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Part One
The text
PREFACE TO CHAPTER 1
THE CENTRAL DISCOVERY: TRANSFERENCE ENTANGLEMENT
Papers on Technique begins with an unwanted empirical discovery: I will call it transference entanglement. Not transference, mind you – that was old hat – but transference entanglement. By that I mean the way Freud’s own wishes get inextricably tangled into the patient’s transference. (Today we might call it enactment.) Freud is very clear that this entanglement was his paramount experience and overwhelming difficulty in the new treatment. This kind of entanglement distinguishes psychoanalysis from hypnosis since it expresses the patient’s will more than the analyst’s. You would expect that to be good news for Freud, who was always accused of planting his own “findings.” But here, in this first attempt to grasp the analyst’s unaccustomed helplessness, any familiar mechanism – even one that was usually anathema – would have been welcome. Hypnotic suggestion might impeach Freud’s discoveries, but it was at least understandable and manageable. This new relationship was just baffling, and its mastery could easily seem impossible. People who natter on about the arrogance of neutrality and blank screen can have little imagination of that humbling confrontation with the Laocoön-like enactment problem – a problem we still haven’t solved.
It is important to be very specific about what entangles what. Bion’s rephrasing of Freud’s principle is so familiar that we don’t bat an eyelid when we hear someone say (usually with an ironic, forgiving smile) that we are supposed to come to a treatment hour “without memory or desire.” What Freud discovered was the way transference tangled into his every wish, whether passionate or cognitive, including his scientific curiosity and wish for the material of cure. The only way to escape entanglement would seem to be to want nothing at all.
Freud had discovered that he is no longer in the driver’s seat. He is no longer master of the transaction, cognitively or behaviorally. He must find a way to recover his poise by thinking differently and acting adroitly. Entanglement challenges Freud’s whole understanding of what transference is, since it is no longer merely a mistake or a disguise. Transference not only makes for trouble in practice; it shakes up all of Freud’s guiding concepts. In its wild new incarnation, transference invades the secure notion of resistance and eats away at Freud’s picture of the repressed. It changes his understanding of illness and ultimately threatens the ethical position of the analyst.
Freud’s discovery of transference entanglement and his effort to extricate himself is charted in Papers on Technique. As he refits the old terms to their new job of helping him center himself, many theoretical dominos must be rebalanced. And it turns out that the rebalancing moves from the terms into the treatment itself: The continuous balancing of conflicting ways of seeing the patient is itself the new psychoanalytic technique.
To someone distantly remembering Papers, my description may seem unfamiliar and willfully hyperbolic. If he returns to the book and reads closely, he might exonerate me and pass the blame to Freud, whose rhetoric he judges to be overheated. Since Papers is undeniably weighted toward the experiential aspect of treatment (in contrast to the art of interpretation), the most plausible alternative to my reading might be that, in 1910–1914, Freud was in love with a mechanistic libido theory in which the discharge of energy has pride of place. What could be more natural, the argument goes, than for a hyper-intellectual like Freud to use his pet theory to explain practice and deduce the alleged discovery that transference is not a species of misperception but a matter of push and pull? My adversary might argue that Freud mechanically applied his mechanical (energy) theory to draw the built-in conclusion that an analyst will receive from his patient an energetic discharge (transference) which it is his job to divert and sort out. Isn’t that exactly what a theory-proud person like Freud would “find,” no matter what he actually observed? In other words, my adversary would say that Freud was entangled not with transference but with his own libido theory. On this reading, the central theme of Papers on Technique – perhaps the whole of it – fell out-of-date at the precise moment in the 1920s when psychic energy was kicked upstairs to a merely metaphoric status. All the dramatics that I find in Papers on Technique are really just personifications of an academic diagram called metapsychology. This argument is advanced to rescue the profession from enslavement to an archaic energy theory that artificially made transference central to analytic therapy. The message is: We have gone off the track. It is time to look at clinical facts with a modern eye. I will argue against this view in the following chapter.
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1
Discovering how to Elicit the Psychoanalytic Phenomenon
Puzzled and perhaps a little annoyed by the persistent idea that interpreting the transference is the only way to effect analytic change, Sander M. Abend (2009) tracks the dogma back to Freud’s prestructural writings on technique. Abend plainly and cogently lays out a line of thought that may have led Freud to this belief.
Having given the early ideas a really fair hearing, Abend then points to the greater sophistication of later theory and technique, and asks why, long after Freud had opened up larger vistas, he never disabused analysts of the idea that treatment progresses solely by interpreting the transference. Abend finds a clue to this riddle in the early theory of a quasi-physical libido, which Freud associated with the vivid image of catharsis. Could it be, Abend asks, that Freud was unable to pry his imagination loose from libido theory even while he was developing a subtler and more scientific theory of ego and defense? That would explain why, among the many useful approaches suggested by his later theory, only this early one won Freud’s endorsement. If so, we would have to say that Freud’s atavistic loyalty to libido theory discouraged analysts from employing all the tools their broadened rationale made available. Although Abend does not deny that many analysts have their own reasons for glorifying transference interpretation, I think he would be happy to leave us with the impression that the transference-only dogma is a kind of genomic parasite from Paleolithic libido theory.
I will suggest another way of reading Freud on technique that might lead to a different conclusion. We are familiar with Freud’s general reluctance to give up one idea while overlaying it with a different one. But I suggest that we can learn something by turning our gaze to his specific, microscopic unwillingness to discard treatment ideas that were being updated already in Papers on Technique (1911–1915), even in that short interval, even before the advent of the structural theory, and even within the scope of a single paper. I will use as my example chiefly “The dynamics of transference” (1912).
It is impossible to read the Papers on Technique in sequence without realizing that this group of essays records an investigation in real time. The journey of exploration from the first paper to the last is not the kind of rhetorical fiction that Freud often uses to escort the reader through false hopes and blind alleys until, by apparent process of exclusion, he is brought to a preplanned solution. Instead, Papers on Technique is more like a laboratory log honestly kept without erasures, in which Freud reported serious conceptual and practical difficulties as they afflicted him and recorded his progressive efforts to cope with them. Bit by bit we see him ruminating and trying first one way and then another to get a fix on the strange treatment he had stumbled upon. Our general question, then, is why Freud published a given individual paper and the Papers on Technique as a whole just as they were written, rather than rewriting the whole thing (perhaps in a revised version) from the standpoint of his final understanding. At the very least, one might have expected him to footnote corrections and revisions, as he did in other updated expositions. Why didn’t he do that with Papers on Technique?
The only possible answer, it seems to me, is that the thing Freud was discovering could only be described by this method of successive passes. We may imagine Papers on Technique to be something like those atlases of anatomy that superimpose several transparencies upon each other, layering up two-dimensional diagrams to a three-dimensional body. No one of them alone will show the thickness of the subject, and each obscures the other. Or we may compare these Papers with the successively displaced images on a pack of cards that display a “movie” when flipped through in rapid succession. My metaphors will not, I fear, bear close scrutiny, but they may suggest how Freud counts on us to gather into our mind the contrasting and conflicting ideas that pile up and accumulate as we tangle with the treatment phenomenon. The implication is that we must be able to think in several different ways at once, or at least in flexible alternation, as we take up our stance in psychoanalytic treatment. In the course of the book, every crucial term is both retained and radically redefined instead of being edited and replaced: resistance, transference, memory, and much else by implication. By defining and redefining these terms, Freud seems to be searching for their “cash value” in the consulting room, correlating their varying operational definitions and puzzling over how they relate to each other. To my mind, this strange way of apprehending analytic treatment is independently rediscovered by every learner, and I believe it is this paradoxical mind-set that, in confirmable fact, conjures into existence a specifically psychoanalytic treatment.
If Papers on Technique is, as I suggest, a real-time record of Freud’s thinking about things he was still trying to get into focus, it follows that the way to read the book is by identifying at each recorded moment who the Freud was that was making the entry. One must first imagine the preliminary expectation Freud brought to a given problem, then the nature of the practical difficulty (and its conceptual placement) that prompted his note, and finally the resolution he provisionally reached at that stage of the inquiry – a resolution that may occupy as little as one paragraph. The key to the next passage or paper will then be another difficulty he encountered, together with any uneasiness left over from the solution(s) in the preceding paragraph or paper(s). In each case, his vision of treatment is best understood as a reaction to a particular, practical problem that inspired it.
As Freud moved from hypnotic and cathartic treatments, where the term resistance had the common vernacular meaning, and began his vexed inquiry into the new, psychoanalytic treatment he had chanced upon, we see him struck by the fact (recorded in the first of the Papers, “The handling of dream-interpretation in psychoanalysis,” 1911) that resistance could take the inconspicuous form of seemingly good-faith compliance and, moreover, it could actually produce something (a plethora of dreams) rather than just concealing something (memories). Most startlingly and portentously, Freud discovered to his great distress that resistance could not only fit itself into the analyst’s obvious external resemblance to a parent but could also mold itself to the analyst’s most personal wishes – in Freud’s case, a paramount interest in dreams and pride in their interpretation. A description of this sort of resistance – such clever, whole-person, positive maneuvering, still regarded as the work of “the” resistance – pastes a new image over the previous impersonal, almost physical stickiness of unconscious memories.
As though that wasn’t headache enough, Freud could not escape the thoroughly perplexing impression that this sort of thing was no occasional bump in the road. It seemed to him that his daily job had turned out to be outmaneuvering the patient’s sly maneuvering – a very different and much less agreeable task than the joint effort of dislodging memories, which was what both he and his patient had initially signed on for (and which, it should be noted, remained for him the ultimate aim of psychoanalytic treatment).
This is the Freud we follow into his next lab note (“The dynamics of transference,” 1912), where we virtually hear him ask: “Why … why am I always embroiled with what the patient wants from me, when all I want is to learn about his experiences? I can understand that memories would hold themselves back. I am skilled at coaxing them out. I am famous for the kind of patience that requires. I can even understand that any diversion would be useful to a force dedicated to holding back memories. But why do these memories almost always conceal themselves by some sort of grabbing at me?” Freud seems not to have anticipated this situation, much less welcomed it as a happy confirmation of theory. He had no incentive to see a familiar rapport transformed into a duel. It was no great joy to smother (lest it give a hostage to resistance) his paramount interest in the coded secrets of humanity while patients dangled their dreams before his eyes. He was discovering that he couldn’t continue in a way that had always seemed sensible. It was not clear what new sense could be found in the new doings. It was not even clear what the problem was. Freud’s immediate reaction (in writing) was to assure himself that it was, in fact, no problem at all, but this reassurance was repeated suspiciously frequently. Watching Freud banging his head over and over again against this problem in page after page of Papers on Technique, I, for one, find it impossible to think of him as complacently fitting it neatly into a well-prepared, theory-satisfying vision.
In this second paper in Papers on Technique (“The dynamics of transference,” 1912), Freud tries in several ways to assimilate the original notion of resistance and transference to the newly perceived, blunt fact that the main difficulty of treatment was the patient’s wishful pressure on him. That this was an urgent and bothersome issue is shown by his repeated posing and “solving” of the problem, followed a paragraph or two later by another statement of the problem and another (or the same) declaration of victory. He is obviously not even sure how to put his question. Only midway through the paper does Freud realize that repressed material is not just an escape from current frustration, but also a continuous source of desires. Even at that point, however, he is still unwilling to identify the shape of neurotic desire with the configuration of the transference (p. 104, n1). He still insists that transference resistance is just one more ruse and distraction (though now he acknowledges that this form of the resistance has some special “advantage” [p. 104]). The exposition seems to end on that note. However, there are two paragraphs remaining in the paper (pp. 107–108). And there, in what looks like an afterthought, Freud writes as though transference and resistance are almost synonymous. He has suddenly gone all the way to that extreme. Yet he retracts nothing from the formulations of the body of the paper, simply saying that he is adding “another aspect” (p. 107)! And not only that: not only does this last move – a mere couple of pages long, but by far the most vehement and memorable of the paper – leave the earlier formulations inviolate; it is tacked on almost without a bridge, as though utterly unrelated to what preceded, to which, indeed, it bears no resemblance in voice or method.
What is the function of these last two appended pages that almost identify resistance with transference? Freud is telling us that it is one thing to describe interacting parts of the mind as “the” resistance using “the transference” to keep “the unconscious” from consciousness. But it is another thing (“another aspect of the same subject,” p. 107) to observe what the whole person is visibly doing to the analyst as a result of the resistance (“anyone who has observed all this … ,” p. 107). What led to this postscript? We picture Freud laying down his pen after finishing pages 99 to 106, looking back and suddenly realizing that he has been downright misleading if he leaves it at that. He has not prepared future analysts for what they will see. They need to be alerted to – they need to be warned about – the intentional, as well as the causal, aspects of the event, for that is what they will actually experience, and it is on that level that they will be called on to react. Analysts must be ready for the interpersonal experience of resistance. So he adds pages 107–108. Freud has learned the hard way that analysts are not (merely) adjusting internal forces such as “the” resistance; they are negotiating (battling, as he sees it) with people who want what they want, rather than what the analyst wants. I can imagine Freud saying to the novice, “You must accept this ahead of time, so you won’t be so frustrated when you get embroiled in it, as I was when – and for which reason – I was impelled to write this paper in the first place.”
When we grasp the message of this addendum, we understand why it does not replace the main part of the paper. The main part consists of elaborate, redundant explanation, while the addendum is a short, sharp shock of recognition. It is a descriptive supplement, albeit a vital supplement, to the preceding impersonal speculation about “the” resistance, transference, unconscious memory, and free association, which had been laboriously worked out and apparently concluded. The main part and its addendum are two ways of perceiving the patient, and no matter how incommensurable they are, an ...
