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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 analysand may depart from this illusion and relieve the analyst of the subject-supposed-to- know position. In his 1951 paper (1966/2007), “Interventions on Transference”, Lacan 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 make 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
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