It is worth noting that Freud’s coming around to the possibilities implicit in this development is not without a degree of resistance on his part. For, in this 1912 exposition – and, indeed, henceforth – he cannot bring himself to relinquish his long held belief that transference deployed in the service of resistance can and must be removed. While this concept of removal is destined to evolve into the more elusive, and potentially productive, lösung, a crucial aspect of Freud’s clinical philosophy nonetheless remains intact; only once the negative transference has been removed can the remaining positive transference fulfil its potential as ‘the vehicle of success in psychoanalysis’ (Freud, 1912:105). Thus, Freud refuses to surrender his imperative to do battle on a field that remains populated by familiar opponents.
If the assertion of the need to remove the negative transference has left psychoanalysis with a pragmatic headache – not least, for example, the myth that analysis cannot proceed, cannot do its work, until the negative transference has been vanquished – Freud’s hope that the concept of positive transference would see off the demon of suggestion has also given rise to a persistent hangover. For now a question arose regarding the role of the positive transference as vehicle of analytic success, establishing a problematic in which psychoanalysis remains entangled; that is, the conflating of interpretation and hypnotic suggestion (Borch–Jacobsen, 1991/1993). By 1912, Freud is still prepared to ‘readily admit that the results of psycho–analysis rest upon suggestion … the influencing of a person by means of the transference phenomena’ (ibid. pp.105 – 106). However, he does not seem daunted by the implications of this admission; that the susceptibility of the patient to cure by reason(ing) relies upon hypnotic suggestion, thus nullifying the rational, scientific basis of the psychoanalytic method and contradicting his clean-cut positioning of analyst and patient.
Why this preoccupation with the removal of the negative transference; how – and to what – is this variation on the transference used as a resistance? Again, Freud could not disentangle himself from the snare of suggestion, for he saw the negative transference as an obstacle to the treatment due to its immunising the patient against the hypnotic analytic demand for work; from the first rule of psycho–analysis – that the patient should freely associate – up to the acts of interpretation and construction. For Freud, the patient desires such inoculation due to the principle motivation of resistance; he or she does not want to remember, does not want to know, does not want to submit his or her repressed unconscious desires to rational scrutiny, but rather wishes to continue to enjoy – and, indeed, wring even more enjoyment from – the illusory fantasies that lean against his or her hidden passions, where reality can impose no limitation to – or consequences of – desire. Here, then, is born the theme of an unconscious that strives to remain hidden, just as the effects of the transference announce themselves with full fanfare, while the transference itself slips out of the grasp of interpretation.
In this sense, then, resistance flourishes due to a kind of loophole; insight cannot simply be handed over by the analyst, cannot be transferred at the point of interpretation, but rather, must be taken over – taken up – by the analysand, if the experience of representation-as-realisation is to have some effect upon the unconscious source of the symptom. That is, ‘[t]he patient’s subjective appropriation of the analyst’s interpretation enables the analysand to free himself from repetition in the transference’ (Sechaud, 2008:1017, italics added). Such appropriation alludes to an interpretation forged by the analysand, a translation of the analyst’s interpretation, opening the analysis up to the potential for reflection and revelation. To the extent that interpretation evokes a translation in the analysand, then, one that represents a re-authoring (after Barthes, 1967) of the analyst’s speech act (Austin 1962) rather than a capitulation in hypnotic deference to the authority of the analyst, we can view an interpretation as a catalyst, one that fires a process of internal transformation in the analysand.