Back to Table of Contents
compulsion, which he would soon denominate the resistance of the id, reigned by the death drive, a concept whose inclusion implicates an important turn in the theory. This compulsion to discharge --destruction drive-- remains latent during the treatment and will then occupy the transferential scene with the maximum resistance. The analyst perceives an active resistance from the unconscious ego against dealing with the repressed, resistance, which the conscious ego disowns. The repressed is segregated from the ego by the resistances of repression but can be communicated to the ego through the id. “The Ego and the Id” (1923), read alongside “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) contextualizes the ego as the representative (Repräsentant) of reason and prudence, while the passions (drives) prevail in the id, and are capable of breaking through its borders. Freud’s description of the resistance to the analytical work, enunciated in metapsychological writings previous to 1920, culminates in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, where the clinical phenomenon of the repetition compulsion assumes drive-like characteristics and demands to undertake the fight against the ego’s need for punishment, which is a consequence of the tragic fault coming from the forbidden oedipal actions to which the subject is driven, martyred at the same time by the super-ego’s demands. If the ego submits itself to an unmerciful super-ego, creating thus an intense masochistic joy, the analysis may be in danger. Even when the analyst sees some progress, a negative therapeutic reaction will arise, resulting in interpretable transferential manifestations of neurotic level. Tragic transferential manifestations (oedipal tragedy, personal prehistory) such as anxiety, lethargy, refer to buried material, ‘actual’, and require a construction of the act, which occurs ‘now’. Also, the buried tragic material may activate itself through a recent trauma and produce a discharge in the somatic, as the ego is above all a body ego (Freud, 1923). Viewed through the lens of such theory developments in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and “The Ego and the Id”, murderous superego punishment of the ego, fueled by the id’s death drive, reveals itself in different ways both in Oedipus’ ‘fateful’ tragedy and in Hamlet’s agony. Freud’s introduction of the Second Topography/Structural theory marks an important change in the dynamics of transference. Seen until then as driven by the force of desire, it appears as inexorably tied to the repetition compulsion and to the sphere of action, of discharge. One must note that Freud’s papers on technique come to an end in 1918, before the Second Topography/Structural Theory. Only in 1937, with “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (Freud, 1937a) and “Constructions in Analysis” (Freud, 1937b) does Freud return to the technical problems raised by the introduction of the repetition compulsion and the death drive, especially in relation to Ferenczi’s (1909) notion of negative transference. With the developments put forward in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud, 1920) and, in particular, with the introduction of the concept of death drive, Freud suggests that, urged by the compulsion to repeat, something beyond the repressed is displayed within the scene of transference: something that now presents itself by means of feelings and perceptions. These,
1059
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online