Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) (V)
In the last entries, we discussed Freud’s views on the patient’s “repetition” — its nature and challenges. Particularly threatening, both to the treatment and the patient himself, is the potential of “actions outside the transference,” that is, extra-transferential repetition which “may do him temporary harm” and even “invalidate his prospects of recovery” (153). But what of the patient’s repetitive behavior “within” the analytic field? There now appear several intriguing references to transference, which I will reproduce here.
First:
“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)
Second:
“Occasionally…it is bound to happen that the untamed instincts assert themselves before there is time to put the reins of the transference on them, or that the bonds which attach the patient to the treatment are broken by him in a repetitive action.” (153-154)
And third:
“The main instrument…for curbing the patient's compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference.” (154)
Notwithstanding the elegance and simplicity of these formulations, the picture here is arguably rather more complicated than it initially appears. I’d like to discuss several of these complications:
Earlier in this same piece, Freud had characterized transference as itself a piece of “repetition.” (We may leave aside for now his further suggestion that repetition, too, is always a “transference” of sorts.) If this is really so, however, we are left with the enigmatic thought — in each of the formulations above — that analysis addresses the challenge posed by one “repetition” (acting out) with the assistance of another “repetition” (the transference, under whose aegis the first repetition is brought). That the relation of transference, which emerges as the most powerful resistance, can become the greatest asset for analysis, is a familiar paradox to readers of Freud. As he puts it in the Introductory Lectures:
“[T]he transference, which, whether affectionate or hostile, seemed in every case to constitute the greatest threat to the treatment, becomes its best tool, by whose help the most secret compartments of mental life can be opened” (443-4)
What is less familiar, though, is the claim that a “bad” repetition, too, is overcome in analysis only by way of a “good” one.
The next complication follows from the last one. One condition of a successful analysis is evidently that “the attachment through transference has grown into something…serviceable.” What, by contrast, might make a transference “unserviceable”? The major culprits seem to be, first, an altogether detached, undeveloped transference (psychotics were considered unanalyzable, because incapable of establishing a real transference); second, a hostile transference; and third, an overly affectionate transference. (Freud recounts the cautionary example of a patient whose “markedly affectionate transference…grew in intensity with uncanny rapidity in the first few days” (154), thus indicating that the unwieldiness of a transference may consist both in the type and the “intensity” of the feelings involved.)
But what, on the other hand, does it mean when “attachment through transference has grown into something at all serviceable,” or when the “analyst has successfully “put the reins of the transference” on the patient’s “untamed instincts”? What does such a transference look like, concretely, and are there criteria for distinguishing it from the “unserviceable” variety? What is it, really, what does it enable, and how? Mostly Freud seems to have in mind what analysts will later call the “therapeutic alliance”: an attitude towards the analyst, and the treatment generally, characterized by sufficient levels of good-will, trust, confidence, and esteem. Only on such a basis, it seems, would the analyst enjoy the standing necessary “to prevent the patient from executing any of the more important repetitive actions” (153). Only then is the analyst in a position of “making him [the patient] promise not to take any important decisions affecting his life during the time of his treatment” (153) and of ensuring that “the patient shows compliance enough to respect the necessary conditions of the analysis” (154).
The kind of transference that best grounds an analysis, then, appears to coincide with the patient’s willingness to entrust herself to the treatment, to make and honor agreements — especially when they become onerous — and, while Freud might loathe this language, to some extent submit to the authority of the analyst. Yet this abridgment of the patient’s “freedom of motility” (as regards major life decisions), achieved by the “good” transference (an essentially trusting, compliant attitude vis-à-vis the analyst), now wins for the patient a new “realm” of freedom — and precisely within the “transference” that seemed simply to constrain it. In exchange, so to speak, for the patient’s qualified and temporary renunciation of certain actions — actions that fall under the suspicion of constituting “repetitions” — he or she receives a significant, vital consolation. This is Freud’s full description:
“The main instrument, however, for curbing the patient's compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference. We render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field. We admit it into the transference as a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts that is hidden in the patient's mind. Provided only that the patient shows compliance enough to respect the necessary conditions of the analysis, we regularly succeed in giving all the symptoms of the illness a new transference meaning and in replacing his ordinary neurosis by a 'transference-neurosis' of which he can be cured by the therapeutic work. The transference thus creates an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made. The new condition has taken over all the features of the illness; but it represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention. It is a piece of real experience, but one which has been made possible by especially favourable conditions, and it is of a provisional nature. 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)
In the next entry, I will take this passage as a starting point.