Transcending Transference: Hollowing–Out
If we interpret a transferential movement, it is not to attack it as a defence, nor to resolve it; it is in the end to make it evolve, to help in its evolution (Laplanche, 1999:217).
In the light of Laplanche’s refounding, the evoked reaction of reflection within the analysand in response to the analytic situation can be seen as a de-translation returning the analysand to an engagement with the enigmatic signifier, and affording an opportunity to work over the constructions made in the face of the failure of translation. Laplanche translates Freud’s term, lösung, as ‘loosening’—referring to Freud’s frequent use of the terms ablösen and auflösen, ‘to loosen’, and in contrast with Strachey’s notion of ‘resolution’ and Freud’s insistence on ‘removal’—in order to propose a counterpoint to the notion of filled-in transference. Here, interpretation functions as a hollowing-out, a process facilitated by three dimensions of the analyst; ‘the analyst as the guarantor of constancy; the analyst as the director of the method and the companion of the primary process; the analyst as the one who guards the enigma and provokes the transference’ (Laplanche, 1999:227). The first two dimensions as characteristics of the analyst’s position provide the necessary setting for analysis as a method to gain access to the unconscious; a containment in which an analysis can be productively engaged, one that is on the side of the death drive as a function of dissolution, of a de-translation of the reaction-formations, the theories constructed as a result of the analysand’s originary translation. A bound site, that is, in which an unbinding can unfold. The third dimension refers to the analyst as representative of a benevolent ‘zero point’—a translation of Freud’s notion of neutrality—a position that aims to facilitate the analysand’s free association and free speech addressed to an analyst who does not assume a knowing of either the analysand or of themself. That is, the analyst needs to assume the position of another who engages with the alterity they find in themself, as well as that of the analysand, from a hollowed-out position, one that declines theorising as a filling-in of that which is enigmatic.
Laplanche characterises this situation as the offer of a ‘tub’, or hollow (in)to which the analysand can pour their filled-in transference in order that, with an analyst who declines the promise of a more successful filling-in, both are confronted again with the enigmatic signifier. From this (re)encounter the analysand may engage in an emptying out, a de-translation that unbinds the originary theorising. Thus there is a demand on the analyst to maintain the dimension of an interior alterity within themselves, a task to which the analyst’s own analysis is oriented. In doing so, the analysis—analysand and analyst—are interpellated by the enigmatic signifiers at play.
From this perspective, interpretation represents a speech act by the analyst – though, in time, one performed by the analysand – addressed to the analysand’s speaking, an intervention that seeks to loosen, to open up the analysand’s associations—the productions of fantasy, memory, dreaming, joking—in such a way as to bring into question the originary theorising that effected a binding, a closing up in the face of the disturbing insistence of the enigmatic signifier. That is, rather than seeking to solve the riddle of the enigmatic signifier—a vainglorious enterprise that was, after all, instrumental in Oedipus’ downfall—interpretation seeks to elicit a questioning that (re)engages the drive to translate, a productive process of signification of the dynamics of the unconscious and the disturbing threat of what is encysted within the sub-conscious enclave (Stanton, 1997).