Transference as manifestation of the Enigmatic Signifier
In his revision of how the analysand’s navigation through the Oedipal crisis shapes the nature of transferential dynamics, Laplanche asserts that Freud’s revolutionary project went astray at the point where Freud shied away from pursuing a crucial logical implication with regard to the issue of seduction; that the infant’s everyday encounter with the adult is inherently and profoundly enigmatic, and that this situation is potentially traumatising, that these encounters can wound. How is this so?
Laplanche portrays the infant as without sexual(ised) desire, language or cultural codes and meanings and, therefore, without an unconscious. From this position, addresses by the (m)other – a sexual(ised) adult subject to language, located within a situated cultural matrix and possessing an unconscious – appear enigmatic to the infant, since these addresses are always/already ciphered by unconscious dynamics, belying an incomprehensible yet compelling ‘something’ beyond the infant’s reach. Such is the situation of primal seduction; one in which an adult addresses an infant through non-verbal (behavioural), verbal and linguistic signs that are pregnant with unconscious sexual effects. Laplanche (1989:126) offers an archetype for this situation in the act of breast feeding, an act that inevitably cathects the mother’s ambivalent attitude towards her own erotic arousal. He asserts that it is inconceivable that the infant does not notice a trace of the mother’s experience, and thus generates a ‘question’, which we may conceptualise as involving a ‘what’ (does the breast want of me?) and ‘why’ (does it want?) In this moment, Laplanche is clear that there can be no unpicking of the unconscious thread stitched within the address. While he distinguishes within the address a level of conscious communication and an unconscious message (Laplanche, 2007), the two are entangled or knotted together in the (m)other’s lived compromise-formation (Freud, 1896/1959). Since the nature of this compromise-formation is also beyond the (m)other’s conscious grasp, the infant cannot appeal to the (m)other for mediation in the task of disentangling such an encounter, leaving the infant alone in his or her survival-level need to make meaning.
The infant’s encounter with such an address instigates two moments of originary transference. First, due to the imperative to make sense, the infant is tasked with ‘digesting’ the address. As suggested, the thread of the unconscious message is not palatable, it raises questions that insist, and it is an insistence that the infant experiences as an alien penetration. That is, in structural terms, the (m)other’s unconscious message is intromitted within the internal world of the infant, embedding itself like a splinter within the envelope of the infant’s proto-psyche. The wounded infant now faces a demand to handle, to make sense of something that was outside but which is now inside; something that was ‘other’ and which is now ‘me’, something which insists.