We take a break from our analytic thriller, to offer some
background on the term that supplies its title.
In psychoanalysis, the notion of Übertragung/transference
was to enjoy a remarkable floraison,
to the point that many passages using the term (examples quoted below) are
baffling to any but a connoisseur.
But its origins were literal enough, its use not restricted to the
analytic situation. Thus, from the first edition of Die Traumdeutung,
Freud anent his youthful crush on Hannibal:
Ich meine, daß ich diese
Schwärmerei für den karthagischen General
noch ein Stück weiter in meine Kindheit zurück verfolgen kann, so daß es sich
auch hier nur um die Übertragung
einer bereits gebildeten Affektrelation
auf einen neuen Träger handeln dürfte.
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amerikanischer Mundart,
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Later, in the relation between analyst and analysand, Freud believed he regularly discovered
a transference of a special sort:
an unconscious projection, by the analysand, of prototypes -- likewise
unconscious, and infantile in origin -- onto the analyst himself. And the oddity -- no, the paradox
-- is that, instead of going straight for the patient’s traumata and complexes
and what-all, the transference being a mere distraction, in time the analyst’s focus came to be
primarily on analyzing the actual transference relation -- a sort of
meta-illness. As one orthodox
practitioner put it:
It is now all but axiomatic that the
transference is the indispensable driving power of the analytic process.
-- Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic
Situation (1961).
~
An early appreciation, from one outside the inner circle:
Such ‘negative’ transference seems to be
often an artificial product of analysis, an artefact. (Not always, for many subjects are inevitably hostile.) One is tempted, indeed, to ask whether
an investigator who encounters ‘negative’ transference might not be well advised to retire
from the world for a time and to
pracise a little auto-psychoanalysis.
-- Havelock Ellis, Studies in
the Psychology of Sex (?1897-?1910), vol. III, part 2, p. 204
The passage is characteristic of the author’s common sense, leavened
by wit. His observation,
though that of an analytic outsider, yet hit the mark, as witness this
parallel
passage in the classic mainstream-orthodox text (held in reverence by
Janet Malcolm, but itself spectacularly devoid of any hint of humor) of
Leo Stone, The
Psychoanalytic Situation (1961), p. 54:
Superfluously remote and depriving
attitudes [on the part of the analyst] tend to promote an artifact element in
the transference neurosis …
Except as regards the spelling of artefact, these authors are here
basically in agreement.
~
With time, the term became increasingly numinous and portentous:
The transference and the transference neurosis … are at
the very center of our concept of the analytic process.
-- Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic
Situation (1961).
“The motives of student organizations
are nothing if not transferential.”
“The kids getting together against the
parents.”
-- Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
(1981), p. 63
Though he considers the office
unimportant, he says he would have felt terrible if he had lost out. “It took on a transferential meaning for me.”
-- psychoanlyst “Aaron “, quoted in Janet
Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The
Impossible Profession (1981), p. 106
“It’s a defense maneuver that many
analysts adopt, when all of a
sudden they find themselves caught
within the emotional field of the patient’s instincts, when they feel the full
impact of the transference
beating down on them like hail.”
-- psychoanlyst “Aaron “, quoted in Janet
Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The
Impossible Profession (1981), p. 149
As with any precise technical term, transference is subject to a somewhat loose or relaxed use as
jargon:
We must guard against rationalizing that
aspect of our group countertransference which idealizes the overr-obedient
patient.
-- Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic
Situation (1961), p. 66
Since an infantile fixation of a group mind is here most implausible,
this can mean no more than déformation
professionelle.
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