Mike Becker 5/28/23 Mike Becker 5/28/23

Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) (VII)

Freud compresses a full third of the subject-matter promised by the essay’s title into its final two paragraphs. As though acknowledging this disproportion between his treatments of “remembering,” “repeating,” and “working through,” Freud writes: "I might break off at this point but for the title of this paper, which obliges me to discuss a further point in analytic technique” (155). Just over a page remains, and it is unclear whether he discharges this “obligation” so quickly because (a) there are no extensive clarifications to make regarding “working through” (compared, that is, to the novels figure of “repetition” as a form of “remembering”); or (b) it so exceeds the scope of the paper that it is best left for a separate exposition. I am prepared to accept either explanation.

Whatever his motivations, Freud’s few comments on working-through are rather narrowly related to a misconception among young analysts that leads them to unwarranted discouragement. I will take up these comments in a moment. Before doing so, however, I want to fill in some of the context for grasping them, both in this essay and beyond it.

Analysis, we will recall, had by its “third” phase become essentially resistance analysis. While the final “goal” remained undoing repressions and recovering (or “repairing”) memory, the path to this goal now led, not through hypnosis (phase one), or the direct interpretation of the repressed materials (phase two), but rather through the very obstacles blocking that path, namely, the resistances. The premise of this phase, it appears, is that any viable approach to these repressed materials — at least any approach that does the patient enduring good — must address the resistance holding the repressions in place.

Now, the forms assumed by resistance are potentially manifold. As we saw earlier, anything that interferes with the treatment can and should be suspected of serving resistance. In practice, however, Freud is preoccupied with two particular manifestations of resistance — transference and repetition — which frequently enough coincide.

Here we might remind ourselves of something regarding Freud’s use of this concept — in light, especially, of its “post-history.” For in analytic and non-analytic thinking after Freud, the object of “resistance” has been expanded to embrace — to take several prominent examples — the patient’s reluctance to

accept the analyst’s conjectures or ambitions for the treatment; or
become emotionally attached to the analyst; or even to
change in the direction of improved mental health

Arguably these conceptual developments are implicitly contained in Freud’s writings, even here. Nonetheless, we ought to keep in mind that, as Freud employs the term (in this piece and elsewhere), “resistance” pertains quite narrowly to a specific object: the patient’s compliance or non-compliance with the activity of free association. The patient evinces no resistance, strictly speaking, so long as he or she obeys the injunction to say whatever comes to mind, without exception. Even a transference that is immediately exhibited in treatment does not qualify as “resistance” until it impedes this obedience. (Presumably the same applies to any other “repetitions” in treatment that do not interfere with or divert from this rule.) Conversely, any piece of behavior that does violate this fundamental rule is interpretable, by definition, as resistance.

Let us return now to Freud’s concluding comments. These relate, again, to a misconception, and a resulting discouragement, among inexperienced analysts:

“The first step in overcoming the resistances is made, as we know, by the analyst's uncovering the resistance, which is never recognized by the patient, and acquainting him with it. Now it seems that beginners in analytic practice are inclined to look on this introductory step as constituting the whole of their work.” (155)

On the basis of this mistaken expectation, analysts “complain” that they have “pointed out his resistance to the patient and that nevertheless no change had set in” — that, “indeed, resistance had become all the stronger” (155). As Freud emphasizes, though, “identification” of the resistances is merely an “introductory step,” and in fact “giving the resistance a name could not result in its immediate cessation” (155). Simply alerting a patient to a resistance will not dissolve it. One may say to a patient, for example: “Your intense ‘transference’ feelings are unconscious forms of ‘resisting’ the fundamental rule.” But one must not expect those feelings to then dissolve at a stroke. On the contrary, one may expect that resistance “to become all the stronger.” This is the context in which Freud introduces the third and final concept in the essay’s title:

“One must allow the patient time to become more conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work through it, to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis.” (155)

We have seen that all elements that conspire to stanch the patient’s free associative flow, that prevent him or her from saying everything that comes to mind, should fall under suspicion of “resistance” — preeminently transference and repetition. Freud now tells us that “working through” this resistance finally consists in the patient “continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis.”

We will note how suggestive this language of “defiance” is, since in many cases it is a perfect synonym for its present “object.” To defy something is precisely to resist it. Hence we may paraphrase Freud’s position in the following way: “working-through” centrally involves resisting resistance. By adhering to the fundamental rule, the patient (consciously) “resists” all the (unconscious) obstacles to that rule, viz. the “resistances.”

Mike Becker 5/21/23 Mike Becker 5/21/23

Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) (VI)

I concluded the last entry with an extensive quotation and a promise to discuss its significance. Let us recall the quotation, then, which has essentially to do with “transference” and its function in addressing the repetition compulsion:

“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)

Now, I have already commented on some of the oddities of “transference,” as the concept is mobilized in this piece. For example, Freud re-describes transference as itself a “repetition” — indistinguishable, to a point, from the other repetitions found in an analysis. Moreover, to be “serviceable,” the transference must meet certain minimal conditions. In particular, the analytic situation presupposes a trusting, respectful, generally affectionate attitude in the patient. Absent this attitude, the basic “understanding” between patient and analyst — stipulating, say, that the patient not make major life decisions during the treatment — would become unworkable.

In the quoted passage, however, a broader and more internally-differentiated sense seems to accrue to the concept of “transference.” According to the first, narrower meaning, the “attachment through transference has grown into something…serviceable” (153) inasmuch as it supports the analytic situation, that is, the frame. Such a situation has effectively “put the reins of the transference” upon the patient’s “untamed instincts” (154).

But in this passage, transference plainly includes substantially more than the “minimal” ingredients of trust, regard, affection, and the like. To be sure, the analytic situation begins with these ingredients, as insurance against the more damaging types of “acting out.” Yet Freud proceeds to characterize this same transference as a “definite field,” a “playground,” an “intermediate region between illness and real life” in which “the compulsion to repeat” is able to “assert itself” or to “expand in almost complete freedom” and “display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts” — characterizations that exceed by some margin mere “compliance enough to respect the necessary conditions of the analysis.” It now appears that, alongside this background attitude of trusting compliance — and, in the nature of things, at loggerheads with it — analysis elicits transference phenomena from the patient, hitherto unconscious, that look rather different.

What kinds of repetitions, after all, does the analyst “admit…into the transference as a playground?” And how exactly does the situation look once these repetitions have been thus admitted? Freud does not provide any illustrations in our quotation. But earlier in the essay he listed several, as we saw in previous entries:

“For instance, the patient does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and critical towards his parents' authority; instead, he behaves in that way to the doctor. He does not remember how he came to a helpless and hopeless deadlock in his infantile sexual researches; but he produces a mass of confused dreams and associations, complains that he cannot succeed in anything and asserts that he is fated never to carry through what he undertakes. He does not remember having been intensely ashamed of certain sexual activities and afraid of their being found out; but he makes it clear that he is ashamed of the treatment on which he is now embarked and tries to keep it secret from everybody.” (150)

Evidently, these are the sorts of “repetition” — e.g. dynamics of defiance, confused futility, and shame — that ought to be welcomed into the arena of transference. And this must mean that each of these “repetition” dynamics or structures, by definition aspects of the patient’s presenting neurosis, must receive a reality and signification within the transference, that is, vis-à-vis the analyst. Suffice it to say, again, that these transferences will not merely differ from the trusting, friendly attachment to the analyst that grounds the analytic station as a whole; they will contradict that attitude. This contradiction, the resolution of which then defines the treatment, appears to coincide with the distinction between the patient’s “observing ego” — allied with the analyst — and her more-or-less ego-alien “observed ego.” But this suggests that, when a given repetition first emerges in the transference — say, when the patient’s “friendly attachment” to the analyst is first clouded by a “defiant and critical” attitude — it is precisely ego-syntonic. The patient does not conceive it as a “repetition” at all, but as a feeling towards the analyst quite as “realistic” and “well founded” as the friendly attachment itself.

What begins as an affectionate transference, then, must as a rule become tainted by the very “subversive” ingredients — “pathogenic instincts” — invited into it. Indeed, the introduction of these ingredients will, it seems, strain that respectful affection to its breaking point, to the extent that it become nothing “more” positive than a grudging submission to an onerous obligation. Again:

“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.”

Implied in the first part of this formula is the notion that, if the patient merely respects the frame — “the necessary conditions of the analysis”— then nothing more need be demanded from him in the way of positive regard and, in fact, everything in the way of “negative,” or at least “problematic” regard should be welcomed.

The second part of this formula, of course, goes beyond the — already considerable — claims of Freud’s argument thus far. Not only, that is, will (a) neuroses manifest themselves as “repetitions” of configurations and dynamics from a repressed past. And not only (b) will analysis excite these repetitions as “resistances” that — inevitably, it seems — increasingly pertain to the person of the analyst, that is, will bear a “transference” meaning. Beyond this, Freud is suggesting that (c) once these aspects of the analysis are in place, the whole ensemble qualifies as a new and artificial neurosis — a “transference neurosis” — that both reproduces in domesticated miniature the illness as a whole, while also replacing that whole. Moreover, and most crucially of all, we are told that (d) this replacement, which collects the elements of the original neurosis into a transference neurosis, is for just that reason temporary, because amenable to analytic influence. As Freud continues:

“[W]e regularly succeed 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.” (my italics)

All of this, of course, is stated abstractly and dogmatically here. For Freud’s own clarifications, illustrations, and defenses of the “transference neurosis,” we would need to look to other places in his writings. (The editors themselves refer us to Lecture XXVII in the Introductory Lectures.) But in her book Transference Neurosis and Psychoanalytic Experience, Gail Reed helpfully summarizes the transference neurosis as

“a particular and organized development of the transference in the course of psychoanalytic treatment. The transference neurosis was seen as an illness centered uniquely on the psychoanalyst. The treatment became a situation in which the repressed libidinal impulses and related hurts and frustrations originating in the soil of childhood oedipal conflicts could flower. Once they emerged from repression, inevitably attracted by the presence of the analyst as a substitute object representation for loved and frustrating oedipal objects, their energy could be liberated for a healthier deployment in reality. The transference neurosis represented an illness necessary to cure” (1-2)

Whether and how such an “artificial illness” is possible I will not discuss here. Nevertheless, what this hypothetical entity involves is now clear enough, at least in a rough way. So, to recall Freud’s own example: we will not be surprised when a patient who “used to be defiant and critical towards his parents’ authority” at some point “behaves in that way to the doctor.” Indeed, assuming that such a “defiant and critical” attitude is inseparable from the patient’s presenting neurosis, we will expect it eventually to “attach” to the analyst in an intense, concentrated way. If I understand him correctly, Freud believes that essentially all the unconscious impulses, energies, and dynamics are thus reactivated vis-à-vis the analyst — in the transference — so that, liberated in this guise from repression, there is essentially nothing “left over” to sustain the original neurosis. Again, whether or not this is correct — whether, indeed, it assorts with Freud’s later, evidently more cautious position in, for example, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” — are questions I will leave for another time.

Mike Becker 5/14/23 Mike Becker 5/14/23

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:

In the next entry, I will take this passage as a starting point.

Mike Becker 5/7/23 Mike Becker 5/7/23

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.”

Mike Becker 4/30/23 Mike Becker 4/30/23

Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914) (III)

While Freud does not define “resistance” in this piece, his use of the term is congruent with the descriptions offered in other places. In “Observations on Transference-Love” (1915), for instance, Freud remarks that “anything that interferes with the continuation of the treatment may be an expression of resistance” (162). Repetition constitutes “resistance,” then, inasmuch as it replaces — and thus effectively preempts — the “work” proper to analysis. This work consists in the struggle to disarm repressions and liberate, or consciously access, that which has been repressed: impulses, affects, thoughts, fantasies, and, of course, memories.

Consider, too, Freud’s abstract on the aim of analysis, as it is found in the “Constructions” (1937) essay written towards the end of his life:

“[T]he work of analysis aims at inducing the patient to give up the repressions…belonging to his early development and to replace them by reactions of a sort that would correspond to a psychically mature condition. With this purpose in view he must be brought to recollect certain experiences and the affective impulses called up by them which he has for the time being forgotten. We know that his present symptoms and inhibitions are the consequences of repressions of this kind: thus that they are a substitute for these things that he has forgotten.” (257-258)

Thus releasing repressions and repairing memory are conceived as corollaries. If, Freud now seems to be saying, this repressed content, including memories, can be “discharged” in behaviors that schematically replicate the original experience, there will be no felt need to “liberate” that content as a conscious memory. In this way, the patient unburdens himself of the content in a way that favors resistance. So long as a repressed content, pressing for discharge, can be disposed of via action, there is little appeal in handling it by the comparatively painful approach of recollection. Indeed, the patient has considerable incentive to avoid the second alternative, if at all possible, since — negative consequences of “acting out” notwithstanding — repetition comes rather easily.

Under conditions of resistance — particularly, a transference that is “hostile or unduly intense” (151) — the analyst can expect a “sequence” of repetitions from the patient that are best regarded as potent “weapons”:

“From then onwards the resistances determine the sequence of the material which is to be repeated. The patient brings out of the armoury of the past the weapons with which he defends himself against the progress of the treatment — weapons which we must wrest from him one by one.” (151)

Thus, in the case of the psychoanalytic “criteria” mentioned in the last entry — transference and resistance — repetition approaches a relation of pure identity. Repetition is a type of transference (and vice versa); just as it is a type of resistance. And these relations of identity, while threatening to collapse the distinctions between separate concepts, are nonetheless unsurprising. In most places, after all, Freud is plainly interested in transference itself almost entirely as a form of resistance, while resistance hardly threatens treatment until it blossoms into its most acute form — namely, transference. Once repetition is turned into a near-synonym for transference, in other words, it seems likewise inevitable that it would interest Freud exclusively under its aspect of “resistance.”

How exactly, though, does repetition constitute resistance? — how, that is, does it interfere with the course of treatment? Freud reiterates that “the patient repeats instead of remembering, and repeats under the conditions of resistance” (151). In short, the patient does not do what he ought — he does not remember directly. And he does do what he ought not — he succumbs to a repetition compulsion that both precludes directly recollection and, in the bargain, disrupts the analysis in other ways.

To this provisional summary, and in light of our foregoing reflections, I feel tempted to append a couple qualifications. First, as I have insisted, the patient not only repeats instead of remembering; he also repeats as a way of remembering — the only way as yet available to him. Second, while the neurotic’s repetition compulsion is, according to Freud’s account, plainly inflamed “under the conditions of resistance,” this compulsion has surely antedated the analysis-proper.

To be sure, “acting out” as a surrogate for direct recollection may well belong — strictly speaking — to the clinical context. But it would be an overstatement, it seems, to infer that repetitious phenomena originate there. Nor would Freud dispute this: for what is neurosis, from the isolated symptom to the all-pervasive character pathology, if not just such a repetition? Here one might respond that these repetitions, while antedating the analysis, are even then redolent of “resistance” — resistant, that is, to consciously approaching the repressed materials for which they substitute. And this seems correct, provided we broaden the category the resistance beyond its “narrow” application to behaviors that interfere with analysis, and paradigmatically to whatever checks or diverts the flow of free associations.

In fact, I take the next sentences in Freud’s piece as strong evidence that he, too, is expanding the meaning of both “repeating” and “resistance” beyond the treatment, to wherever repressions much be secured against illumination.

“We may now ask what it is that he in fact repeats or acts out. The answer is that he repeats everything that has already made its way from the sources of the repressed into his manifest personality — his inhibitions and unserviceable attitudes and his pathological character-traits. He also repeats all his symptoms in the course of the treatment.” (151)

For what, indeed, could it mean for the patient to “repeat” — in treatment — his “inhibitions and unserviceable attitudes,” his “pathological character-traits,” as well as “all his symptoms” (151)? After all: on Freud’s own view, isn’t each of these items already and in essence a “repetition” of some unconscious memory? — something, in Freud’s phrase, that “has already made its way from the sources of the repressed into his manifest personality”? In other words, can’t we simply say that the patient’s “acting out” is the repetition — in therapy — of a repetition — those pieces of the manifest personality that already do double-duty for a repressed memory? Freud continues:

“[T]he patient's state of being ill cannot cease with the beginning of his analysis, and…we must treat his illness, not as an event of the past, but as a present-day force. This state of illness is brought, piece by piece, within the field and range of operation of the treatment, and while the patient experiences it as something real and contemporary, we have to do our therapeutic work on it, which consists in a large measure in tracing it back to the past.” (151-152)

The formulations enclosing this passage are, again, paradoxical. Freud begins the quote with an exhortation to “treat his [the patient’s] illness…as a present-day force,” and not as something over and done, “an event of the past.” Yet the very next sentence seems to contain a roughly antithetical idea: that, while the “patient experiences it [the illness] as something real and contemporary,” nonetheless, in “our therapeutic work” we should not be misled by this putative contemporaneity. On the contrary, we must insist on “tracing it back to the past.” If, then, Freud invites the analyst to construe the illness “as a present-day force,” it is because for the patient that is exactly how it appears — “real and contemporary.” The illness persists as a “reality,” then; but this reality is a function of the patient’s (unconscious) illusion. The patient’s “illusion of reality” becomes, for Freud, the “reality of an illusion.”