Since, as we have seen, transference is an everyday phenomenon – the medium by which communication is propelled, the stuff of human nature—it is nonsensical to seek its termination in analysis. Rather, where transferential dynamics have been loosened there is room for an engagement with a more alterior other (internally and externally) with a less rigid insistence on ‘knowing’, on theorising along repetitive, familiar lines. Does not this notion of a radically alterior other have profound implications regarding the notion of an enigma? For does not this unknown/unknowable other take on the status of a new enigma, rather than the hollowed-out originary enigma; one that may not be traumatising, but rather generative? What I am proposing is an otherness—again, within and without—that functions as the source of a (relatively) unencumbered drive, as well as the object of a desire that does not seek to disavow lack, but rather acts as the creative spur of an expression that acknowledges an always/already lack-in-being. In short, a variation on the originary enigma.
Allied with the notion of a hollowing-out, then, is the metaphor of an opening up, a (re)opening of what was closed as a result of the originary theorising in the face of the failure of translation. Such an opening up represents not the removal or resolution of transference but a liberation, a (re)activation of the enigma, a loosening of the repetitive, cyclical dynamics of filled-in transference, one that affords a more productive elaboration, a more creative theorising that unfolds the alterity of self and other. In such a potential position – that is, a position pregnant with potential—the possibility of sublimation emerges; the creative work of a personal signification of one’s all-too-human condition.