference is at the beginning of psychoanalysis. This is
certain in a historical sense: the encounter between the hysterical subject and
Freud, the transference addressed to Freud as a person by the hysterical subject,
is at the origins of psychoanalysis. But it is also certain in a structural
sense: transference is at the beginning of every psychoanalysis; every subject arrives
in a certain manner with the psychoanalyst in his car, even if he doesn’t know
it. Lacan says somewhere that the question is to know where the analyst already
was in the picture that the subject brings with him to the first encounter with
the analyst. In the short story I have recounted, this question is very clear,
but precisely because it is very clear, it poses the question even more acutely:
Where is the real analyst? Which of the three figures of the analyst we have
indicated is the most real analyst in the Lacanian sense?
I will answer as
follows: none of them taken one by one, but all of them taken as the knot they
form in the speech act of the first interview. If the real presence of the
analyst is ensured by the person who has listened to the subject in that first
interview, if the real analyst is supported by the person who has received the
unconscious message of the subject and has confirmed the truth of that message,
the message that links the dream with the question of the father’s desire, if
this real presence can be ensured by someone, it is because there previously was
someone in the back seat of the car and because this car is going somewhere,
even if neither the driver, nor the passenger, for the time being, know where.
That is to say
that transference is a knot formed by three registers: 1) the symbolic Other,
the Big Other, the symbolic place of word and language that is supposed in the
subject’s dream but also in the speech act in the first interview; 2) the
imaginary other that the subject conceives as his interlocutor in the reality
of this interview, 3) the Other reduced to his real, the Other that the subject
cannot see in his rear-view mirror nor imagine when he is going to the analyst’s
consulting room for the first time.
From this
perspective, transference and its paradoxes are something more complex than a
simplistic repetition of an original object relation, a repetition to which the
post-Freudian analysts had reduced the transference. This reduction was always
accompanied by a conception of transference as a dual relation between the
patient and the analyst, a dual relation in which the resistance to the
analyst’s interpretations and interventions was understood as the most
important phenomenon in a non-empathetic relation. On the other hand, the power
of transference was impossible to distinguish from the mere action of
suggestion as a consequence of the overwhelming presence of this same empathetic
relation. It has to be said that the general conception of the so-called
“therapeutic alliance” in the Cognitive Behavioral Therapies of our time
doesn’t go very far beyond this reductionism.
When Lacan
begins his criticism of this reductionist conception in the 1950’s, he shows
the complexity of the transference phenomenon by pointing to the three
registers we have underlined —the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real— the
very three registers that are implied in its structure.
Psychoanalytic
interpretation depends on this structure of transference, understood as a knot.
Let us quote two short paragraphs from Lacan’s 1958 text “The Direction of the
Treatment and the Principles of Its Power”, where he poses this dependence as
follows:
“Let me
summarize. If an analyst dealt only with resistances, he would look twice
before hazarding an interpretation, which he in fact does, but this prudence
would suffice.
‘However, this
interpretation, if he gives it, will be received as coming from the person the
transference imputes him to be. Will he agree to take advantage of this error
concerning who he is? Psychoanalytic morals do not forbid it, on the condition
that he interpret this effect, failing which the analysis would remain at the
level of crude suggestion.”[1]
An
interpretation is received as coming from the person the transference imputes
the analyst to be. We will see shortly that this imputation is in the first
place a supposition, a supposition of knowledge. It is an “error concerning who
he is”. In French, Lacan writes “erreur sur la personne”, literally an “error
about the person”. It is the “false link” of transference that Freud had
pointed out, and that makes it necessary to distinguish the Symbolic register
from the Imaginary one.
From the point
of view of an objective analysis, transference is an error, a mistake about the
person; it is confusion between the Symbolic and the Imaginary places. The
subject imputes the analyst to be someone else. And the analyst can only take
advantage of this error in his interventions if he, at the same time,
interprets this confusion in order to separate the two registers. Maintaining
this confusion without interpreting it would reduce psychoanalysis and
transference to a “crude suggestion.” Suggestion is, therefore, the reduction
of transference to its Imaginary register, a reduction that fails to interpret
its effects. Transference in its Symbolic register is the interpretation of suggestion itself. This is what Lacan
remarks in his criticism of the general conception of the “therapeutic
alliance”.
There is also
a paradox in this remark that distinguishes transference and suggestion through
the operation of interpretation. How can anyone take advantage of this error
about the person and interpret it at the same time? Perhaps this effect could
be interpreted in a second moment, but in any case the analyst must be in a
certain symbolic place in order to interpret, and, at the same time, he must
interpret the imaginary effects, the effects of suggestion, of this same place.
In a certain way, the analyst has to exit with his interpretationfrom the same
place that makes possible the effects of this interpretation. We can see the
extreme paradoxicality of this operation. You might even say that it is
impossible, and I would agree, but I would also add that it is by means of this
logical impossibility that an interpretation deals with, touches a real point
in the subject’s structure.
Let us give a
well-known example, a Freudian example, that it is also a Lacanian example,
that you will find in a beautiful text written by the American poet and
novelist H. D., Hilda Doolittle. The text is entitled “A Tribute to Freud”. In
this text, HD remembers her analysis with the famous Professor Sigmund Freud,
which she undertook when Sigmund Freud was already in his seventies. There is
an anecdote that carries a particular interest for us. HD had sent Freud a
bunch of gardenias, his favorite flowers, for his birthday, a gift she never
failed to give him on every birthday up until his death. On this occasion,
however, she had forgotten to write down her name on the small note that
accompanied the bunch of flowers. Freud was not very pleased with this oblivion
and he replied back with a letter assuming that it was probably she who had
sent the gift, and although he wasn’t sure, he added: “In any case,
affectionately yours…” H D also didn’t know what had so suddenly enraged Freud.
In her session she spoke with a certain indifference, a certain non-implication,
until Freud interrupted her speech by beating with his hand on the head-piece
of the couch and uttering the following words: “The trouble is —I am an old
man— you do not think it worth your while to love me.” The impact of these
words was too dreadful for her to add anything else, and she wondered about the
meaning of what Freud meant to say.
Without any
doubt, Freud was in a very admired place for Hilda Doolittle, as a professor,
as an analyst, and as a man. She writes: “Exactly it was as if the Supreme
Being had hammered with his fist on the back of the couch where I had been
lying.”[2] With these words, however,
the very Supreme Being who exercises such a great power of suggestion over her,
speaks from this place to say that she doesn’t consider him to be such a loveable
being. At this moment, the Supreme Being exits from its place. There is always,
thus, a lie in the love of transference, an idealization of the object. In this
sense, one can play with the equivocality of the subject’s words and say that
the Supreme Being’s interpretation is beating on the very couch where she has
been lying about the object of love.
Freud’s interpretation
therefore strikes the subject and awakes her from suggestion, from her demand
to be loved, by pointing to her division with the question: What do you want?
What is the object of your desire? This is not an interpretation of the transference
itself, but an interpretation that leans on transference in order to interpret
its effects of suggestion.
We have to
distinguish, then, at least two levels of the Other in transference and
psychoanalytic interpretation.
$ — transference —> A
$ <—interpretation — A
Firstly, there
is transference from the subject to the Other, the big Other that will be
invested as the Other of transference, “the person the transference imputes
[the analyst] to be”. And, secondly, there is the Other of interpretation, the
place of the Other from which interpretation takes place, the Other from which
the interpretation will be received precisely as an interpretation thanks to the
original transference.
The question
may then be posed: is there an Other which could interpret the very transference
to the Other that interpretation leans on?
We can see
that a nice paradox emerges precisely in this place of the Other that could
interpret the transference from within. It is a paradox that is very similar to
the well-known paradox of Russell, which questioned the supposed foundation of
mathematics upon a naïve set theory. It is the paradox that Bertrand Russell
himself illustrated with the example of the barber: "The barber is a man
in town who shaves all those, and only those, men in town who do not shave
themselves." The question “Who shaves the barber?” results in a paradox that
it is impossible to resolve, because according to the above statement, the
barber can either shave himself, or go to the barber (who is, of course, none
other than himself). Neither of these possibilities are valid: they both result
in the barber shaving himself, but he cannot do this because he only shaves
those men "who do not shave themselves".
The statement
“the analyst that interprets the place of the Other of transference from where
interpretation is received” would posit an Other of the Other in the same
manner, an Other of interpretation that would contain the Other of transference
that makes possible that very interpretation. There is no solution to this
paradox, and all the misunderstandings in post-Freudian psychoanalysis concerning
transference and counter-transference, concerning the interpretation of
transference and the response to counter-transference, are in some way
variations of this impossible solution.
Lacan will take this
paradox as a symptom of the particular structure of transference.
In fact, we
may say that, properly speaking, there is no interpretation of transference.
That is to say, there is no interpretation from a place exterior to the
transference relation. Every interpretation operates and obtains its effects
from the inner place that transference allocates to the analyst, from the
person it “imputes him to be”. On the other hand, however, an interpretation
must always be, in a certain way, an interpretation of the effects of suggestion
of transference itself. It must use the place of transference in order to
interpret the suggestive effects of this interpretation.
An analytic
interpretation would ideally work, then, not – as in classical interpretation –
as a machine that feeds the subject with more meaning, but instead, in exactly
the opposite terms, as a sort of
self-boycotting device, a self-canceling system of meaning. The analytic
interpretation made under transference tends to disable the very place of the
Other that is, on the other hand, the place where meaning originates with all the
suggestive effects of transference itself.
As
Jacques-Alain Miller has recently outlined[3], the so called “great
secret of psychoanalysis” for Lacan, the great revelation that would open up a
new perspective in his teaching, was enounced in his 1959 Seminar “Desire and
its interpretation”. This secret, which was a secret for psychoanalysts
themselves, was revealed with the following formula: “There is no Other of the
Other”. This turning point, which has also
been formulated by Jacques-Alain Miller with the expression “The Other without
Other”, was produced at the moment when Lacan began to devalue the symbolic
function of the Name of the Father, the signifier that had accomplished till
then this role of the Other of the Other, the signifier that had completed and
made consistent the place of the Other. Some years later, in 1967, Lacan added
another formula constructed in a homologous way: “There is no transference of
the transference”[4].
It was his way of showing the exit from the paradox of transference indicated
above. There is no Other of the Other of transference, and there even is no
Other of the Other of interpretation.
This paradox
and its solution lead Lacan to show a hidden face of the transference
phenomenon, a phenomenon that seems to be an intersubjective one, that is to
say, a phenomenon that occurs between two subjects. Transference was indeed at
first conceived by Lacan in his teaching as an intersubjective process, but
this supposition was sustained by the idea of the existence of an Other of the
Other, and this Other of the Other was the subject itself.
Transference
as an intersubjective process, transference to a big Other that would encounter
in the subject itself the reciprocity of an Other of the Other, leads to a
paradox that is enunciated with the other well-known Lacanian formula for
transference: the Subject Supposed to Know.
The “Subject
Supposed to Know” is a conclusive version of the paradox of the Other of the
Other in transference, or the paradox of the transference of the transference.
And the entire
ethical question concerning the use of transference in psychoanalysis revolves
around the use of this “Subject Supposed to Know” by the analyst.
What is this
“Subject Supposed to Know”? In the first place, it is to suppose a knowledge in
the place of the Other, the Other conceived as a subject, as another subject — or,
also, as an Other Subject. This is the most superficial level of transference.
You take the analyst as a Subject Supposed to Know and there is a good reason
to address him. You take the car of your symptom and you drive to the analyst’s
address. But there is another analyst in the car of your symptom, the analyst
you don’t know but who is the true cause of your transference, or even of your
“agalma”, to evoke Lacan’s term in his Seminar on “Transference”. This analyst has
no face, no name and no representation. He or she is an object, in the Lacanian
sense of the object, and you are driving it without knowing what sort of object
it is. You don’t know what this object is, and you don’t know the knowledge contained
in this object that concerns you.
At this point,
we need to distinguish more carefully between the two French terms for
knowledge: “la connaissance” —which is the knowledge of someone in the sense that
you may feel that “I don’t know him, I don’t know who he is”— and “le savoir” —which
is the knowledge that is supposed, the knowledge the object contains that
concerns you and that you don’t know.
There is
another knowledge in the back of the car, it is your unconscious knowledge, the
knowledge of your symptom, the knowledge you don’t know but that you may
suppose if you take it as a formation of your unconscious. As in the case of a
dream, you may suppose there is a knowledge articulated even in its meaningless
aspect, or you may not. It depends precisely on… transference.
At this point,
however, we encounter another face of transference, or even another logic.
Transference is transference with your unconscious, transference is to suppose
a subject to your unconscious, to suppose that you are concerned as a subject with
your unconscious and with your symptom. The logic of transference as Subject
Supposed to Know is not, therefore, only or basically to suppose a knowledge to
the Other but, first of all, to suppose a subject to the knowledge of your
unconscious. You will find this remarked when Lacan introduces this new logic
of transference as Subject Supposed to Know, as a criticism of his own initial
conception of transference as an intersubjective process. In his inaugural text
entitled “The Proposition of the 9th of October 1967 on the
Psychoanalyst of the School”, he says, for example:
“The subject
supposed to know is for us the pivot on which everything to do with the
transference is hinged. [...] Here the levitator of intersubjectivity will
display his finesse in asking: subject supposed by whom, if not by another
subject? [And Lacan answers:] A subject supposes nothing, he is supposed.
Supposed, I teach, by the signifier that represents him for another signifier.”[5]
The formula of
the transference that Lacan proposes in this text follows the logic of this new
conception:
We find on the
upper level the link between a signifier S, the signifier of the transference,
as Lacan points out, a signifier with an unknown meaning, and another signifier
Sq, “that we shall call
any signifier”, the signifier that represents the analyst at first, his name,
for example, to which he is here reduced. We can see the car driving to the
analyst in a line reduced to a link between two signifiers, with an unknown
meaning. This is the transference at the beginning of analysis, before its
development.
On the lower
level we also have some signifiers, —S1, S2… Sn— ordered in a series, the
series of signifiers of unconscious knowledge. This is the unconscious series
of signifiers in the subject’s history that are also in his dream: a car, a
father, an unknown passenger, perhaps a debt impossible to pay to this father…
In fact, this series of signifiers were already on the upper level reduced,
condensed, in a single link, the link of transference. But as a result of the
real encounter with the analyst, this series acquires a meaning, a new meaning:
the car is not a car, the car is a taxi with a taxi driver who is also a
father.
And where is
the subject? The subject, Lacan points out, is this small “s”, —“le signifié”
in French—, the meaning we suppose to unconscious knowledge, the meaning that
was “en souffrance”, in waiting, as
the unknown passenger in the transference, the meaning that will only appear in
the real encounter with the analyst. The analyst is only a Subject Supposed to
Know, but he or she is also the only subject that takes a place in the
transference.
That is to
say: in the transference relation there is only one subject, supposed to the
signifying link, and an object, which the analyst must support in this
relation.
That is also to
say — there is no intersubjectivity, as is shown in the beautiful poster that
announces these Clinical Study Days: the man and the woman, they are not
talking to each other, “inter” or between one another, but with an object where
a subject may be supposed.
We can now pose
a final question: who is the real analyst, the analyst that it is impossible to
represent in the car of the symptom, the symptom that leads every subject to an
analyst? Perhaps we will find some answers in the works that will be presented
in these Clinical Study Days.
In any case,
we must take into account this paradox: transference is the unknown passenger
of psychoanalysis itself, and the destiny of psychoanalysis is the destiny of
this unknown passenger in every psychoanalytical treatment that we conduct.
* I thank Howard Rouse for his proofreading of this text.
[1] Jacques Lacan, Écrits, (The first complete edition in English, translated by Bruce
Fink), W.W. Norton & Company, New York – London 2006, page 494.
[2] H.D. A
Tribute to Freud: Writing on the Wall-Advent, New Directions Books, New
York 1984, page 16.
[3] In his conference “L’Autre sans Autre”, in the
NLS Congress, Athens, 19 May 2013.
[4] In his Seminar XV, (29/11/1967). Also in Lacan,
Jacques, Autres Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, page 325: “il n’y a pas de
transfert du transfert”.
[5] Jacques Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967
on the Psychoanalyst of the School”, translated by Russell Grigg.
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