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the other North American “schools”. As translations of Lacan’s work have been made available to Anglophone analysts, it has become more apparent that the divide may not be as wide as is often depicted, in particular by Lacan himself. Lacan pays special attention to affects in the transference, especially anxiety. Some of his dialectical and inter-subjective notions of treatment comes close to the classical lines of transference analysis and, differently, to its intersubjective and relational modifications. V. C. Jean Laplanche With the theory of enigmatic signifier, Jean Laplanche introduces a new point of view about the transference. The intrusive impact of the Other and the impossible translation by the infant of the adult’s messages “compromised” by interference of sexual fantasies is, for Laplanche, the frame of the fundamental anthropological situation and the basis of the “general theory of seduction” (Laplanche , 1987). It is this situation, which is repeated in the transferential situation. Therefore, the transference is not limited to a simple repetition of the relationship to the infantile objects. This aspect only corresponds to what Laplanche names “filled-in transference” – i.e the “positive” content which the analyst and the analysand can refer to as infantile imagos. The other aspect, named “hollowed-out transference” by Laplanche, is the reiteration of the relationship to the other as bearer of enigmatic messages (Laplanche, 1992). It is “provoked” by the analyst insofar he/she confronts the analysand with his/her enigma and “refusal to know” – this position actualizing the relationship to enigmas of the patient’s infancy. In this very heart of the transferential situation, a progressive process of “de-translation” and “re-translation” allows the analysand to “re-appropriate” excluded messages (Laplanche, 1999). From this perspective “mourning is the paradigm of symbolization.” Transference as a process – along with dreaming – works in the opposite direction to mourning. To repeat in the transference, means to try and retrieve the lost object (or relationship) rather than mourning and symbolizing it; therefore, the transference works in the same direction as the dream: both tend to deny absence; they tend to re-present (present anew) what could not be symbolized; hence, they both work in the opposite direction of mourning. This means that transference and dreaming share a “hallucinatory” quality in that they tend to shape the experience according to unconscious schemas rather than acknowledging the reality of absence or loss. V. D. Laplanche and Freud: a reading in French Canada An influential strand of thought in French Canada maintains transference as indeed the most important and most distinctive feature of psychoanalytic treatment. From this perspective partially inspired by Jean Laplanche’s writings, taking transference into account is what makes their treatment “psychoanalytic”. Moreover, no “genetic” reconstruction of the patient’s story will have as much weight as what is brought to life within the transference. Transference is
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