Back to Table of Contents
IV. E. Late Bionian development in USA An example of a late Bionian tradition in North America, particularly applicable to analysis with children and primitive mental states, is Judith Mitrani ’s concept ‘taking’ the transference . (1999, 2000, 2001, 2014). She conceives this as a function of the analyst essential to what Bion called the maternal function of reverie: that attentive, actively receptive, introjective and experiencing aspect of the containing object. This function does not merely entail a cognitive understanding of or an ‘empathic attunement’ with what the patient is feeling toward and experiencing with the analyst in any given moment. It also refers to the unconscious introjection, by the analyst, of certain aspects of the patient’s inner world, and a resonance with those elements of the analyst’s own inner world, such that she is able to feel herself to actually be that unwanted part of the patient’s self or that unbearable object that she has previously been introjectively identified with. Taking the transference may be the most difficult aspect of the work, as it is not a matter of good will or good training, but an unconscious act governed by unconscious factors.
V. THE FRENCH CONTRIBUTION
V. A. Jacques Lacan Lacan posits the transference as one of the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, along with the drive, the unconscious and repetition. His approach to the transference is predicated on the Freudian idea that the link with the analyst hosts the repetition of an experience that comes from the past, the reactualisation of signifiers in which the childhood demands for love may have taken form. But even before involving these particular forms, the transference shows itself in the very process of the demand for analysis, insofar as the subject addresses someone in whom some knowledge is supposed. The figure of the analyst as the subject supposed to know is pivotal when accounting for the course of the treatment according to Lacan: during his analysis, the analysand must specifically experience the illusion in which he finds himself when supposing that the analyst has the answer he expects, as a patient, with regard to his demand and his becoming, more generally. In Lacan’s view, any demand is fundamentally aimed at what was irretrievably lost in speech. This dimension of the experience of the transference is, to Lacan, the most decisive one; it keeps the analyst, thus a representative of the figure of the Other, from being concerned with counter-transference: the most orthodox Lacanians hold the attention given to the patient’s linguistic discourse as exclusively worthwhile, whereas the attention paid to the analyst’s mental processes is regarded as a distraction in the listening process. The end of the treatment, envisioned as the eradication of the transference, coincides with the moment when the
1069
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online