A ‘transference’ that is not.

In the picture, my first school book, “Roselline”[1] in a very recent edition : a patient, enjoyed work when children can discover unpredictable details in a drawing, or text, or even a speech.

In 1910, during the 'Psychoanalysis Congress' in Nuremberg Sigmund Freud explained an affection as far as an analyst is concerned, when meeting and listening to the patient : Freud used the same term 'übertragung', but giving it an opposite direction.

‘Gegenübertragung’ was then the name of an item, the ‘counter-transference’, by means of which an analyst could stand side by side to his patient pathology being aware of it but without been catched : any neurosis infact, if also silent, is quite a a virus and not sensitive to medicines. Editing the Cases was to Freud an opportunity to point the profitability other than the conspicuous labour for the analyst, to work on his own life experience.

Jacques Lacan did not add much more, on that rough ground and staying at a distance : his formal defence of the ‘language’ even exposed it to an almost behavioral method, which can favour a mind-laziness in patients, also strengthening their inhibitions.

Just in a few words[2] Lacan says about an unpredictable and well accepted fall of pathological repetition, which previously was hiding an individual competence : that was also a professional experience in Freud.

However it is only in “Il pensiero di natura”[3] that the appointment between patient and analyst comes out from a mystical and obscure ‘transference’, accepting the elaboration itself between two conscious partners in well different positions : without the availability to one’s own competence, no work can proceed, neither analytical work and its rules[4].

Mainly, the availability to be recalled by competence makes unuseful ‘transference’ or ‘counter-transference’ as rejecting work, neither of the patient nor of the analyst.

Without this (technical ?) passage, a coming back to ‘transference’ is just a risky regress and obstacles indeed any individual cure.

                                                  Marina Bilotta Membretti, Cernusco sul Naviglio March 10, 2021.

[1] “Roselline. Per muovere i primi passi nel disegno”, Rosella Banzi Monti – Edizioni Larus Srl.

[2] “Il rovescio della psicoanalisi – Il seminario Libro XVII. Jacques Lacan”, by Jacques-Alain Miller – Antonio Di Ciaccia, Giulio Einaudi editore Spa (2001).

[3] “Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico”, Giacomo B. Contri (1994 e 1998) SIC Edizioni.

[4] “La formazione dello psicoanalista”, Giacomo B. Contri in ‘THINK!’ 2014, May 10-11, 12, 15, 17-18, 19, 21.