Übertragung V (Quotational Interlude)

We take a break from our analytic thriller, to offer some background on the term that supplies its title.

In psychoanalysis, the notion of  Übertragung/transference was to enjoy a remarkable floraison, to the point that many passages using the term (examples quoted below) are baffling to any but a connoisseur.  But its origins were literal enough, its use not restricted to the analytic situation. Thus, from the first edition of Die Traumdeutung, Freud anent his youthful crush on Hannibal:

Ich meine, daß ich diese Schwärmerei für den karthagischen General  noch ein Stück weiter in meine Kindheit zurück verfolgen kann, so daß es sich auch hier nur um die Übertragung einer bereits gebildeten Affektrelation  auf einen neuen Träger handeln dürfte.

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Later, in the relation between analyst and analysand,  Freud believed he regularly discovered a transference of a special sort:  an unconscious projection, by the analysand, of prototypes -- likewise unconscious, and infantile in origin -- onto the analyst himself.   And the oddity -- no, the paradox -- is that, instead of going straight for the patient’s traumata and complexes and what-all, the transference being a mere distraction,  in time the analyst’s focus came to be primarily on analyzing the actual transference relation -- a sort of meta-illness.  As one orthodox practitioner put it:

It is now all but axiomatic that the transference is the indispensable driving power of the analytic process.

-- Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation (1961).

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An early appreciation, from one outside the inner circle:

Such ‘negative’ transference seems to be often an artificial product of analysis, an artefact.  (Not always, for many subjects are inevitably hostile.)  One is tempted, indeed, to ask whether an investigator who encounters ‘negative’ transference  might not be well advised to retire from the world for a time  and to pracise a little auto-psychoanalysis.

-- Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (?1897-?1910), vol. III, part 2, p. 204

The passage is characteristic of the author’s common sense, leavened by wit.   His observation, though that of an analytic outsider, yet hit the mark, as witness this parallel passage in the classic mainstream-orthodox text (held in reverence by Janet Malcolm, but itself  spectacularly devoid of any hint of humor) of Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation (1961), p. 54:

Superfluously remote and depriving attitudes [on the part of the analyst] tend to promote an artifact element in the transference neurosis …

Except as regards the spelling of artefact, these authors are here basically in agreement.

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With time, the term became increasingly numinous and portentous:

The transference  and the transference neurosis … are at the very center of our concept of the analytic process.

-- Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation (1961).

“The motives of student organizations are nothing if not transferential.”

“The kids getting together against the parents.”

-- Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 63

Though he considers the office unimportant, he says he would have felt terrible if he had lost out.  “It took on a transferential meaning for me.”

-- psychoanlyst “Aaron “, quoted in Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 106

“It’s a defense maneuver that many analysts adopt, when  all of a sudden  they find themselves caught within the emotional field of the patient’s instincts, when they feel the full impact of the transference   beating down on them like hail.”

-- psychoanlyst “Aaron “, quoted in Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 149

As with any precise technical term, transference is subject to a somewhat loose or relaxed use as jargon:

We must guard against rationalizing that aspect of our group countertransference  which idealizes the overr-obedient patient.

-- Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic Situation (1961), p. 66

Since an infantile fixation of a group mind is here most implausible, this can mean no more than déformation professionelle.

[A suivre ici.]