Notes After a Talk on Transference

“In the beginning is the transference.” The word beginning makes me pause.

What kind of beginning is meant here?

This was the question I brought to a talk with Natalie Wülfing on transference, and it remained with me throughout the discussion.

There is, of course, a historical beginning. Transference appears very early in Freud’s clinical work. What first emerged as a difficulty in the treatment gradually became impossible to separate from psychoanalysis itself. With Dora, the problem was no longer simply that transference occurred. Freud also had to confront the fact that the analyst may already occupy a place in the transference before recognising what that place is.

But there is another beginning that interests me more: when does an analysis actually begin?

It is difficult to locate this chronologically. Is it the first meeting? The first time one lies on the couch? The beginning of free association? A certain number of preliminary sessions?

None of these seems sufficient in itself.

Transference may already be at work before the first meeting. Something has led a person to contact this particular analyst and to address something to someone. But this does not mean that an analysis has already begun.

So one distinction stayed with me: the beginning of transference and the beginning of an analysis are not necessarily the same thing.

Perhaps this is one way of thinking about the preliminary interviews. They are not simply an introduction before “the real analysis” begins. The question is what happens to the transference in these encounters and whether something begins to take on an analytic form.

A knowledge is supposed

This brought us back to Lacan’s subject supposed to know. I had initially understood this quite simply: the analysand supposes that the analyst knows something about him. But Lacan makes it more difficult than that: “A subject supposes nothing, he is supposed.” Transference therefore cannot be reduced to one person believing that another person possesses knowledge. Something also happens to what is being said.

A symptom, a slip, a dream or a complaint can begin to acquire another status. It is no longer only something that happens or something to be eliminated. There is a supposition that something can be read in it, even though this knowledge is not already possessed by either person. The analyst occupies a peculiar place in relation to this supposition. He is placed in relation to knowledge without actually possessing the knowledge that is supposed.

This also helped me think about why speaking to someone is not in itself analytic speech. It is not enough that one person speaks and another listens. Something has to become possible in the speaking that was not known beforehand.

What does it mean to manage the transference?

This leads to the question that interests me most personally: the management of transference. I still find management a difficult word. It can sound as if the analyst should manage the analysand’s feelings, control the relationship, or direct the person toward a particular outcome. But perhaps the difficulty is almost the opposite.

The analyst is given a place in the transference. The question is what he does with that place. If the analyst begins to believe that he actually knows what the analysand wants, what a symptom finally means, or what decision should be made, the authority created by transference can easily turn into suggestion. Yet simply refusing this position does not solve the problem either. Repeating “I don’t know” can itself become a way of avoiding the position from which the analytic work has to take place.

One way I had been thinking about this before the discussion was that handling transference may have less to do with managing the analysand than with the analyst’s relation to the place that transference gives him. How can the analyst make use of that place without identifying with it? The discussion left this question open for me rather than resolving it.

This also explains why Lacan’s distinction between directing the treatment and directing the patient matters. The analyst does not stand outside transference and administer it from a neutral position. His intervention is already made from somewhere within the transferential situation.

And transference itself is not simply something that helps an analysis. It can also become resistance. What makes speech possible can also begin to close it. The analyst can become too substantial: the one whose approval matters, the one who must know, the one who loves or rejects.

So perhaps the question is not whether transference is “strong enough,” but what the transference is doing to the analytic work at a particular moment.

Not every transference is analytic

This led me to another distinction that I found especially useful: the presence of transference does not in itself mean that psychoanalytic work is taking place. Transference is not created by analysis. It can exist elsewhere, attach itself to different figures, or organise itself around authority, love, knowledge or identification. Lacan’s notion of wild transference makes this especially clear.

What then makes a transference psychoanalytic?

I do not think the answer can simply be “because it happens with an analyst.” The analyst can also respond from suggestion, from his ego, from an ideal of what the patient should become, or from the conviction that he already knows what is happening. This makes the analyst’s handling of transference part of what determines whether something specifically analytic can happen.

The question therefore shifts from:

Is there transference?

to:

What kind of transference is at work here, and what is the analyst doing with it?

Acting out: something addressed

Acting out sharpened this question for me. One point Natalie made stayed with me in particular: acting out may emerge at a point where something in the transference has not been interpreted—or has not been interpreted accurately.

This seems close to Lacan’s way of situating acting out. It is not simply behaviour to be explained or stopped. Acting out belongs to the field of transference; Lacan even calls it wild transference. It calls for interpretation precisely because something is being shown rather than sufficiently articulated in speech. This changes how the act can be heard.

An acting out is not only something the subject does. It is also something shown, something addressed to the Other, and, within a treatment, something that may be addressed to the analyst.

The question then becomes less “Why did the patient do this?” and more:

What is being shown here, and to whom?

The case of Ernst Kris’s “Fresh Brains Man” seems especially useful here. The patient was preoccupied with the idea that he plagiarised other people’s work. Kris intervened by demonstrating that his work was in fact original. The patient could accept what Kris told him, but something remained untouched. After the session, he would go looking for restaurants where he could eat fresh brains and later report this to his analyst.

Lacan repeatedly returned to this episode as an example of acting out. The point is not simply that Kris’s interpretation was factually wrong—it may well have been correct at the level at which it was made. Rather, it did not touch the question of desire that was at stake for the subject. The fresh brains then appear almost as something brought onto the stage for the analyst: what could not be sufficiently reached by the intervention is shown in an act instead.

This is also why acting out should not be reduced to a coded message waiting to be decoded. Lacan’s later formulation is more precise: it is not necessarily the falsity of an intervention that provokes acting out, but that the intervention may leave room for something else to emerge.

And perhaps this is what makes it clinically important. The act may not only tell us something about the analysand. It may also require the analyst to reconsider what was not reached by the interpretation, what was being shown instead, and from what position he had been intervening.

The same intervention is not always the same intervention

This brings me to another question from the discussion that I want to continue working on: the intervention cannot be separated from structure and from the particular transference in which it occurs. The same words do not necessarily perform the same function in every treatment.

An intervention that opens something for one subject may close something for another. An analyst’s silence can create space in one case and acquire an entirely different, even threatening, significance in another. An interpretation that introduces a question in a neurotic structure cannot simply be assumed to operate in the same way in psychosis. This makes the desire for general technique difficult.

It is not enough to ask whether an intervention is theoretically “Lacanian,” clever, or even correct in its content. One also has to ask what effect it has here, for this subject, within this structure and this transference.

The question of handling transference is therefore inseparable from clinical orientation.

What stayed with me

I began with a question about the beginning of analysis. I left with several questions that now seem connected.

If transference can precede analysis, what happens that allows it to become part of an analytic work?

If transference can take different forms, what kind of transference is operating at a particular moment?

And if the analyst is always intervening from a position within it, what does his intervention actually do to the transference?

These questions make the management of transference sound less and less like the application of a technique.

Perhaps handling is a better word.

Not mastering the transference, but being able to read its transformations: when it makes analytic work possible, when it closes something, when it becomes wild, when something appears in an act rather than in speech, and when the analyst’s own intervention changes its direction.

For me, this is what remained open after the discussion—and what I would like to continue working on.