Freud’s Battling
[The] struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won – the victory whose expression is the permanent cure of the neurosis (Freud, 1912:108).
Speaking here of the transference neurosis that he believed neurotics alone generate in psychoanalytic treatment, Freud’s confident assertion conjures up a vivid metaphor; transference as field of battle on which the cure as victory is at stake. Not only is it significant that Freud absolves the analyst – and, indeed, the analytic method – from any causal implication with regard to the transference, but note that he also polarises the positions of the reasonable (intellectual) analyst, and the unreasonable (instinctual) analysand. Freud thus grounds transference in line with his Enlightenment–rooted project as the site where the rational analyst battles an irrational analysand. In this battle, however, Freud found he could not be confident of victory, acknowledging that it represents the analyst’s greatest challenge, and potentially the nemesis of analysis. In this, Freud is drawing on his own clinical victories and defeats – most notably, with regard to the latter, that of the case of Dora (Freud, 1905/1901) – for he flourishes his epic metaphor as a hard won theoretical position that had incurred its own sacrifices. Characterising transference in this way is thus bound up in Freud’s apology for a potential – and experienced – failure of treatment, and it cements a metaphor that, as with all such similes, precludes other ways of conceptualising, thus carving out a way of thinking that dominated his development of the notion of transference. Henceforth, then, transference is the battle ground on which the success of the analytic project is to be won or lost.
Indeed, from the very start of his psychoanalytic project, Freud (1895) had regarded the manifestation of transference as an obstacle to the analysis of neurotics; a manoeuvre by the patient stubbornly resolved to repeat rather than remember, a frustrating act of sabotage by the analysand turned foe. And though he consolidates this view in 1912, he also acknowledges two further issues that represent a significant variation on this original theme. First, in what was to join the first of a number of attempts to exorcise psychoanalysis of the ghost of hypnosis, he calls upon the notion of transference in order to construct an analytic account of the problem of suggestion. Distinguishing between positive and negative types of transference, Freud asserts that only negative transference, in which hostile feelings are directed towards the analyst, as well as that involving repressed erotic feelings similarly directed, are amenable to recruitment by the resistance. The positive transference that springs from the well of a love cleansed of erotic desire, however, is now positioned by Freud as a pre-requisite for a successful analysis. This positive transference, this variation is at the analyst’s disposal, a much-needed weapon in the service of the all-decisive battle.
Second, after Ferenczi’s (1909) revelations regarding the implications of the Oedipus complex for the positioning of the analyst by the neurotic patient, Freud now acknowledges that the transference ushers into the here and now of the consulting room imagoes of the patient’s prototypical familial relational dynamics, and resulting unresolved unconscious Oedipal conflicts, comprising what Freud (1930) would come to see as erotic desires repressed in the face of the limits imposed by civilisation. Thus, while Freud claims victory in his assertion that negative aspects of the transference are seized upon and deployed by the analysand as a resistance to cure, he now concedes that this very repetition performs a potentially transformative function, offering a tantalising new route to victory. Thus, in his battle with the patient, the analyst is now equipped with an extended armoury and a cunning new plan.