Transference Love Research Articles

Joking Around, Seriously: Freud, Derrida, and the Irrepressible Wit of Heinrich Heine

This essay sets out to explore the unexpected but amusing entanglement of three Jewish writers—Harry (“Heinrich”) Heine, Sigismund (“Sigmund”) Freud, and Jackie (“Jacques”) Derrida. You will not often find a reference to Heine in the work of Jacques Derrida, but you will find a Heine joke in Derrida’s discussion of forgiveness in Le parjure et le pardon (1998–1999), where the name Heine is invoked precisely in order to recall the scandalous automaticity, the machine-like quality of forgiveness. Beginning with Derrida’s surprising reference to the man George Eliot called a “unique German wit”, this essay will begin by arguing that there is something about Heine’s jokes, his Witze, his mots d’esprit, that not only plays up, but also paradoxically takes seriously, what Derrida, echoing Nietzsche in Of Grammatology, describes as the “play of the world.” The second part of this essay will engage Freud’s particular and quite special relation to Heine: Heine is the third most cited German writer in all of Freud’s work (after Goethe and Schiller). Neither Homer nor Sophocles is cited more often than Heine. Indeed, a bon mot from Heine is always ready-to-hand in the face of theoretical obstacles (e.g., “Observations on Transference Love”, “On Narcissism”, etc.). But perhaps nowhere is Freud’s affinity with Heine more apparent and more striking than in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where Heine’s witticisms offer the best and most canonical examples of jokes. In conclusion, this essay will argue that Heine’s wit can be read as a playbook—not only for psychoanalysis’s economic understanding of jokes, but also, more radically, for deconstruction’s thinking of play.

No Touching: Boundary Violation and Analytic Solidarity

“No Touching” argues that we can locate analytic solidarity in the boundaries drawn to protect analytic work from sexual enactment. The author traces ongoing elaborations of the notions of boundary and boundary violation as they become codified across the twentieth century in American (ego psychology) psychoanalysis and its legal and training institutions, in parallel with the retheorization of transference love toward a stable notion of erotic transference. The author argues that professional psychoanalytic institutions and associations only began to legislate boundary violation as a normative ethics problem when the feminization of psychoanalysis took place in the 1970s through the 1990s. The author then turns to the “overbounding” of analysis in its teletherapeutic contexts to ask if psychoanalytic suspicions of mediation are in part based in their capacity to suspend traditional forms of boundary violation.

The Erotics of Knowing: A Neglected Contribution to Analytic Erotism.

An erotics of knowing is posited that comprises embodied aspects of psychological and emotional closeness, and derives not from transference dynamics but from psychological and emotional intimacy-both component and consequence of the analytic process. The experience of knowing and being known is invested with erotism via its interpenetrative and interreceptive aspects; regardless of gender, to know the other is to enter a hidden interior "space" that represents that person's embodied inner world. Yet the interrogation of the intrinsic relationship between knowing and loving is stunningly absent from the psychoanalytic literature. This historical neglect is traced to a split in the discourse presaged by Freud's essay on transference love, which distinguishes between the qualified reality of the erotic transference and the de-erotized but "real" construct of the "analytic love" relationship. A more recent split relocates erotism to the maternal transference, divesting it of aggression and oedipal sexuality. These splits constitute a vigorous collective defense against engaging with the erotics of knowing: from Oedipus to Genesis, our forbidden fruit.

Where Have the Hysterics Gone?: Lacan’s Reinvention of Hysteria

[A]nd nevertheless I consider that in a very precise manner I have been guided by hysterics. Lacan Propos sur l'hysterie ended in 1952 when the diagnosis was eliminated from the official American psychiatric nomenclature. The word was deleted from the medical vocabulary when it ceased to be listed as a separate clinical entity in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Mental Disorders (dsm-i) (1952) and in The Standard Classified Nomenclature of Disease (scnd). But the termination of the entire disease form was rather a semantic suppression than the real elimination of the illness. It was not long before this repression produced a predictable Freudian return. By a curious chronological coincidence, it was also in 1952 that Jacques Lacan published in the Revue frangaise de psychanalyse an article that emerged from a seminar he taught at the Societe Psychanalytique de Paris. It focused on Freud's most detailed case study of a hysterical patient, the famous Dora's case. Presentation on Transference (Ecrits 176-85) is one of the few texts Lacan devoted entirely to hysteria. In addition to being a perfect example of his proclaimed return to Freud, so characteristic of Lacan's work it represents a decisive moment in French psychoanalytic history. Just a year later, in 1953, a long-standing rift would develop into a split in the Societe Psychanalytique de Paris. Lacan and others resigned to found the Societe Frangaise de Psychanalyse, under the direction of Daniel Lagache. The reasons behind the split were theoretical, directly affecting the practice of psychoanalysis. Consequently, Lacan reopened the case of Dora's hysteria with both clinical and political motives. He had been supporting liberal academics and intellectuals on the question of lay analysis and opposing the authoritarianism of those who argued in favour of medical training for the practice of psychoanalysis. As the title of Lacan's essay betrays, Dora's case enabled him to underline the clinical importance of transference--the slippery terrain of mutual implication of analyst and patient in the treatment, the role of the person of the analyst, and the importance of the patient's belief in the analyst. Lacan foregrounded the transference bond in the analytic cure and, above all, to the role of the analyst within the transference. Lacan was also aware, following Freud's example, that medical training was the least helpful in preparing an analyst to deal with the deceiving, non-empirical nature of transference. It was precisely unanalyzed transference love that impregnated Anna O. and terrified her doctor Joseph Breuer; Breuer resisted the sexual reality of the unconscious revealed by Anna's imaginary pregnancy and parturition and abruptly terminated her treatment. Not wanting to know anything about it, he hastily declared her cured and ran away from the powerful force of transference (see Breuer and Freud). Freud, in contrast, did not vacillate: he not only admitted the existence of transference but was also courageous enough to publish his first major case study on hysteria, although it would fail. This case is fragmentary (let us recall that it was published under the title Fragment of an Analysis ...), an incomplete analysis, for the defiant Dora had abruptly broken off the treatment. This unsuccessful case, however, taught him an important lesson on transference. Furthermore, it may suggest that psychoanalysis is best grasped through its own failure. It is well known that Freud did not mind publishing controversial case studies; he intended the obstacles to develop into clues for discovery. This becomes quite clear in his Postscript to Dora's case, in which Freud learns from his mistakes and attributes his failure to his delay interpreting his own participation in the transference (see Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria 118). …

Love, drive and desire in the works of Freud, Lacan and Proust

Both Freud and Lacan have made love the object of scientific enquiry, which is in itself remarkable, since we usually turn this subject over to literary and philosophical treatment. This article discusses Freud and Lacan’s contributions to the psychology of love through dialogue with Marcel Proust’s seminal novel, Remembrance of Things Past, with special emphasis on the middle sections. The point of departure is love’s manifestation in the analytical situation. Freud has described transference love as both resistance and as an extreme variant of normal falling in love, to which Lacan adds the deceptive character of transference. From transference love the investigation continues to the contradictions Freud has described in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality as love’s affectionate and sensual currents. Lacan contributes the concept of desire, which must be distinguished from drive and love. The differentiation between desire, drive and love introduces the perspective necessary for a psychoanalytic reading of Proust’s opus. The main objective is a reading of the protagonists, Albertine and the Baron de Charlus, as representatives of the vicissitudes of love and drive, respectively.

A three-person perspective on transference.

Different approaches to psychoanalysis may be classed according to the number of persons that they assume to be necessary in order to adequately describe mental life. One-person approaches assume the basic autonomy of the individual to act as a subject in her world, while 2-person approaches assume the irreducibility of object and subject, their essential complementarity and their mutual affirmation as subjects. Three-person approaches, on which the present article focuses, argue that the subject can fully develop only by creating enough space for herself among other persons who compete for subject positions. Such space is created in relation to (at least) 2 other subjects, hence the system of 3 persons. In the 3-person perspective, the position of the subject is defined as First, and the Second is defined by the one with whom the subject identifies and in whom she mirrors herself through cycles of projection and introjection. The position of the Third involves the personification of the cultural matrix and, especially, the way language informs our ability to relate to each other. This is best represented in the universal system of personal pronouns: the subject takes the position of the 1st person (1), the Second takes the position of the 2nd person (You), and the Third is posited as the 3rd person (she or he and it). In psychoanalytic therapy, the patient takes the position of the Subject, the First. Transference is construed as the superposition of both the 2nd and the 3rd persons upon the figure of the analyst, a mental process that (re)creates the necessary conditions for the development of subjecthood. As a result, in the discourse of transference, the position of the analyst keeps fluctuating between the 2nd and 3rd positions: When one takes place on the actual level, the other acts in the background, and vice versa. The therapeutic consequences of this view are discussed; for example, transference love is construed as a process in which the 2nd person struggles to dominate the positioning of the analyst. Other transferential configurations are also discussed.

Is Love Curative?

This article explores the phenomenon of love in the therapeutic relationship and its role as a curative factor. Since Freud's (1915) description of transference love, a major goal of treatment is to understand its developmental antecedents. Most analysts agree that transference love is no different than ordinary love, except that it is overdetermined and requires the patient to view it as simultaneously real and illusory without reciprocity from the analyst. Nontransferential, realistic elements of the therapeutic relationship also play an important role in treatment. An important outgrowth of the therapeutic process is the development of a new object relationship between analyst and patient. This special or transformative friendship is a new object relationship characterized by genuine feelings of mutual respect, trust, caring, and even love. It facilitates the patient's capacity to form and maintain other loving relationships. Two case presentations are illustrative.

Hunting Plato'sAgalmata

In this essay I argue that to understand Plato's philosophy, we must understand why Plato presented this philosophy as dialogues: namely, works of literature. Plato's writing of philosophy corresponds to his understanding of philosophy as a transformative way of life, which must nevertheless present itself politically, to different types of people. As a model, I examine Lacan's famous reading of Plato's Symposium in his seminar of transference love in psychoanalysis. Unlike many other readings, Lacan focuses on Alcibiades’ famous description of what caused his desire for Socrates: the supposition that beneath Socrates’ Silenus-like language and appearance, there were agalmata, treasures, hidden in his belly. I argue that this image of Socrates can also stand as an image for how we ought to read and to teach Plato's philosophy: as harbouring different levels of insight, couched in Plato's philosophy as literature.

‘The healing power of love’: The literary/analytic bond of marriage in Freud’s essay on Gradiva

Freud ’s declared position regarding the management of ‘transference love’ advocated ‘abstinence’, objectivity and even ‘emotional coldness in the analyst’. However, his essay on Jensen’s Gradiva reveals an identification with an involved and responsive ‘maternal’ analytic position associated with theorists such as Ferenczi, Balint and Winnicott. These theorists attribute the origins of transference love to the pre‐oedipal stage, shaping their analytic model on the basis of the early relationship with the mother. Freud generally had difficulty identifying with such a position, since it entailed addressing his own inner feminine aspects. Yet a literary analysis of his ‘Gradiva’ reveals this stance in his textual performance, i.e. in the ways in which he reads and retells Jensen’s story. Freud ’s narration not only expresses identification with Zoe, the female protagonist, but also idealizes her ‘therapeutic’ conduct, which is closer in spirit to that of object‐relations theorists. His subtext even implies, however unintended, that an ideal treatment of transference love culminates in a psychical ‘marriage’ bond between the analytic couple, a metaphor used by Winnicott to describe the essence of the mother–baby (analyst/patient) bond. Freud ’s reading process is itself analogous to Zoe’s ‘therapeutic’ conduct, in that both perform a creative and involved interaction with the text/patient.

The Dynamics of Empirically Derived Factors in the Therapeutic Relationship

The therapeutic relationship is the source of major concepts in psychoanalytic clinical theory. Such concepts as resistance, transference, countertransference, and the alliance are fundamental, even though there may be shifts in meaning between theoretical schools and clinical contexts. In the clinical psychoanalytic literature, disagreement exists over the nature of the alliance and its essential components. Empirical studies using reliable patient, therapist, and observer scales to assess the alliance demonstrate a correlation with psychotherapeutic gains. In the study reported here, thirteen patients were followed for 6 to 33 months of psychodynamic psychotherapy, during which time their views of the therapeutic relationship were assessed, and several experiential measures taken, all on a weekly basis. Statistical analyses reveal that the therapeutic relationship, as reflected in the patients' weekly responses to the St. Louis Therapeutic Relationship Rating Scale, has four distinct components: therapeutic alliance, resistance, transference love, and negative transference. On a week-by-week basis, the therapeutic alliance was the strongest predictor of improvement in patient-reported general adjustment, as reflected in such areas as self-esteem, positive affect, social relations, work productivity, satisfaction, and optimism. Time plots of the variables show the typical time course for the components of the therapeutic relationship, as well as for improvement on the experiential variables. Results indicate that the therapeutic alliance, transference, and resistance are central components of the psychotherapeutic relationship, which in turn predict the ongoing life experience of the patient.

From nature in love: The problem of subjectivity in Adorno and Freudian psychoanalysis

This paper investigates the potential of the concept of sublimation for thinking subjectivity at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory. I first rehearse a recent argument by Whitebook that Freud’s notion of sublimation presents a nonviolent integration and expansion of the ego, which can mediate the modern dichotomy between the rational subject and nonrational impulse and desire. On this view, sublimation turns subjectivity into a site of possibility in the context of modern, rationalized thought and society. I then argue that the concept of sublimation offered to critical theory in this form is insufficiently developed. Both Freud and Adorno analyze a deep-seated destructiveness of the modern subject, which turns up right at the heart of attempts to mediate the dichotomies of rationalized modernity. What is needed to counter this problem is a theory of love in which love is not separated from, but, rather, correlated with drive and desire, and can thereby get on a level with the unconscious or unacknowledged, impulsive nature of death-bearing subjectivity in enlightened modernity. A central conception in Kristeva’s development of Freudian psychoanalysis, the idea of transference love, delivers such a theory and thereby develops the concept of sublimation in the way that is needed at the intersection of psychoanalysis and critical theory.

The Birth of Psychoanalysis: From Incestuous Couples to Transference Love

Through an analytic reading of the 2 films by Elizabeth Màrton and Roberto Faenza, we revisit the relationship between Sabina Spielrein and Carl Gustav Jung, focusing their attention on the contribution it gave to the development of the concept of transference and countertransference. Elisabeth Màrton's film is more linked to the historical documentary, and Faenza inserts historical documentary in a fictional frame, bringing the spectator towards the affective, passionate level of this analytic relationship of the beginning. In the history of psychoanalysis, the therapeutic and love encounter of Spielrein and Jung represents the first attempt to testify the sufferings and errors, suffered by the 2 protagonists; they supplied the basic elements for the reflection and research of contemporary psychoanalysis on the theme of transference/countertransference.

Eros invicto combatente

The paper relates to the transference love as being double faced: it is, at the same time, a very important factor for the psychoanalysis development as well as a source of resistance to the psychoanalytical treatment. The transference of love to knowledge, which is sustained by the analyst’s position during the treatment, must be maintained as the analysis horizon, and never be confused with transference love. The analyst should receive this love as a genuine one, although not responding to or underestimating it. For that, he/ she shall use the analyst’s wish as an operator that maintains the tension at the point of suspension of knowledge.

Being “Done For” in Analysis: Commentary on Paper by Stuart A. Pizer

Stuart A. Pizer's fascinating article explores through a relational lens analytic impasse, and its manifestation through transference and countertransference love. How this love is demonstrated (or not) and the ways in which we provide for our patients will have profound effect on the process (and progress) of any treatment. But, too often, reluctance to “do for” our patients compromises our ability to provide what may be needed in any given moment. Perhaps an expansion of the “doer—done to” dyadic paradigm into a “doer—done for” model might allow more analytic leeway and more possibility of growth within our patients.

The Contributions of Marcel Proust to Psychoanalysis

This article is about the major contribution of Marcel Proust to psychoanalysis in his seven-part novel, A La Rècherche Du Temps Perdu (translated as Rembrance of Things Past, 1934). This work spans two decades, from 1988, when Proust writing to 1927, when the last part was published 5 years after his death. Proust, a literary scholar whose knowledge dated to the early Greeks, knew nothing of Freud or psychoanalysis. His major contributions were to the emergence of memory, specifically the exquisite details of the descriptive unconscious, which we can now explain in cognitive neuroscientific terms. Freud wanted to do this for all mental processes in 'The Project'. Proust contributed to the projective aspects of passionate love. Kernberg has pointed out that although psychoanalysts knew about transference love, idealization, and sex, love has only been a subject for us in the 1900s. Proust also wrote of jealousy as a necessary concomitant of love. He proposed that all humans had pluripotential sexuality and recognized the psychodynamics of the perversions in a way that is closer to modern psychoanalysts like Chassuguet-Smirgel. Proust was himself psychologically disabled, with an illness his father called neurasthenia, adding somatic components and abulia, inability to make decisions. We would probably recognize him today as having a borderline personality disorder, with superior cognition, depression, somatization, obsessions, compulsions, phobias, and severe anxiety, which he understood was the result of his inability to separate from his mother. Proust's findings in all these areas are compared with the psychoanalytic literature--Freud, to the present.

Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in Israel: the reflection of social history in therapeutic processes

AbstractAn extended case study of an analytic treatment examines the difficulty of identity formation for Sephardic Jews in Israel, on the background of negative stereotypization of this group by the Ashkenazi Elites during the first decades of Israel's existence. Zionism was based on the idea that a New Jew needed to be created, as the Old Diaspora Jew was seen as weak, dejected, and self‐deprecating. The hypothesis is advanced that the Old Jew remains a split‐off part of Israeli identity, which is experienced as threatening, and that psychic wounds often found in Sephardic Jews in Israel reflect the projection of disavowed aspects of the Old Jew by Ashkenazim onto Sephardim. The case example shows how this wider social reality influences transference–countertransference interactions in analytic treatment. The patient's transference love and the therapist's complex countertransference reaction are analyzed not only as individual issues but as reflecting Israeli history and its present social and political reality. Copyright © 2004 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Impasse Recollected in Tranquility: Love, Dissociation, and Discipline in the Analytic Process

This paper offers an intimate account of a long-term analytic process and a detailed presentation of one pivotal session to illustrate and explore the issues of love, dissociation, and discipline in a therapeutic relationship. Organized around the concept of impasse, this paper presents a relational perspective on the potential in transference and countertransference love to facilitate or curtail the forward progress of therapeutic work. Love may bring life or impasse to a person in analysis. One key to the dynamics of therapeutic love and impasse is the problem of weak dissociation (Stern, 1997) and the impact of the analyst's noticing, or not noticing, a moment in the onrush of familiar clinical process that is ripe for questioning. A new concept is introduced and elaborated in this paper that relates to the resolution of preoedipal and oedipal transference love: The paradoxical analytic triangle.

Training in Democracy, Democracy in Training: Notes on Group Analysis and Democracy

This article focuses on the relationship between group analysis and democracy with special reference to transference phenomena. Accordingly, Foulkes's concept of leadership and transference in groups is compared with Freud's analysis of mass formation, hypnosis and transference love, and the concept of transference further elucidated with particular reference to Laplanche's `General Theory of Seduction'. Finally, the group-analytic process and training is suggested as a training for citizenship, where group analysis and democracy are indissolubly linked.

Transferência: amor ao saber

Procura-se evidenciar um novo direcionamento para a questão do amor de transferência com o ensino de Jacques Lacan. Trata-se, antes de mais nada, do questionamento do lugar do analista para responder a esse amor. A tese de Lacan é de que esse amor é endereçado ao saber: o analisando coloca o analista na posição de sujeito suposto saber, de um saber consistente, de um saber que sabe. Entretanto, da perspectiva do analista o saber não sabe. O analista deve conduzir a análise visando esse não saber como verdade.

Intersubjective observations on transference love.

Intersubjective observations on transference love.