Psychoanalysis as Cause
Contemporaneous to Laplanche’s considerations – and in what represents a starting point for his elaboration of the dynamics of transference – Macalpine (1950) critiques Freud’s assertion that the neurotic is the cause of the transference, describing how the analytic situation itself – with the analyst’s abstention and rule of free association – provokes a heightened regression in the patient. Might we not say, in other words, that the patient’s regression is an adaptive response to the demand for work that the analytic situation poses? As Laplanche (1999:226) puts it, ‘it is the offer of analysis, the offer of the analyst, which creates … what? Not analysis, but its essential dimension, transference. Not, perhaps, the whole of the transference, but its basis, the driving force at its heart, in other words, the re-opening of a relation, the originary relation, in which the other is primary for the subject.’ If the transference, then, transfers an originary template into the analytic situation, it does so as a response to the already-seductive suggestion of analysis; the analyst actively evokes – even provokes – a transferential dynamic by inviting a temporal – that is, regressive – transfer in the phenomenology of the patient.
Freud acknowledges that transference is common in everyday life, and so we can see how understanding transference as a response to the analytic situation may reveal something about the analysand’s everyday situation. That is, if transference occurs spontaneously in the everyday, might it not be because something has been experienced that evokes a regression? In this way, we are interpellated (Althusser, 1970), hailed back by and into the past as we (re)call something of the past. Again, if there is something unique regarding the analytic situation, it is that it transfers something of the everyday and makes it particular, peculiar, in order to work through the repetition of neurotic misery.