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analysand may depart from this illusion and relieve the analyst of the subject-supposed-to- know position. In his 1951 paper “Interventions on Transference”, Lacan (1966/2007) details his theory of transference in terms of its imaginary and symbolic aspects, looking in particular at Freud’s case study of Dora (1905). The imaginary transference for Lacan includes the extreme feelings of love and hate that emerge in treatment and that can act as a resistance, in particular as a narcissistic obstacle between patient and analyst. Specifically, the imaginary transference crystallizes as a resistance when it becomes the analyst’s resistance. ‘Caught in the patient’s imaginary drama’, Lacan claimed, the analyst often becomes deaf to the more symbolic aspects of transference that keep the analysis unfolding, bringing to the surface unconscious material, deepening the treatment. In the Dora case, Lacan points to the stagnation of treatment with Freud’s insistence on Dora’s love for Herr K, a resistance that often arose for Freud with women patients during his early period. Because of this, Freud fails to hear in Dora’s dreams and in the unfolding of her story, her complicity with and erotic feelings for Frau K. that would have brought the analysis to its next turn, what Lacan calls Dora’s central question concerning the enigma of femininity and her own desire (as opposed to her previous obsessive concern with the desire of others— her father, Herr K). Lacan takes Freud’s conception of transference as resistance and makes the analyst responsible for it: “There is only one resistance, the resistance of the analyst”. (1978/1988, p. 228). Lacan’s emphasis on the “intersubjective dialectic” of the symbolic realm of the third, The Other, ‘in’ the transference is close to the interpersonal and relational emendations to classical psychoanalysis. Another important aspect of Lacan’s thoughts on transference concerns technique. For Lacan, there is no ‘meta’ position the analyst can assume in relation to the transference. When the analysand hears what the analyst says, he hears it ‘in’ the transference to the analyst, namely, through whatever particular subjective position he or she may be occupying in the unfolding of the analysis. This challenges many ideas concerning the interpretation of the transference, especially when done from an external vantage point. It also raises a question about the ‘dissolution’ of the transference via interpretation. For Lacan, transference takes place whenever “the subject supposed to know” arises, meaning the love, hate, and ignorance that develop in the face of those to whom we attribute knowledge. This is why it happens most readily with teachers, religious figures, doctors and psychoanalysts, namely with parental figures in positions of power. What distinguishes analysts, and differentiates interpretation from suggestion, is that the analyst does not abuse this transfer to him/her by the patient. The very frame of analysis allows this supposed knowledge to be seen not as a particular property of an individual, but rather a knowledge ‘in’ the unconscious, in the Other, that can be unpacked, becoming part of the evolution of an analysis. Lacan describes this movement in terms of the feeling the analysand has that the all- powerful analyst knows something about their symptoms, allowing a treatment to begin and gain traction. We might think of this as the imaginary and projective aspects of the ‘benign positive transference’ - the therapeutic alliance. The analyst’s neutrality helps contain the patient’s developing anxious preoccupation with the analyst’s desire, e.g., What does the
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