Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) (IV)
In the essay’s middle pages (152-155), Freud enumerates the challenges that confront an analysis conducted according to the “third” and latest technique. The latter, in contrast to the laboratory-like containment of hypnosis, “implies conjuring up a piece of real life” — the repetition compulsion — which “cannot always be harmless and unobjectionable” (152). In fact, this potential harm opens the way to the notorious “deterioration during treatment” (152).
I want now to discuss several passages in this section that appear obscure, paradoxical, or especially fertile. In each case, I hope to resolve some of the seeming-obscurity or develop some of the interesting implications.
A Maxim — “in absentia or in effigie”
In the course of his enumeration, Freud throws light on one of his widely-cited maxims — about whose meaning I have admittedly always been uncertain. We may recall that Freud’s “Dynamics of Transference” closes with the following lines:
“It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psycho-analyst with the greatest difficulties. But it should not be forgotten that it is precisely they that do us the inestimable service of making the patient's hidden and forgotten erotic impulses immediate and manifest. For when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie.” (108)
Commentators routinely invoke this last phrase —“it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie” — without elaboration, as though its meaning and reference go without saying. But it has always struck me as genuinely gnomic.
The context of the phrase, of course, is a canonical essay on transference phenomena. And this context led me to imagine the entity to be “destroyed” is the patient’s (largely unconscious) parental imago, guilelessly projected onto the “blank screen” of the analyst. In the fury of the negative transference, for example, when the patient is full of hatred for the analyst, the latter is in reality a mere “place-holder” for the father who is actually hated. But this reading would invert Freud’s maxim into its opposite. For in this case, doesn’t such a patient precisely destroy the parent “in absentia or in effigie” — just the action that Freud calls impossible? Isn’t the virtue of the analytic cure just this, that it allows the patient to confront the “absent” parental figure?
Evidently, then, if the absent parent (or other significant figure from the patient’s past) is the referent, then Freud really ought to have said the opposite of what he did: the “transferred” object really is destroyed in absentia. The genuine object of one’s unconscious, infantile wishes — the parent — may be long since dead and buried. But this parent is resurrected in analysis, during which he or she can be finally “put to rest” when the analyst becomes an “effigie” of, or placeholder for, that parent. (Even where the transference is positive, the patient may still — so to speak — “destroy” the absent object, in the sense of dissolving that object’s unconsciously persisting influence.) My suspicion is that many readers of Freud place his maxim in some such context as this, and then struggle to reconcile the literal meaning of his words with the drift of his thinking about transference.
There is, however, a phrase in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” that, though perhaps less evocative, contains substantially the same elements and, further, in a context that leaves its meaning fairly unambiguous. (Indeed, in a footnote to “Dynamics of Transference,” the editors direct the reader to just this passage.) Freud’s focus here is the “change in the patient’s conscious attitude to his illness” (152) brought about by analytic treatment. From
a habit of “lamenting” his illness, “despising it as nonsensical and under-estimating its importance” (152), as well as willful ignorance regarding its causes and consequences, the patient is made to
engage the illness directly and in full seriousness — to “find the courage to direct his attention to the phenomena of his illness” (152), which “must no longer seem to him contemptible, but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle” (152).
At this point in his account, Freud describes the patient’s situation with the assistance of essentially the same image we have been contemplating:
“The way is thus paved from the beginning for a reconciliation with the repressed material which is coming to expression in his symptoms…If this new attitude towards the illness intensifies the conflicts and brings to the fore symptoms which till then had been indistinct, one can easily console the patient by pointing out that these are only necessary and temporary aggravations and that one cannot overcome an enemy who is absent or not within range.” (152, my italics)
The better-known maxim, “it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie,” can now be placed alongside the lesser-known reiteration, “one cannot overcome an enemy who is absent or not within range.” The context of this latter invests it with an unmistakable referent: the “enemy” that analysis must “overcome” — but which can be overcome only when it is “within range” — is the “repressed material which is coming to expression in his [the patient’s] symptoms,” or again, the latent “conflict” that, once “intensified,” is manifested in “symptoms which till then had been indistinct.” The enemy, in short, consists in the unconscious material and analysis cannot overcome it until it is “within range” — that is, until it erupts as “symptoms.” Only then is the enemy really experienced and known, not as an inference, “in absentia,” but as a fact and lived-reality for patient and analyst alike.
A Regulative Ideal
A troublesome phrase comes shortly afterwards:
“The tactics to be adopted by the physician in this situation are easily justified. For him, remembering in the old manner — reproduction in the psychical field — is the aim to which he adheres, even though he knows that such an aim cannot be achieved in the new technique.” (153)
To this reader, Freud’s suggestion here — that the “aim” of “reproduction in the psychical field…cannot be achieved in the new technique” — seems so clearly to contradict, not only Freud’s position in the essay as a whole, but even the quotation itself, that I suspected there must be some issue with the translation. But the German seems much the same:
“Die Taktik, welche der Arzt in dieser Situation einzuschlagen hat, ist leicht zu rechtfertigen. Für ihn bleibt das Erinnern nach alter Manier, das Reproduzieren auf psychischem Gebiete, das Ziel, an welchem er festhält, wenn er auch weiß, daß es bei der neuen Technik nicht zu erreichen ist.”
And the newer, Penguin translation of the passage, while rearranging its elements somewhat, preserves the basic contradiction:
“The tactic that the physician has to adopt in this situation is easily justified. The goal that he holds fast to, even though he knows it to be unattainable under the new technique, remains the old form of remembering, that is, reproducing things within the psychic domain” (397)
Several thoughts occur to me, though, as ways of softening the contradiction into which a literal-minded reader may feel cornered:
First: what, generally speaking, could it mean to commit ourselves to an “aim” or “goal” (Ziel) that we nonetheless recognize as “unattainable” [nicht zu erreichen] using the “tactic” or “new technique” now exclusively at our disposal? We are perhaps put in mind of Kantian “regulative ideas” and “infinite tasks” — abstractions that “ought” to govern our thinking and conduct, even while they cannot ever be realized “empirically.” Similarly, while “remembering in the old manner” — that “reproduction in the psychical field” achieved by hypnosis — is now strictly speaking unattainable, it remains a sort of ideal “vanishing point” towards which one imperfectly strains.
Second: this “strictly speaking” implicitly introduces another caveat, which likewise helps loosen the knot of Freud’s words. On the one hand, the type of “remembering” practically attainable under the third technique does not “rise” to the ideal “reproduction in the psychical field” induced under hypnosis — an austere Ziel that the third technique renounces. But neither, of course, must this third technique content itself with the pseudo-remembrance of “acting out.” In fact, the next passages indicate just the opposite: a kind of non-hypnotic “reproduction in the psychical field” remains not only desirable but eminently possible with the latest technique. Consider, after all, the very next lines in Freud’s essay. The analyst, we are told,
“is prepared for a perpetual struggle with his patient to keep in the psychical sphere all the impulses which the patient would like to direct into the motor sphere; and he celebrates it as a triumph for the treatment if he can bring it about that something that the patient wishes to discharge in action is disposed of through the work of remembering. If the attachment through transference has grown into something at all serviceable, the treatment is able to prevent the patient from executing any of the more important repetitive actions and to utilize his intention to do so in statu nascendi as material for the therapeutic work.” (153, my italics)
And in the essay’s concluding paragraphs, Freud seems to confirm this reading:
“From the repetitive reactions which are exhibited in the transference we are led along the familiar paths to the awakening of the memories, which appear without difficulty, as it were, after the resistance has been overcome.” (154-155)
Third: thus it is probably necessary to distinguish between (1) hypnotic remembering or “reproduction in the psychical field,” something achieved directly through a method that bypasses resistances, rather than overcoming them; and (2) that “awakening of the memories” in which a successful application of the “third” method eventuates, once these same resistances — inter alia in the form of “repetition” — have been “worked through.”