Certainly, Freud had such a process and goal in mind, yet found no way to vanquish the conflation of interpretation-as-seduction; thus, the transformative effects of interpretation-as-catalyst remained entangled with the dynamics of suggestion. And this is so because this crucial ‘taking up’ by the analysand, a taking up upon which all hangs, is one that must be performed unconsciously, returning us to the problematic domain of hypnosis.
Nonetheless, Freud’s assertion quoted at the start of this section rallies the analyst as if this project of cure-by-interpretation can bypass, if not defeat the unconscious; the analyst must take up arms against negative transference, the foot soldier of the patient’s desire to regress to the pleasure principle in defiance of the reality principle. In this battle, ‘the doctor tries to compel … [the patient] … to fit … [their] … emotional impulses into the nexus of the treatment and of his life-history, to submit them to intellectual consideration and to understand them in the light of their psychical value’ (ibid. p.108). Only through such conscious insight will the patient be cured, though if the battle is to be won, the doctor relies upon the patient’s positive transference in order to ensure their amenability to the removal of the negative transference by suggestion, a suggestion that masquerades as rational reflection and understanding.
Transference, then, is a Trojan Horse; both a gift and an ambush. It reveals how the neurotic offers, despite themself, a coded communication that belies their originary template and the resulting dynamics of the repressed – thus placing within reach the prize of an unconscious structure that is amenable to a knowing that promises permanent relief – yet, at the same time, through this very offering the patient interpolates the analyst into the role of the representative of significant others in this originary drama. Both parties are thus ensnared in a transferential knot in which neither is who they assume themselves to be – either for themselves or for each other – and words function on a level that slips from the control of the one who speaks.