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While psychoanalysis discovers and names the transference very early on, it does not create it, it uses it in order to interpret the configuration of the libidinal apparatus which is repeated ‘in the flesh’ in the context of the analytic relationship. By 1917, Freud was clear that transference – together with its manifestation in the analytic situation as “resistance” – was the “most important” aspect of psychoanalytic therapy (Freud, 1917b, p. 316). In fact, echoing his previous paper on Narcissism (Freud, 1914b), the capacity to develop transference became a condition of the potential success of analytic therapy (Freud, 1917a, p. 447), as he concluded in his Lecture on Transference (ibid, pp.431-447) of the “Lectures on Psychoanalysis” which eloquently summarized all the developments within the area of transference until 1917. Throughout this period, Freud highlights the paradox that the transference is at once the cross to bear and the best tool because the transference is a carrier of the dimension most removed from consciousness. Once a facilitator, the transference can become a major obstacle in the process of remembering the repressed material: the unconscious drive-related impulse seeks to achieve satisfaction while barring access to any awareness or any remembering in the treatment, transference having formed an alliance with resistance. Hence, in Freud’s view, lies the paradox of transference love: without it, you do not get anywhere in the treatment even though transference love is also the source of the most persistent form of resistance. “Thus the transference becomes the battlefield on which all the mutually struggling forces should meet one another” (Freud, 1917a, p. 454). Freud does not hesitate to rely on war-related vocabulary to name a conflict that takes place on territories where forces fight one another for every inch. The conceptual evolution of Transference is inter-related to the evolution of formulations of psychic conflict and both are inter-related with the overall evolution of increasingly complex psychoanalytic theory. First, in the transitional text of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, Freud (1920) adds the aggressive drive of destruction and death (Thanatos) to the sexual drive (Eros), which reformulates conflict of the (First) Topographic theory from previous sexual drive/instinct vs. defence/repression/self-preservative instincts (Ego instincts), to drives vs. defence(s). Repetition compulsion is a clinical manifestation of the aggressive/destructive Thanatos . Then, in “The Ego and the Id” (Freud, 1923) and in “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926), Freud posits the conflict to be among the three agencies id, ego and superego, and the demands of the outside world: The conflict is between the drives in the (fully unconscious) id, defences/repression in the unconscious portion of the ego, which responds to anxiety signalling danger, and the superego as the heir of the Oedipus complex, with its largely unconscious self- punitive and ego-ideal components. As the id’s aggression feeds the self-punitive component of superego, id and superego pressure ego from both sides. This can manifest itself in the transference-resistance, which is thus linked to the sway of the id but also to the internal assault carried out by the superego. This assault underlies what Freud (1923) refers to as “negative therapeutic reaction”, i.e. a worsening in the treatment in which transference is the bearer of both excess and destructiveness, as explored later by such authors as André Green in “The Work of the Negative” (Green, 1993) and J.-B. Pontalis in “On the Basis of Counter- transference: the Dead and the Living Intertwined” (Pontalis, 1975) and in “No, Twice No” (Pontalis, 1979).
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