Filled-in Transference
The emergence of an enigmatic signifier at the point where translation fails forms a boundary beyond which sense falters, an event horizon behind which lies the threat of annihilation. Might it not be at this limit that we encounter the source of resistance in analysis? If the resistant patient, after all, is one who refuses to be hypnotised, all well and good. If he braves the regression that analysis brings on, and the unconscious follows in its transferential mysterious way, then surely any appearance of resistance marks an emergence of the spectre of the enigmatic signifier in all its forbidding guises. In this sense, like any other aspect of the transference, resistance is a sign; one that points the way for the direction of the analysis.
For example, what Laplanche has termed filled-in transference functions, in part, as a resistance. To return to our developmental story; as we have seen, from the first moment of originary transference – that is the intromission of the (m)other’s message – the infant is compelled to make sense of something threateningly alien. This sense-making can be seen as a kind of proto-theorising; an attempt to effect a digestion, to de-alienate the intrusion from without. If a first filling-in occurs, then, as a result of an experience of originary transference—representing a purposeful activity aiming at psychical containment—a second filling-in occurs at the moment transference is evoked in the analytic relationship. As we have seen, the analytic situation provokes the transference since the analysand encounters a radical alterity in the position of the analyst. In this way, filled-in transference itself transfers into the analytic setting the analysand’s primary theorising in the face of their failure to translate the encounter with the unconscious message of the (m)other in the originary situation.
In the notion of filled-in transference, then, we find an evolution of Freud’s tripartite structure and function of transference; filled-in transference, evoked by the regressive analytic situation, belies the analysand’s strategy with regard to bearing their originary encounter with the alien(ating) nature of the enigmatic signifier as sign of the repressed sexuality of the other.