Concluding Remarks: Variations on a Theme
[S]peech in the transference reveals the unconscious, but is also the bearer of new meaning (Laplanche, 1999:218).
To the extent that this paper has sketched an account of one evolution of the Freudian concept of transference – one, that is, with a particular French accent – this paper itself represents a process of transference, one that highlights the mutative potential of such a process; the potential to ‘bear new meaning’. To employ a musical metaphor; in his Goldberg Variations J. S. Bach wanders away from a theme over the course of thirty variations, arriving at a point—one which can hardly be seen as a goal since it could not have been anticipated from the outset—whose complex associative relation to the theme is only illuminated upon the return of the latter; an origin that we have all but forgotten. It seems to me that this is an evocative metaphor – though very different from the metaphor of Freud’s with which we began this particular set of variations—for the notion of transference itself, as well as the developments in the conception of transference as traced out in this paper.
To take the former first; in transference, as we have seen, something returns – or we return to something – something enigmatic, something of the other that is compelling in its utter alien–ness. In this moment, are we not again surprised to find that we hardly recognise how we arrived back at the same place, given where we thought we had arrived in the light of our theorising, our filling-in? With regard to the latter; the Freudian themes as summarised here find echoes in Laplanche’s variations. And, indeed, how could it be otherwise? A refounding upon already-laid foundations encodes something of what was originally laid; it is made in its image, so to speak. There can be no vanquishing of the origin, even if the refounding leads to very different (counter)points.
Finally, is it not the varying itself, the working through, that loosens; and if it is the grip of the repetition that is part and parcel of what is loosened, does this not, in a sense, free the drive? After all, one of the gains Count Kaiserling enjoyed in the endless repetition of his insomnia may well have been a marvelling at Bach’s genius to do just that; to work through, to creatively vary a theme in order to roam wide and far. This, for me, is the Laplanchian transcendence of Freud’s foundation; transference cannot be vanquished—nor should we desire such a pyrrhic victory—rather it awaits a variation, an evolution, that leads us back to a zero point where what was always/already familiar can be encountered again as unknown, providing a starting point for a less predictable, yet potentially more productive encounter.