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as a resistance to the analysis. He also underlined the role of the homoerotic transference, i.e the crucial place of the “other” woman.
II. A. Freud’s Further Development of the Concept In keeping with the development of analytic practice, the definition carries on increasing complexity. The first shift from the plural to the singular in Freud’s writings points to the ubiquity of the phenomenon, and it is closely followed (Freud, 1909, 1912 1914, 1915, 1917a) and combined with another breakthrough: if the transferences are no longer “copies”, they become the “prototypes” of the relations to infantile figures, the patient thus reliving with the analyst the conflictual impulses that have inherited the ties to parental imagos. Such imagos are loved or hated, the object of displays of tenderness and/or hostility, in positive or negative transference, and they present themselves in a “newly created and transformed neurosis” (Freud, 1917a, p. 444) at the heart of which the patient places the analyst and which becomes the very space of interpretation (Freud, 1912). While in the ‘Ratman case’, Freud (1909) had already mentioned that both positive and negative feelings can be part of transference, it is in ‘The Dynamics of Transference’ (Freud, 1912) that he presents the first composite and clearly formulated account of the theoretical side of the phenomenon, within the (First) Topographic theory. In it, Freud made the following points: 1. Transference emanates from the portion of libidinal impulse that has remained unexpressed and/or unconscious; 2. Transference is ubiquitous and it occurs not only in the course of psychoanalysis, but also outside it. The difference is that in psychoanalysis it is made the subject of study; 3. Transference is “the strongest weapon of resistance” (ibid, p. 104); 4. Transference can be positive or negative; 5. The ‘Positive Transference’ can be divided into an affectionate type, which is an ‘unobjectionable ally’ of the treatment, and an erotic type, which needs interpretive resolution; 6. Predominance of negative transference presents a challenge to the successful outcome of analysis; 7. The patient getting insight into how the Transference- based wishes/desires fit into “the nexus of the treatment and of his life history” (ibid, p. 108) frees him from the tendency to re-create such situations. This is necessary to dissolve early fixations since “it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigy” (ibid, p. 108). The move from transference-resistance to transference interpretation as a central element of technique is implicit here. It became explicit with the concept of ‘transference neurosis’, a technical elaboration of which appeared in “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” (Freud, 1914). This paper is significant also, because it not only mentions ‘repeating instead of remembering’ as a potential resource of accessing the infantile history, but also because it mentions prominently for the first time transferential ‘compulsion to repeat’, which would be theoretically further developed in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud, 1920), a transitional text between the First and Second Topography / Topographic and Structural Theory. “Observations on Transference-Love” (Freud, 1915) presents further study of the technical difficulties raised by the positive transference. Only towards the end of his life Freud approached the subject once more in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (Freud, 1937a).
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