Transference in analysis

The science of the particular

Transference is one of the most important concepts in psychoanalysis, alongside the unconscious. If one were to decide which concept was more important in the discovery of psychoanalysis, one would be hard pressed to choose between them. Indeed, the discovery of the Freudian unconscious occurs precisely through the discovery of transference as well, even at the crucial point of their intersection. In the following, I will try to explain this intersection and its usefulness for psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Freud encountered transference as a particularly difficult problem and as something that set psychoanalysis apart from other sciences. With some embarrassment for the neutrality of the scientific method upon which psychoanalysis was building itself, transference, the presence of the analyst as involved in the therapy[i], a peculiar presence I will return to.

If, in the early days of psychoanalysis, Freud suggests, that the analyst could like a master present their knowledge to the patient, he quickly learns that analyst cannot impose his knowledge (or what he thinks he knows) on to the patient.

Precisely at the moment, when the analysis hits some impasse, some signifiers, that are not easily found, when the patient hits a wall of silence, the analyst as a person, becomes of particular importance. It is in this way both an obstacle to analysis, since the patient falls silent, and suddenly the analyst becomes particular important. This is why it also an obstacle that in fact can lead to much more important working through of the patient’s unconscious symptoms.

Transference involves of course part of the scientific foundation of analysis, something that can be written about and taught, otherwise there would be no reason for Freud to write his essays on technique. On the other hand, it is particular difficult problem, since it escapes the ideal of scientific objectivity. Lacan says in Seminar I: “To be sure, analysis as a science is always a science of the particular”(1988: 21). This is because the therapist is not simply equitable with an experimenter in a laboratory, that should as far as possible, eliminate themselves from the experiment. On the contrary, they can only cure through working with their own person, through the phenomena of transference.

The knowledge of each case must be won in and from the case, and cannot simply be transmitted through textbooks. And even Freud’s teaching itself is also very much open to interpretation, something that must be treated as a living organism. In other words, we can put all of Freud’s texts themselves as a “work in progress”, something that relies on a certain transference (the right way in the future to interpret them). To put it more concisely it is not simply that psychoanalysis is a science of particular cases, each case being particular, or rather singular, so there’s no general framework that can simply be applied. It is also that psychoanalysis is itself a “particular” science, something that does not simply align with ideals of other sciences, precisely because it has to do with what escapes the signifier. Other therapies today, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, rely, on the other hand on science and the signifier almost exclusively (and then use medicine to treat what escapes the signifier, what is in the body).

In this way transference is both what articulate what is singular about each case, but also the very concept that puts psychoanalysis at odds with any other of the natural sciences. It becomes a lense, through which psychoanalysis itself is at stake, including its future.

But back to the main thread, this mean, that for example the gender of the therapist will have an impact on the analysis and its final outcome? This presents a problem for the verification process, the repeatedability with which modern science prizes itself. To take a simple example: a chemical result won in a labotary, should be the same no matter who the chemist is, as well as their personal background. On the contrary, an analysis, since it deals with enjoyment and the particularity of the singular history necessitates that the analyst is able to listen to the nature of this enjoyment, an enjoyment that cannot be deciphered alone through the signifier. of the scientist should be eliminated as part of the scientific ideal of objectivity. Lacan’s name for this is that there is no metalanguage.

Lacan says, continuing the discussion of the science of the particular, that transference is a concept. But it is one that we must work with in praxis, rather than treat through a simple dichotomy: it is not that we have a clearly defined concept and then apply it to practice; rather, practice is the way the concept “comes to itself”, as Hegel would say. As Lacan puts it, “the concept is determined by the function it has in a particular praxis. This concept directs the way in which patients are treated” (124). This therefore involves an element of tact, something that cannot simply be taught ex cathedra or simply generalized, but must be, as it were, “invented” again each time. On the other hand, the teachings of Lacan and Freud do of course provide a kind of framework, points that can be relied on.

The subject supposed to know

The first consequence of conceiving psychoanalysis as a science of the particular concerns the status of knowledge itself. Analytic knowledge cannot simply be possessed in advance by the analyst; it must first be supposed to the analyst by the analysand.

The two, transference and the unconscious, are closely related: the unconscious takes form only through transference, while transference itself is structured by the unconscious and by the subject’s relation to the Other. In Freud’s conception, there is a repetition in transference of earlier episodes in the patient’s life. We can say that this element is repetition in the imaginary. Lacan supplements to other repetition: that of automaton (the letter that repeats, insists in the subject’s unconscious, like fragments of parental speech). Then there is repetition in the Real, that is precisely what evades transference, the encounter with tyché.

“And indeed, the greater our experience the less we are able to resist making this correction, though having to do so puts our scientific pretensions to shame. On the first few occasions one might perhaps think that the analytic treatment had come up against a disturbance due to a chance event — an event, that is, not intended and not provoked by it. But when a similar affectionate attachment by the patient to the doctor is repeated regularly in every new case, when it comes to light again and again, under the most unfavourable conditions and where there are positively grotesque incongruities, even in elderly women and in relation to grey-bearded men, even where, in our judgement, there is nothing of any kind to entice — then we must abandon the idea of a chance disturbance and recognize that we are dealing with a phenomenon which is intimately bound up with the nature of the illness itself.” (Freud, 502).

Transference is both what enables analysis, since a (positive) transference conditions my belief in the Other as someone who can help me, someone who knows, and what blocks analysis.

The analyst must occupy a position where two strands meet: she has to hold the position of the subject supposed to know, but also maintain the analytic desire that ultimately points in the direction of the subject’s truth:

“The analyst is placed in the position of the subject supposed to know. He knows very well that this doesn’t function unless he holds this position, because this is where the very effects of transference are produced, those upon which he has to intervene so as to adjust them in the direction of truth” (Lacan, 324).

The analyst must, on the one hand, “play the game” and allow the analysand to put her in the place of the subject supposed to know. She must allow this and not, for example, confront him right away with her non-knowledge. This is also how we can understand the analyst’s discourse: while knowledge is “under the bar”, it is also in the place of truth. Knowledge is effective, but only insofar as it remains under the bar, so that the analyst does not pose as a judge who knows what is good for the patient. She must hold the position of subject supposed to know, since without knowledge presupposed in her place, the analysand will not speak and the unconscious cannot manifest itself through transference.

On the other hand, she does not use transference authoritatively, as a master, to make the analysand dependent on her. Rather, as Lacan claims, transference is used “in the direction of truth”; that is, she ultimately tries, tactfully, to guide the process in the direction of the subject’s desire. This is why Lacan says of the analyst that “he has a foot in each camp”, both as a subject supposed to know and as the enigmatic a, the cause of desire.

A particularly fertile dimension of transference concerns the lie, something to which Lacan returns throughout the seminars, and especially throughout Seminar XI. The analysand approaches the analyst as a subject supposed to know, much as one approaches any figure presumed to possess a certain knowledge. Yet this presumption is, as Lacan points out, also constantly accompanied by doubt. Unlike Descartes, who must eventually, after his hypothetical doubt and the discussion of an Omnipotent Deceiver, place absolute trust in the Other, the analysand doubts this Other from the very beginning of analysis. The subject doubts that the Other really knows, or is capable of understanding, of “speaking the same language”. This is why we often encounter people in analysis saying something like, “it is obvious that she doesn’t speak the same language as me” about their analyst, even thinking they are a bit slow-witted (see for this point also Michel Silvestre, la psychanalyse de demain). Yet, as long as they keep returning, so there is still transference, a subject supposed to know, even if it is accompanied by doubt.

This doubt, is why interpretations, or constructions, offered by the analyst can always be questioned: the subject rarely fully believes in the knowledge attributed to the Other (and if they were to “fully believe”, there would be no possibility of analysis). And, of course, the Other does not in fact possess such knowledge. There is no hidden key to the subject’s symptom lodged somewhere in the Other, waiting to be uncovered. Nevertheless, it is presupposed that the analyst holds the key to my unconscious desire. As Lacan says:

“In so far as the analyst is supposed to know, he is also supposed to set out in search of unconscious desire” (235). That is to say, no matter, what I say in analysis, I suppose or presume knowledge in the Other, more precisely, knowledge about my unconscious desire. I more or less consciously, presume the analyst to know why I do what I do, including why I came up with a lie.

Lacan points out that due to this position of transference, everything the analyst does can be taken as a response to the patient, as importing something of significance, including the smallest gesture, maybe even having moved the furniture slightly between sessions. This is taken as a test to the analysand (234f).

In my case, say, my analyst has forgotten to turn off her phone. Suddenly a message comes in, and the analysand might say, “You left the phone on purpose; you want to indicate to me that my heartbroken complaint is futile and that your random phone messages are much more important!” “Even the psychoanalyst put in question is credited at some point with a certain infallibility, which means that certain intentions, betrayed, perhaps, by some chance gesture, will sometimes be attributed even to the analyst put in question: You did that to test me” (234). The point here is also to relieve the analyst of some pressure, since Lacan is saying that, even if you make some chance gestures (like you forgot to turn off your phone), this can be used in analysis, transference will manifest itself, and this is precisely what you can work with. In this case, simply saying, “You want me to listen to you?”, might itself be a way of ensuring that the analysis keeps going, even if the phone was left on “by chance”.

Transference as obstacle

Lacan says that the only resistance is on the side of the analyst: “there is no other resistance to analysis than that of the analyst himself” (E 595). The resistance of the patient is a given, there is even a “passion for ignorance”, patients of course demand less suffering, but they do not know that unconsciously they get off from this very suffering. This is why, especially when there is a “satisfaction crisis”, when the patient stops to talk, the analyst must desire. What he means is that, in such a case, the analyst tries to understand too soon. They try to understand, but this means that they are not ready to listen, or to allow time to pass for the unconscious to work itself out through transference. The analyst not only has to listen, but also has to allow time to pass for the analysand to come up with questions and doubt themselves, questioning their own stories and the reasons they show up in analysis.

A simple example from psychoanalyst René Rasmussen is someone saying that they hate their wife. A premature understanding would be to ask, “Why don’t you leave her?” This shuts down the unconscious. The resistance is here on the side of the analyst, not the analysand. Today, stories themselves function as commodities, as Christian Salmon and others have shown, as part of the new “cultural capitalism”. You are the story you tell yourself (or so the story goes). To strengthen such a story, is not what psychoanalysis is about, since this ends up strengthening the ego and therefore only consolidating alienation, and shut off anything that might reveal how the ego is not master in its own house.

“The transference is the means by which the communication of the unconscious is interrupted, by which the unconscious closes up again. Far from being the handing over of powers to the unconscious, the transference is, on the contrary, its closing up” (130).

This can be seen, for example, when the analysand tries to present himself as a lovable object for the analyst, wanting to impress her (“now that you know all these good traits about me, how can you not love me?”). In this way, the analysand, of course, also deceives himself, A Lacan puts in at this point, the love for the analyst is narcissistic (and therefore a deceit, a way to avoid confronting one’s own desire and jouissance): “one has to admit that if there is one domain in which, in discourse, deception has some chance of success, it is certainly love that provides its model” (133).

This is also why Lacanian approach is different from the ego-psychological approach, where the analyst makes an alliance with the “healthy” part of the ego of the analysand, thereby directing them towards recovery, that can only be in terms of what the analyst considers “healthy” (based on societal norms — today, healthy means a happy, flexible self-enterpreneur), in short, the “American way of life”, as Lacan often puts it. Of course, psychoanalysis is not against the subject obtaining some form of happiness, but it cannot be one commanded by the superego (indeed one of the problems for neurotics, for example, is that they are always happy at the level of enjoyment, but that they flee from this enjoyment, can only enjoy through suffering, or fails to take responsibility for their enjoyment).

From a psychoanalytic perspective, this is also where certain other therapeutic approaches, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, encounter an impasse: they may address the symptom without necessarily confronting its cause. Or they may replace the symptom with love for the therapist, as in the classical use of suggestion (but this means that the patient simply becomes dependent on the therapist). The disappearance or alleviation of one symptom may therefore leave the underlying structure untouched, allowing another, perhaps worse, symptom to emerge in its place. The symptom is always a solution, even if a poor one, and it allows for a certain modicum of jouissance, even if also of suffering.

Does transference happen outside the clinic? Yes, of course. While other therapies or, indeed political and religious movements, especially also depend heavily on transference, they do not explicitly set out to conceptualise it, still less to dissolve it. The difference is that, in the psychoanalytic clinic, transference can be worked on towards its dissolution and the assumption of the subject’s cause. People have asked whether it is “artificially produced” in analysis. Yes. But this does not mean that it is illegitimate. It also happens outside analysis, to such an extent that Freud and Lacan even point to the “artificial nature” of love itself.

“Freud himself did not weigh down the scales in this direction — far from it. Not least among the consequences was that it led Freud to take the question of what is called true love, eine echte Liebe, further perhaps than it had ever been taken” (123). This is particularly interesting because Freud also says that psychoanalysis is not about recovery so much as a “love of truth” (although, of course, the two need not exclude one another). People usually focus on “truth” in this case, not love. But if Freud questions “true love”, we should also ask what is true about the “love of truth” that analysis conveys.

Truth through deception

The particularity of analytic knowledge also transforms what counts as truth. If the object of analysis emerges through the subject’s speech and address to the analyst, factual accuracy cannot provide the sole criterion of analytic truth.

We can see this in the phenomena of the lie, which is not simply identifical to a falsehood. Even in lying the subject does suppose someone to know. Every lie presupposes an Other (also on top of the concrete analyst). Just like in the famous gravedigger scene in Hamlet, where lying/lying (to lie to someone, to lie down) only works as witticism, because there is a symbolic Other to whom it is addressed (we the audience get the joke, for example).

Say you lie to your analyst, as I consciously did (but no doubt also with unconscious motives). At the same time, you are not entirely lying, in terms of presenting a falsehood, because you expect them to “catch” you or explain to you what the lie meant (“you lied because you were unable to face that your father left you…”). On a subjective level one always tells the true (even if this truth is through a lie). Even as the analysand consciously lies, they unconsciously hope or expect the analyst to call them out and then tell which unconscious desire was at work there (but of course the analyst does not simply know this). In this way, they, the patients, actually believe in an omnipotent Other, someone who knows their thoughts better than they themselves do (“I don’t know why I lied; my analyst has to tell me”).

Lacan refers to a case by Nasz in which a patient withholds information about having syphilis. After a while, the analyst asks, “Why didn’t you tell me?”, and the analysand answers, “So that you wouldn’t trace everything back to my syphilis as the cause of my problems.” In other words, the analysand is afraid that the analyst will be deceived. But the example also shows that organic causes are not the material analysis works on; rather, its material is speech — in this case, the subject’s division, his relation to his own syphilis, and what he thinks about it. Analysis is in this sense always directed “outside”, towards the material of the words spoken in analysis, towards what is actually said.

As the late Lacan repeatedly says, the Other does not exist, meaning that there is no subject who actually knows. This does not mean that the Other does not have effects. We also need this fiction of the Other in order to be social beings at all. As soon as we speak, we presuppose the Other; a basic pact is established simply by speaking, since we address ourselves to the Other.

But this Other is only presumed to know. Of the many lies I told my analyst, I simultaneously had the vague feeling of playing a game, of waiting for her to catch me in the lie. So I was testing her. We can compare this to a case reported by Lacan in Seminar I, but originally told by Michael Balint. Here, a man tells the analyst all sorts of stories at the beginning. They are all lies, and he says one day that he had to do this in order to make sure that the analyst was an “honest fellow”, that is, someone whom he could trust with his “actual” story. The story is important not so much here for its factual details, but for the very fact that the patient told it in the first place, the fact that he wanted to find “an honest fellow” is itself a fact to be interpreted.

Similarly, I might invent a story about myself as a pervert simply to test the waters: does the analyst get aroused by this? Will she support my act, or will she be horrified? But precisely my need to tell a story, a fiction of myself as a pervert, itself testifies to the “perverse fantasies” that are always the obverse of neurosis; it tells me a great deal about my transference with the analyst. That is why Lacan says:

“The I am deceiving you arises from the point at which the analyst awaits the subject, and sends back to him, according to the formula, his own message in its true signification, that is to say, in an inverted form. He says to him — in this I am deceiving you, what you are sending as message is what I express to you, and in so doing you are telling the truth” (1977: 140).

We might put it like this: in other therapies, a lie is (just) a lie, but in psychoanalysis it always carries some truth. “Truth is based only on the fact that speech, even when it consists of lies, appeals to it and gives rise to it.” (133). Marie-Hèlene Brousse said in a discussion of seminar XVII: “in analysis everything is true”. The analysand might not consciously think everything is true. They might consciously think they are telling lies (they intend to lie). But for the analyst everything should be taken as true. I remember my own analyst often putting on a kind of face, whenever you met her in the door before a session, a face of what I cannot describe as anything else as a face of childlike curiosity, as though I had a lot to tell her, and that she was very interested, but also ready to be surprised. In analytical terms, this would correspond to knowledge being held in check, knowledge being both put under the bar (as in the analyst discourse). Yet, it is also knowledge in the place of truth (because it is knowledge that informs the analyst, that they should not be tempted to think they understand too quickly). The way a child can look at you. In one of his seminars, psychoanalyst René Rasmussen says, that he, when he was very young analyst, once made a sarcastic comment, the result was not productive. Since then he promised himself never to be sarcastic or ironic. Why? Precisely, because both sarcasm and irony presuppose that one knows what the analysand is talking about. Instead, one needs to assume a kind of naivety, being ready to be surprised, remembering that the knowledge is not with the analyst, but instead in the unconscious of the subject speaking.

Since I was on the couch, I only saw her childlike expression on the face by entering the door of analysis when she was there to greet me. When my analyst, in response to my conscious lie, said: “that was important”, it was unclear what about it was important, but in a way, she did say: what you told me is true (leaving me wondering what about it was true — not so much the facts, but how it responded to a fantasy, that structured my libidinal being-in-the-world, or my desire to tell her, provoke her etc). “In the way of deception in which the subject is venturing, the analyst is in a position to formulate this you are telling the truth, and my interpretation has meaning only in this dimension.” (ibid.) So, the analyst’s: “that was important” is precisely such an interpretation. To common sensical approach this looks like evasion, or the opposite of interpretation. My analyst didn’t tell me what it was about, she didn’t offer any hermeneutics, any meaning to my act (either the story about the violent fight, or to the fact that I was telling her), she did an interpretation precisely by saying that there was a truth in it (but which truth?). This is very different from the kind of reaction to transference, that ego-psychology does, that Lacan critiques, where the analyst rushes in to tell the analysand, that they are confusing her with the patient’s own mother (“don’t you see that you are projecting your unresolved issues with your mother on to me? just like you kept complaining with her and then leave in a rush, so you do with me?”) — this kind of “objective” critiria would precisely not allow the unconscious to be “put on stage”, “to take place”, the “mis en acte”(Lacan 2024:12) To say that it is “enacted” or takes place in analysis, does not mean that the unconscious is some container, whose content is “transferred” on to the analytic setting. It is rather that the unconscious is a form of thinking, a continuous “work”, that happens in analysis.

Brousse’s statement is one of the best statements about analysis I know, because it means that you have to be attentive. Freud called it “gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit” (evenly suspended attention). The fact that the analysand lies, tells you something about their subjective truth: the story might be a factual lie, but the reason why they chose to tell that lie carries some subjective truth. The point is not that the analyst should catch it. They just listen. Maybe in time, the analysand themselves will start to question why they chose to tell a lie. (“look back then what I told you was a lie, but to be honest I always felt like I was trapped in with those gangs and their code of conduct, it’s also because my father…”).They will be more interested in their unconscious desire, than to win the love or approval of the analyst, or any other figure of the Other.

Another example, that might help illustrate (I apologize for the personal character of this anecdote). one of my lies concerned the fact that, as a teenager, I had been involved in many gang fights. (I was, but this particular one did not play out like this.) Once, we were cruising around the streets of my city. We were in three cars, trying to provoke different groups at the bus stop by the main station, in the centre of the capital of our country, etc. Eventually, a group of young men, around our own age, decided to respond and gave us the middle finger (in Shakespearean terms, they “did bite their thumbs at us”).

Immediately, the driver of the car I was in hit the brakes, so the wheels screeched, turned around, and went back. I could already see that the young men looked a bit more bewildered. The car stopped with a hard brake, and one friend immediately jumped out and ran at full speed in the direction of the men. I was in the seat next to the driver and was, most naturally, the one to follow most closely. In these situations, it is very important to act swiftly, not to leave room for doubt, but to seem like a machine. Had my friend run over to the three men alone, they probably would simply have beaten him up; that is why his “courage” needed to be supported by the reliance on other friends in the group to be right there with him soon afterwards.

It turned out that these young men were actually rather meek. They sensed that we were probably in three or four cars in total, and that standing up to the first people who arrived, my friend and me, would later result in worse violence. We should simply have left, of course, and I remember feeling that there was no opposition. But instead, my friend, let us call him C, dragged one of the men to the pavement and started kicking him in the head; I ran over and did it too. Eventually, my friend C put the young man’s head on the pavement and jumped on it.

Now, this story was actually a lie in terms of “objective facts”, in terms of falsehood and exactiude. We never kicked him in the head; we only tried to provoke and humiliate them. Even at the time, I felt a strange warmth in my body, the strong affect of shame, of having crossed some barrier. Anyway, I told the story in analysis as though I had really beaten up a defenceless young man, kicking him in the face and so on.

This was a factual lie, but a good analyst would precisely listen for the subjective truth. It could be that it felt that way, or that it was my fantasy, and in this sense it would be “true”. Or it could be that I was trying to provoke SOME reaction from my otherwise silent analyst: that I talked about fights to seem tough, or to present myself as an “interesting” case, or that I wanted her to love me (“wow, what a tough cookie you were, and you read Lacan, so special…”).

As Brousse says, there is always truth, and only truth, in whatever you say in analysis, because whatever you say takes on a particular valence: being in analysis is not like having a normal conversation, precisely because of transference. The unconscious is not some deep truth within me, but is played out in the very transference, in the way I relate to the Other, here the analyst.

I could also lie in order to deceive them in the sense that I want to “test” whether they are really good enough to listen to my true stories, as though I wanted to test whether they could handle them and whether I could trust them. We often deceive people, or try to, precisely because we want to see whether they can be trusted, whether they can figure out our web of lies, and so on.

We should therefore distinguish between, say, an occurrence of a lie, a one-time thing, and something more like a sustained lie over time, like the fundamental fantasy. It is also not certain that the subject even knows that it is a lie. I knew that the lie about the gang fight was a lie. But why I wanted to tell that lie, which unconscious desire was at work, was unclear to me and might very well have been the cover for a “bigger” lie that I did not know about — for example, that I really had a hunger for her love, that I wanted to be the “special one” among all her analysands, some precious jewel who had both a violent teenage past, far removed from academia, and at the same time spent weekends reading Lacan, some precocious student.

So, it is part of analysis to allow for lies, not just conscious ones and not just short-term ones, but also those that make up the fabric of the subject’s misrecognition. This allows, with time, with “working through”, for a disidentification from those stories.

This also presents us with a certain enigma: Lacan says that the analyst points in the direction of truth, but also that “truth can only be half-said”. This does not mean that truth is so ineffable that we simply cannot say the whole truth empirically, as if there were never enough time. Nor does it mean that no signifier can fully exhaust it. Rather, the opposite is the case: there is already too much said. There is not so much more to “know” on the other side of truth, of the signifier, since this other side constitutes enjoyment.[i] Hence, the other “half” of the “half-truth” is enjoyment: the way the signifier can rupture it and enable a change in its direction. Lacan’s mathemes are precisely a way of enabling a “metalanguage”, but they preclude the speaking subject. In a way they are the only way to speak the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The half-truth refers, on the one hand, to the way the speaker, the enunciator, is involved in the statement and, on the other hand, following from this, to how she relates to her own enjoyment, there’s in this way too much of truth, since my way of relating to what I say, is also expressed with the statement, even if I wish it was not.

The desire of the analyst

Lacan often speaks throughout his seminars of the problematic nature of the analyst’s authority: “how can we be sure that we are not imposters?” (263). What ensures his position? In what name does she speak? Since the seminars are primarily directed towards the training of analysts, rather than an academic audience, this has very practical and concrete implications. If you are an analyst, on what grounds do you base your interpretations?

This is especially problematic since psychoanalysis is based on the lack in the Other, not on an Other that knows, or rather presumes to know, like the DSM manual. The IPA the group Lacan split from on the other hand, very firmly believe in a substantial Other. They believe in a normative reality, and that the therapeutic effects come through identification with the analyst’s “healthy ego”. But since, Lacan splits, as he has always done, but especially in his “excommunication” in 1963, from this conception and institution, on what grounds, then, does analytic authority rest? Why this “trust” in the analyst? As Lacan says, the problem is that the analyst cannot build his authority on anything “external”, such as societal norms, the ideal of being a model citizen, or anything that would involve the mirror image of the analysand. Analysis is not about social adaptation. As Miller says, the ethics of analysis is “beyond” the merely therapeutic effects, say of social adaptation: “I believe that the IPA is a group without an ethics, because it was created and is maintained in order to be blind to that beyond which we were referring. Of course, claiming that the IPA is a group without an ethics is not say that it is a group without morals. They do have morals, generally the master’s morals. They also have, for example, the idea of absorbing Lacan’s work after amputating its ethics.” (Miller, symptom and fantasy…).

“It is clear, in the experience of all those who have passed through this training, that in the absence of the adequate criteria, something that is of the order of ceremony is put in their place — and since for the psychoanalyst there is no beyond, no substantial beyond, by which to justify his conviction that is qualified to exercise his function — the substitution, in this instance, can be interpreted in only one way — as simulation” (230).

This is why there is always the problem of “simulation”, that the analyst is a fake, that this is all a hoax. Transference is enabled by technique: “what he obtains is of incalculable value — the trust of the subject as such, and the results that this involves by virtue of a certain technique” (ibid.). And the analyst, as Lacan says, is no God, that is, no perfect being, nor does he try to be: “Now, he does not present himself as a god, he is not God for his patient” (ibid.).

Analysis, in other words, is only possible if the analyst, on the one hand, allows himself to play the role of the subject supposed to know but, on the other, remains a finite being, not a God. “The training of the psychoanalyst requires that he should know, in the process through which he guides his patient, what it is around which the movement turns. He must know, to him must be transmitted, through actual experience what it is all about” (230–231).

Yet the analyst’s authority comes not from God or society, nor from any normative ideals, but from the “analyst’s desire”. “This pivotal point is what I designate (…) under the term the desire of the analyst.” What makes the process yield results is the analyst’s desire alone. The point is that, while the subject begins analysis with a belief in the analyst’s authority through knowledge, this eventually gives way to a different kind of authority, one that was, of course, there all along in the analyst’s desire to listen.

It is not just a matter of transference towards the analyst. Psychoanalysis also discovers the reverse movement, “countertransference”. This poses a problem for the neutrality of the analyst. Say, for example, that you fall in love with your analysand. In other psychoanalytical schools than Lacanian, some forms of “countertransference” are allowed, or even encouraged, for example certain moral reactions, that the analysand could identify with, but Lacan sees in this only misrecognition.

For Lacan, the analyst’s desire should thus not be conflated with countertransference, it is not a “personal” desire, but a kind of “role” the analyst plays, the desire that the analysand keep talking and that there is a desire to listen, a desire for analysis (Fink 1997: 7). It is not about giving in to countertransferential feelings, like frustration, love, anger. Of course the analyst has these, like all other humans, but they are not to be displayed, since the patient is all too eager to get any reaction from the analyst against which they can mirror themselves (for example, to know what might make them lovable).

If I say something, like the story discussed above, and the analyst reacts with moral indignation, I will simply refrain from saying something similar again. The unconscious will “shut up”; I will try to say things that I think fit with the analyst’s opinions and morals, and I will try to adapt to social norms. Psychoanalytic ethics, by contrast, concerns the subject’s desire, not making them “fit” social reality.

This is why the analyst must leave room for doubt. Without doubt, there can be no genuine work on the analysand’s cause. The analysand must be given time to doubt their own answers and their own choices in life. It is not “just” about curing symptoms, because new symptoms may emerge in their place. “There is in effect no other way of accounting for the term durcharbeiten, of the necessity of elaboration, except to conceive how the loop must be run through more than once” (274).

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In Seminar XV, Lacan calls the analysand a “worker”, and he often refers to working through as travail du transfer (E595, Fink 1997: 34), the “work of transference”, meaning that the real work is precisely to dissolve, work through, the transference. In a way, while the analyst’s of course listens and make important scansions and punctuations, it is the analysand who “works”, analyses, not the analyst, which is why it is called an analysand, and not for example patient. The subject supposed to know is really the unconscious (the analyst is only a placeholder for it). What Lacan means is that the analysand has to do the work of “free association”, but even more importantly, also to the point where they begin to listen to their own speech, and the unconscious desire revealed therein. It is not up to the analyst to interpret from the position of a therapeutic master.[ii] If the analyst interprets, it is in the form of an “oracle”, that is, an enigma. If the analyst interprets as a master, this will only spark hysterical rebellion in the analysand. That is why the analyst must give answers that are not so easy to rebel against, because the analyst does not take up the position of a master.

As in the example discussed above, my analyst responded to my lie simply by saying, “That was important.” She did not say what about it was important. She left me to doubt and question, and also to question whether she knew it was a lie or not. I also wondered whether she meant it, or whether she was simply too tired to listen carefully and had therefore given me some run-of-the-mill therapeutic answer to make me come back the following week. It would be wrong to say that she was avoiding an interpretation. The phrase “that was important” was the interpretation. An interpretation in the Lacanian sense is not necessarily a definite answer, but rather one that reveals the split subject.

Countertransference is not to be played out in Lacanian analysis. If the analyst feels that countertransference is blocking the work, they need to work through it further in their own analysis, privately with another analyst, not with this or that particular analysand. There is a nice anecdote about Sándor Ferenczi, who allegedly would switch places with the analysand. When an analysand said something important, the analyst might say, “Oh, that reminds me of MY father. Quickly, move aside; now I will tell you an anecdote about when we went fishing…” In this way, analyst and analysand would become interchangeable. This is precisely what Lacanian analysis does not allow for. When Lacan says, enigmatically, that the only resistance is on the side of the analyst, he means that resistance occurs insofar as the analyst allows countertransference to block the work, stops listening attentively to the analysand’s speech, and thinks that they already “understand”.

So why should you come back week after week? Only because there is a desire to listen, an enigmatic desire: the analyst’s desire. Not because you should become a better person, recover, or be cured of your symptoms, although all these things may happen as side effects. What justifies the authority of the analyst is the analyst’s desire alone. As an analyst, this is also what you have to keep in mind: “Why am I doing this? Am I good enough?” Never mind; what matters is that there is a desire, and this is what you can hold on to as a practitioner. The analyst “authorises” himself. This desire outweighs the superego pressure to comply, including therapeutic pressure. The analyst occupies the void in the Other, the place where the Other desires, and thereby becomes enigmatic. To put it simply, the analysand becomes more desirous of their own signifiers, more inclined to listen to them, instead of seeking the love of the analyst.

Presence of a

Yet the particularity at stake in psychoanalysis cannot finally be reduced to the singular meaning of the analysand’s history. If it could, psychoanalysis would remain a hermeneutics of the individual case. For Lacan, however, transference also confronts analysis with something that resists knowledge and signification: the presence of object a and the subject’s singular mode of jouissance.

Lacan takes it as absolutely essential that there is a “presence” of the analyst. This complicates, for example, online sessions, or even various forms of artificial intelligence that are put in the position of the subject supposed to know. These questions are frequently discussed today, but it is not my purpose to enter into this particular dilemma here. My point is rather to emphasise this strange presence. We can compare this with various forms of “structuralism” that certainly did much to debunk presence in favour of structure. By contrast, the analyst embodies the place of something that is both a product of structure, as what falls from it, and the actual presence of a person, the analyst. It is only here that the “unconscious is manifested”. Of course, the unconscious existed before Freud, yet “it is important to stress that all the acceptations given, before Freud, to this function of the unconscious have absolutely nothing to do with the Freudian unconscious” (126). Lacan then goes on to distinguish the unconscious from the “archaic” or instinctual (“have you ever, for a single moment, the feeling that you are handling the clay of instinct?”), focusing instead on “the unconscious” as “the effects of speech on the subject”. This does not simply reduce the subject to speech, but concerns the effects of speech on the living being, turning him or her into a subject, as Lacan puts it: “The concept of the unconscious — which, you will remember, I was unable to separate from the presence of the analyst” (125).

In other words, it is not about some unconscious that is “in” the subject. The unconscious is very much at work in the “actual” transference, in the hic et nunc of analysis. This is why transference also brings something new. We can also say that, without actual transference, there would be no problem; in a way, transference retroactively tells us what the problem is. This is why Lacan also says that “the unconscious is outside”.

Speaking of transference, there is thus both a signifying dimension and a dimension of jouissance. What is repeated in transference can eventually be dissolved through an encounter with tyché, with that in the analyst, a, which is not simply reducible to an imaginary mirror image but provides a return of jouissance that is not simply transference

Freud’s notion of “secondary gain” (Krankheitsgewinn) can also be understood in relation to this jouissance of the symptom. Lacan asks in the seminar why patients come to analysis, since they are already so satisfied with their symptoms. The answer may be that this satisfaction itself causes them too much trouble and is ruining their lives. In my own case, my failure to write a PhD was connected with a heavy jouissance. I could repeat the word “PhD” endlessly, turning it around like a precious jewel to be inspected, but to an outsider it was meaningless. However, even in this suffering, there is jouissance, beyond pleasure. It may, for instance, be easier not to write one’s PhD than to confront the traumatic cause underlying the connection between writing and questions of authority or paternity. The symptom is therefore not simply a signifying obstacle to be removed; it also sustains a particular relation to jouissance that is itself nonsensical, or not reducible to hermeneutics.

Furthermore, Lacan distinguishes a kind of repetition of signifiers from the repetition of an enjoyment connected to the analyst. This is where repetition separates from transference. This happens when, to give a simple example, you talk about your mother and put your analyst in her place, but sooner or later you realise, in a way that is slightly creepy, that the analyst is “her own being”, that she cannot be reduced to transference or to the signifying automaton. Her presence then becomes slightly oppressive; you question her as she stands in for object a, the lost object produced with the entry into the symbolic order. Lacan speaks here of the repetition of a certain impossibility, of what does not work, of what is forever missed in our waking reality of consciousness:

“If the unconscious is what closes up again as soon as it has opened, in accordance with a temporal pulsation, if furthermore repetition is not simply a stereotype of behaviour, but repetition in relation to something always missed, you see here and now that the transference — as it is represented to us, as a mode of access to what is hidden in the unconscious — could only be of itself a precarious way. If the transference is only repetition, it will always be repetition of the same missed encounter. If the transference is supposed, through this repetition, to restore the continuity of a history, it will do so only by reviving a relation that is, of its nature, syncopated. We see, then, that the transference, as operating mode, cannot be satisfied with being confused with the efficacity of repetition, with the restoration of what is concealed in the unconscious, even with the catharsis of its unconscious elements” (143).

In other words, there is something that is repeatedly missing in transference, something that is not of the nature of linguistics or words but emerges as the repetition of jouissance. The particular presence of the analyst is, in the end, replaced by the assumption of another presence: the presence of my jouissance. Only at the end of analysis can the subject assume this cause as their own, in what Lacan associates with the analytic “act”.

Transference is therefore not only what enables analysis; it is also what must eventually be dissolved. The goal is to make the analyst fall from the pedestal of the subject supposed to know and become “trash” (déchet), something thrown out of the process.

As Lacan puts it towards the end of Seminar XI, when transference is dissolved, the a, the lost object and cause of desire, is separated from the I, that is, from symbolic identification and the signifying operation. While the a is produced by a signifying operation, as what falls out from it, it is, precisely as that which falls out, not reducible to a linguistic effect or to the symbolic order: “For the fundamental mainspring of the analytic operation is the maintenance of the distance between the I — identification — and the a” (273).

Identification with stories and symbolic mandates, the “symbolic investiture”, is loosened, and the a is separated as the cause of the analysand’s desire. It is as if one ends analysis thinking, “Wait… why am I telling this woman all these things? She cannot do anything about them.” I stop looking for approval from the analyst and instead see her only as occupying the place of the a, the lost cause of desire. We can also say that enjoyment is, at this point, assumed and made possible, but not commanded by the superego. One assumes one’s enjoyment without guilt and without caring about the Other.

“It is insofar as the analyst desire, which remains an x, tends in the exact opposite direction from identification, that it is possible to beyond the level of identification, via the subject’s seperation…the subject’s experience is thereby brought back to the level at which…the drive can present itself.” (274).

This is also why Lacan opposes the idea that the subject is simply in search of her own good, as we find in Socrates and Plato (see, for example, Protagoras 358b7–c3): “No one who knows or believes there is something else better than what he is doing, something possible, will go on doing what he had been doing when he could be doing what is better.” And immediately afterwards: “To give in to oneself is nothing other than ignorance, and to control oneself is nothing other than wisdom.” For Plato, there is no way the subject could know its own good and nevertheless pursue something else. To cause harm or damage to oneself can only be the result of deficient knowledge. This means, that, in contrast to what Freud says, we need a sort of “consciousness-raising”, that for example the psychoanalyst can help bring about the sort of “recollection”. Lacan, however, distinguishes desire and the good:

“For, as we all know, the most perfect recognition of the conditions of the good will never prevent anyone from dashing into its opposite” (234). In other words, even if I know my good, what I need for my well-being, this might very well be the very condition for doing the opposite, in order to leave room for desire, to enable the reproduction of the lack, to “The whole of analytical experience — which merely gives form to what is for each individual at the very root of his experience — shows us that not to want to desire and to desire are the same thing” (235). We cause harm to ourselves precisely as a means of enjoying, in a way that runs contrary to the signifier and its knowledge. In fact, knowledge about my well-being may itself become a motivation for going against it.

A colleague once told me, “Oh, not giving way on your desire, that sounds like my friend who just sleeps with whomever he wants or takes whatever he wants.” This, however, is not what Lacan has in mind. It does not mean sleeping with a lot of people or not respecting other people’s wishes. My egotism can very well be, and usually is, a way of fleeing my desire. My desire often runs against my own self-interest and well-being. In contrast to this predominant conception, the whole point of psychoanalysis is that subjects tend to flee their desires; they certainly do not simply want to “realise” them. My desire may run against both my egotism and the philosophical-anthropological notion of one’s own good.

Not giving way on one’s desire means that it is not authorised by the Other. Since desire turns around the “cause”, object a, it also concerns the place in the Other where the Other desires, hence where the Other is lacking. To see the lack in me, the subject, as coinciding with the lack in the Other is what Lacan calls separation. To acknowledge my own lack is alienation: I am always alienated in the signifiers, in the field of the Other. But separation is not about “healing” this alienation, overcoming it, recovering from it, becoming de-alienated, or undoing the division introduced by the signifier.

Separation is to see that my lack coincides with the lack in the Other, that the Other, too — for example, my analyst, my parent, or my partner — does not know. Lacan associates separation with taking over one’s own cause, but also with an interpretation that reduces the master signifier to a certain tautology or nonsense. In the end, the master signifiers that determined the subject’s life become less heavy. They become simply words, without the search, the “hermeneutic trap” (Lacan 1978: 8), for a deeper meaning that has haunted the subject’s life in the form of the superego pressure to make sense of, to understand.

This is, in Lacan’s view, the end of analysis in Seminar XI, a point that will be repeated in Seminar XVII as part of the analytic discourse. This is also why what the analysand does with his jouissance after analysis is, in a way, no longer relevant for analysis: “How can a subject who has traversed the radical phantasy experience the drive? This is the beyond of analysis, and has never been approached” (ibid.). In a way, it is precisely here that transference is dissolved and the real of enjoyment is left to be assumed as one’s own; the subject takes responsibility for their own enjoyment and will likely take on a new signifying path. When Lacan, in Seminar XVII, discusses the analyst’s discourse, the master signifier, S1, is both what falls away, reduced, say, to meaningless nonsense and isolated, and what can also be seen as the product, the production of a new master signifier in the subject’s life. What the analysand does with this enjoyment is no longer so much for the analyst to know.

This is where a change becomes possible. I have already spoken of doubt, but leaving the subject in doubt is not the end of analysis. Here there is no doubt, but rather the “frightful certainty” that Lacan associates with the Real, le hors de la doute; in this case, doubt is rather a defence against anxiety. (Lacan 2014:

Anxiety is the only affect which, in contrast to signifiers, does not deceive. Anxiety indicates that the subject is getting close to some Real, and in this sense, we can say that the analysand flees into doubt, with doubt itself functioning as a symptom and a form of jouissance, as in the obvious case of the obsessional neurotic.

Lacan already hinted at this in his first seminar, when he spoke of the peculiar presence of the analyst, which can suddenly become oppressive in analysis and hinder further analytic work, standing in contrast to speech: “just when he seems ready to come out with something more authentic, more to the point than he has ever managed to come up with up to then, the subject, in some cases, breaks off, and utters a statement, which might be the following — I am aware all of a sudden of the fact of your presence” (40). Lacan further defines this presence as something like the later concept of the Real:

“It isn’t a feeling that we have all the time. To be sure, we are influenced by all sorts of presences, and our world only possesses its consistency, its density, its lived stability, because, in some way, we take account of these presences, but we do not realise them as such. You really can sense that it is a feeling which I’d say we are always trying to efface from life. It wouldn’t be easy to live if, at every moment, we had the feeling of presence, with all the mystery that it implies. It is a mystery from which we distance ourselves, and to which we are, in a word, inured.” (ibid.).

Of course, the analyst must be tactful here and not overwhelm the analysand. Anxiety must be given in small doses, because it is what keeps the subject thinking and desiring. The point is not paralysis, nor being swamped or engulfed by jouissance, but rather how to make it a vehicle for enacting a change, one is permitted one’s own jouissance, at last. Or as Freud says: “The neurotic who is cured has really become another man, though a bottom, of course, he has remained the same; that is to say, he has become what he might have become at best under the most favourable conditions. But that is a very great deal.” (Freud 1963: 497). We might say, the subject permits himself his jouissance as no longer “wrong”, but also no longer at the only in the commands of the superego.

Bibliography:

Freud, Sigmund. 1963 [1916–17]. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Translated and edited by James Strachey. Vols. XV–XVI of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis.

Lacan, Jacques. 1988. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by John Forrester. New York: W. W. Norton.

Lacan, Jacques. 2014. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 1962–1963. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by A. R. Price. Cambridge: Polity.

Lacan, Jacques. 1978. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton.

Lacan, Jacques. 2024. Le Séminaire, Livre XV: L’acte psychanalytique, 1967–1968. Texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Éditions du Seuil / Le Champ freudien.

Lacan, Jacques. 2006. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. First published 1989.

Zupančič, Alenka. 2017. “Lying on the Couch.” Problemi International 1 (1): 99–115.

[i] We could make a distinction here from Derridean deconstruction, where “presence” is very much a metaphysical concept to be deconstructed in favour of the play of the signifier. Lacan turns the tables: it is rather presence itself that is inherently stabilising, as in the case of the Real or the missed encounter, and we could even say that deconstruction and its focus on the signifier already work to gentrify, or keep at bay, this menacing presence of the object, here the analyst’s presence.

[ii] Lacan explicitly opposes the analyst discourse to the master’s discourse in seminar XVII: “the analyst discourse — and who has to be located at the opposite of any wish, at least any declared wish, for mastery. I say, “at least declared”, not because one has to dissimulate the wish, but because it is easy after all to spin into the discourse of mastery” (Lacan 2007: 69). The analyst is not a master, since the place of the agent in this discourse, is the object a, and the analyst does not master or “possess” it, even if she occupies its place.

Another is the way that the subject does suppose someone to know. Say, you lie to your analyst (as I consciously did). At the same time you are not lying, because you expect them to “catch” you, or explain to you what the lie meant (“you lied because you were unable to face that your father left you…”). Even as the analysand consciously lies, they hope or expect the analyst to call them out, and then to work from there. In this way, they actually believe in an omnipotent Other, someone who knows their thoughts better than themselves (I don’t know why I lie, my analyst has to tell me). Lacan refers to a case by Nasz, where a patient withholds information about having syphilis. The analyst asks after a while, why didn’t you tell me? and the analysand answers, “so that you wouldn’t led back everything to my syphilis as cause of my problems”, in order words, the analysand is afraid the analyst will be deceived. But the example also shows that organic causes is not the material that analysis works on, but instead speech (in this case the subject’s division, his relation to his own syphilisis, what does he think about it). Analysis is in this way always directed “outside”, in the sense of the material of words spoken in analysis, to what is actually said.

But as the late Lacan repeatedly says, the Other does not exist, meaning there is no subject that actually does know. This does not mean that the Other does have effects. We also need this fiction of the Other in order to be social beings at all. As soon as we speak we presuppose the Other, there is a basic pact, that is established simply by talking, since you address yourself to the Other.

But this Other is only presumed to know. Of the many lies I told my analyst, I at the same time had the vague feeling of playing a game, of waiting for her to catch me in the lie. So I was testing her. We can compare this to a case reported by Lacan in seminar I, but originally told by Michael Balint. Here, a man tells the analyst all sorts of stories in the beginning. They are all lies, and he says one day, that he had to do it in order to make sure, that the analyst was an “honest fellow” (that is someone whom he could trust with his ‘actual’ story). Similarly, I might invent a story of myself as a pervert, just to test the waters (does the analyst get aroused by this? Will she support my act, or will she be horrified?). But precisely my need to tell a story, a fiction of myself as a pervert, itself testifies to the “perverse fantasies” that are always the backside of neurosis, it tells me a lot about my transference with the analyst. That is why, Lacan says:

“The I am deceiving you arises from the point at which the analyst awaits the subject, and sends back to him, according to the formula, his own message in its true signification, that is so say, in an inverted form. He says to him — in this I am deceiving you, what you are sending as message is what I express yo you and in so doing you are telling the truth.” (1977: 140).

In other therapies, a lie is (just) a lie, but in psychoanalysis it always carries some truth. Marie-Hèlene Brousse once said: “in analysis everything is true”. The analysand might not think everything is true. They might think they are telling lies. But for the analyst everything should be taken as true. I remember my own analyst often putting what I cannot describe as anything else as a face of childlike curiosity, as though I had a lot to tell her, and that she was very interested, but also ready to be surprised. The way a child looks at you. In one of his seminars, psychoanalyst René Rasmussen says, that he, when he was very young analyst, once made an sarcastic comment, the result was not productive. Since then he promised himself never to be sarcastic or ironic. Why? Precisely, because both sarcasm and irony presuppose that one knows what the analysand is talking about. Instead, one needs to assume a kind of naivity, being ready to be surprised, remembering that the knowledge is not with the analyst, but instead in the unconscious of the subject speaking.

Since I was on the couch, I only saw her childlike expression on the face by entering the door of analysis when she was there to greet me. When my analyst, in response to my conscious lie, said: “that was important”, it was unclear what about it was important, but in a way, she did say: what you told me is true (leaving me wondering what about it was true — not so much the facts, but how it responded to a fantasy, that structured my libidinal being-in-the-world, or my desire to tell her, provoke her etc). “In the way of deception in which the subject is venturing, the analyst is in a position to formulate this you are telling the truth, and my interpretation has meaning only in this dimension.” (ibid.) So, the analyst’s: “that was important” is precisely such an interpretation. To common sensical approach this looks like evasion, or the opposite of intepretation. My analyst didn’t tell me what it was about, she didn’t offer any hermeneutics, any meaning to my act (either the story about the violent fight, or to the fact that I was telling her), she did an interpretation precisely by saying that there was a truth in it (but which truth?). This is very different from the kind of reaction to transference, that ego-psychology does, that Lacan critiques, where the analyst rushes in to tell the analysand, that they are confusing her with the patient’s own mother (“don’t you see that you are projecting your unresolved issues with your mother on to me? just like you kept complaining with her and then leave in a rush, so you do with me?”) — this kind of “objective” critiria would precisely not allow the unconscious to be “put in scene”, “to take place”, the mise-en-scène. As Bruce Fink puts it:

“Rather than intepreting the fact of transference, rather than pointing out to the analysand that he or she is projecting or transferring something onto the analyst, the analyst should direct attention to the concent (the ideational and affective content) of the projection, attempting to get the analysand to put it into words. Not to dissipate it or prohibit it, not to make the analysand feel guilty about it, but to speak it. Here the analyst works — often more by asking questions than by interpreting — to reestablish connections between the content (thought and feeling) and the persons, situations and relationships that initially gave rise to it.” (Fink 1997: 41).

To say that it is “enacted” or takes place in analysis, does not mean that the unconscious is some container, whose content is “transferred” on to the analytic setting. It is rather that the unconscious is a form of thinking, a continuous “work”, that happens in analysis.

Brousse’s statement is one of the best statements about analysis I know, because it means that you have to be attentive. Freud called it “gleichschwebende aufmerksamkeit” (evenly suspended attention). The fact that the analysand lies, tells you something about their subjective truth: the story might be a factual lie, but the reason why they chose to tell that lie carries some subjective truth. The point is not that the analyst should catch it. They just listen. Maybe in time, the analysand themselves will start to question why they chose to tell a lie. (“look back then what I told you was a lie, but to be honest I always felt like I was trapped in with those gangs and their code of conduct, it’s also because my father…”).

Another example: one of my lies was about how I was a teenager was involved in many gang fights. (I was, but this particular one did not play out like this). Once we were cruising around the streets of my city. We were in 3 cars, trying to provoke different groups at the bus stop by the main station, in the center of the capital of our country, etc. Eventually a group of young men, around our own age, decided to respond and gave us the middle finger (in Elizabethean terms, they “did bite their thumbs at us”).

Immediately, the driver of the car I was in, pulled the brakes, so the wheels screeched and turned around and went back. I could already see that the young men looked a bit more bewildered. The car stopped with a hard break, and one friend immediately jumped out and ran full speed in the direction of the men — I was in the seat next to the driver and most naturally the one to follow most closely. In these situations, it is very important to act swiftly, to not leave room for doubt, but to seem like a machine. (had the friend run over to the 3 men alone, they probably would just have beaten him up, that’s why his “courage” needed to be supported by the reliance of other friends in the group to be right there with him, soon after).

It turned out that these young men were just pretty meek (they sensed that we were probably in total 3–4 cars and that to play up to the first people arriving, me and my friend, would later result in worse violence). We should just have left, of course, and I remember I felt that there was no opposition. But instead, my friend, lets call him C dragged one of the men to the pavement and start kicking him in the head, i ran over and did it to. Eventually my friend C put the young man’s head on the pavement and jumped on it. Now, this story was actually a lie (we never kicked him in the head, we just gave them severap slaps in the face as if to provoke them, to humiliate them). Even at the time, i felt a strange warmth in the body, the affect of shame, of having of having crossed some barrier. Anyway, I told the story in analysis, as though I had really beaten up a defenseless young man, kicking him in the face and so on. This was a (factual) lie, but a good analyst would precisely listen for the subjective truth. it could be that it felt that way, or that it was my fantasy (and in this sense it is “true”). Or it could be that I was trying to provoke SOME reaction out of my otherwise silent analyst (that I talked about fights to seem tough, or a an “interesting” case, that I wanted her to love me (“wow what a tough cookie you were and you read Lacan, so special…”). As Brousse says, there’s always truth and only truth in whatever you say in analysis, because whatever you say takes on valence because being in analysis is not like a normal conversation, (and because of transference). The unconscious is not some deep truth within me, but being played out in the very transference, in the way I relate to the Other (here the analyst).

I could also lie to deceive them in the sense, that I want to “test” if they are really good enough to listen to my true stories, as though I wanted to test if they could handle them, if I can trust them. We often deceive people (or try to) precisely because we want to see if they can be trusted, can they figure out my web of lies and so on.

It is not just transference towards the analyst. Psychoanalysis also discovers the other way around, a “countertransference”. This is a burden for the neutrality of the analyst. Say, if you fall in love with your analysand. Traditionally there are some “counter-transference” that is allowed (say certain moral conduct), but Lacan does not allow for it. This is because if I say something (like my story before) and the analyst reacts with moral indignation, I will simply refrain from saying something similar again, the unconscious will “shut up”, I will try to say things, that I think will fit with the analyst’s opinions and morals, I will try to adapt to social norms. Psychoanalysis’ ethics is on the contrary about the subject’s desire, not about making them “fit” the social reality. A girl once told me, “oh, not giving way on your desire, that sounds like my friend who just sleeps with who he wants or take what he wants”. This is however not what Lacan has in mind. It does not mean sleeping with a lot of people, or not respecting other people’s wishes. My egotism, can very well be a way (and usually is) a way to flee my desire. My desire often runs against my own selfinterest and well-being. In contrast to this predominant conception, the whole point of psychoanalysis is that subject’s tend to flee their desires, they certainly do not simply want to “realize” them, and my desire runs against my egotism, and the philosophical-anthropological notion of one’s own good.

Not giving way on your desire, means that it is not authorized by the Other. Since desire goes over the “cause”, the object a, it also means that in the Other, where the Other desires (hence where the Other is lacking). To see the lack in me (the subject) as coinciding with the lack in the Other, is when you do not give way on your desire, what Lacan also calls seperation. To acknowledge my own lack is alienation (I am always alienated in the signifiers, in the field of the Other). But seperation is not about “healing” the alienation, to be dealienated. In the end there is no authority to support signifiers, there will always be one more signifier. The field of the Other is inconsistent. To make a bit of a simple comparison: it is like the child’s questioning of “why is the sky blue?”, “why is the sky called “sky”? and so on. No matter how the parent responds, there is no “final answer”. It is always possible to ask again, but why. There are no final signifiers that would conclusively close up the process of signification. In this sense, the Other, as the field of signifiers, will always be lacking. This also involves “seperation”, because the subject realizes that the big Other does not have all the answers, or that any answer will only reproduce the lack. Seperation is to see that my lack coincides with the lack in the Other, that also the Other (for example my analyst, my parent or my partner) does not know.

Countertransference is not to be played out in (Lacanian) analysis. If the analyst feels countertransference blocks the work, they need to work through more of their own analysis (privately with another analyst), not with this or that particular analysand. There is a nice point about Sandor Ferenzi who allegedly would switch places with the analysand. When an analysand said something important, the analyst could say, “oh, that reminds me of MY father, quickly, move aside, now I will tell you an anecdote about when we went fishing..”) in this way analyst and analysand would be interchangeable. This is what Lacanian analysis in no way allows for. When Lacan says, enigmatically, that the only resistance is on the side of analysis, it is in so far as they allow countertransference to block the work, to stop listening attentively to the analysand’s speech, thinking that they already “understand”.

We should therefore distinguish between say an occurence of a lie (a one time thing) and then something more like a sustained lie over time (the very “stories” we are telling ourselves, the way that the ego likes to tell itself what it is). It is also not sure, that the subject even knows its a lie. The lie about the gangfight I knew was a lie. But why I wanted to tell that lie was unclear to me, (and might very well be the cover of a “bigger” lie, that I did not know about — such that I really had a hunger for her love, I wanted to be the “special one” of all her analysands some precious jewel that both had a violent teenagehood, far from academia, but at the same time were reading Lacan in the weekend, some precocious student…). So, it is part of analysis to allow for lies, not just the conscious ones, and not just short-term ones, but the one’s that make out the fabric of the subject’s misrecognition. To allow for disidentification with those stories.

Does transference happen outside the clinic? Yes. The difference, is that in the clinic, in psychoanalysis, it can be worked on. People were asking if its “artificially produced” in analysis. Yes. But this does not mean that it is illegitimate. It happens also outside analysis, and to such an extent, that Freud and Lacan even point to the “artificial nature” of love itself. “At a very early stage, Freud posed the question of the authenticity of love as it occurs in the transference.” (123). People claim that the love in analysis, because of transference is “a sort of false love, a shadow of love”. But Freud turned the tables, the artificiality of love in analysis, shows us something about the artificiality of “true love” itself: “Freud himself did not weigh down the scales in this direction — far from it. Not least among the consequences was that it led Freud to take the question of what is called true love, eine echte Liebe, further perhaps than it had ever been taken.” (ibid.). This is particularly interesting, because Freud also says that psychoanalysis is not about recovery as much as “love of truth” (although of course, they might not exclude one another). People usually focus on “truth” in this case, not love. But if Freud questions “true love”, we should also ask what is true about the “love of truth” that analysis conveys.

In any case, the artificiality of love stems from the imaginary identification with being the precious object, the small object a, for the analyst. The analysand wants to be loved: “how precious you are”. It is true that a different conception of love, emerges, particularly in late Lacan, developed by the slovenian Lacanians, but primarilly Lacan’s conception of love is that of the imaginary, of the closing off the unconscious, the imaginary reconciliation in a mirror-image.

But, as said, while transference is produced in analysis, Lacan says, it is also only here we can “work” with it. “even if we must regard the transference as a product of the analytic situation, we may say that this situation cannot create the phenomenon in its entirety, and that, in order to produce it, there must be, outside the analytic situation, possibilities already present to which it will give their perhaps unique composition.” (125).

As Lacan continues, in analysis, “it is possible to give them an experimental model, that need not all be that different from the model I shall call the natural one”. The natural one, is the one outside of analysis (but already our relationships are never simply “genuine”, but artificial in the sense, that a structure determines them. Freud makes a nice case, when he discusses his own high school teachers: the pupils were learning, not simply because of “thirst for knowledge”; but because they transferred parental love on to the high school teachers (in this case Freud spoke of a displacement of affect), something Lacan complicates.

Lacan takes it as absolutely essential, that there is a “presence” of the analyst. We can compare this to various other “structuralism”, that certainly did a lot of work of debunking presence (in favour of structure). In contrast, the analyst embodies the place of what is both a product of structure (as what falls from it), but also the actual presence of a person (the analyst). It is only here that the “unconscious is manifested”. Of course the unconscious existed before Freud, yet, “it is important to stress that all the acceptations given, before Freud, to this function of the unconscious have absolutely nothing to do with the Freudian unconscious.”. (126). Lacan then goes on to seperate the unconscious as “archaic”, as instinct (“have you ever, for a single moment, the feeling that you are handling the clay of instinct?”), and instead focuses on “the unconscious” as “the effects of speech on the subject” (that is not simply reducing the subject to speech, but the effects of speech on the living being, turned him or her into subject).

The concept of the unconscious — which, you will remember, I was unable to seperate from the presence of the analyst.” (125).

In other words, it is not about some unconscious that is “in” the subject, it is not some container. The unconscious is very much at work in the “actual” transference, in the hic et nun, of analysis. This is why transference also brings something new. We can also say, that without the actual transference, there would be no problem, in a way the transference retroactively tell us what the problem is. This is why Lacan also says, “the unconscious is outside”.

Furthermore, Lacan distinguises a kind of repetition of the signifiers, from the repetition of an enjoyment connected to the analyst. This is where repetition seperates from transference. This happens when, to make an easy example, you talk about your father and put your analyst in his place, but sooner or later, in a way that is slightly creepy realizes that the analyst is “his own being”; that he cannot be reduced to transference. Then his presence even becomes slightly oppressive, you question him as he stands in for object a, the lost object with the entry to symbolic order. He talks of the repetition of a certain impossibility, of what doesn’t work, of what is forever missed in our (waking) reality of consciousness:

If the unconscious is what closes up again as soon as it has opened, in accordance with a temporal pulsation, if furthermore repetition is not simply a stereotype of behaviour, but repetition in relation to something always missed, you see here and now that the transference — as it is represented to us, as a mode of access to what is hidden in the unconscious — could only be of itself a precarious way. If the transference is only repetition, it will always be repetition of the same missed encounter. If the transference is supposed, through this repetition, to restore the continuity of a history, it will do so only by reviving a relation that is, of its nature, syncopated. We see, then, that the transference, as operating mode, cannot be satisfied with being confused with the efficacity of repetition, with the restoration of what is concealed in the unconscious, even with the catharsis of its unconscious elements.” (143).

In other words, transference purpose, even while enabling analysis is also what must eventually be dissolved. There is something that repeatedly is missing in transference, something that is not of the nature of linguistics or or words, but produced on top of it, as the repetition of jouissance. This is where a change is possible. I already spoke of doubt, but here there’s no doubt, but rather the “frightful certainty” that Lacan associates with the Real “le hors de la doute” (in this case doubt is rather a defense). Anxiety being the only affect which, in contrast to signifiers, doesn’t deceive. Anxiety indicates that the subject is getting close to some real. Lacan already hinted at this in his first seminar, when he spoke of the peculiar presence of the analyst, that stood in contrast to talking: “just when he seems ready to come out with something more authentic, more to the point than he has ever managed to come up with up to then, the subject, in some cases, breaks off, and utters a statement, which might be the following — I am aware all of a sudden of the fact of your presence.” (40). Lacan further defines presence now, as something like the later concept of the Real:

It isn’t a feeling that we have all the time. To be sure, we are influenced by all sorts of presences, and our world only posseses its consistency, its density, its lived stability, because, in some way, we take account of these presences, but we do not realise them as such. You really can sense that it is a feeling which I’d say we are always trying to efface from life. It wouldn’t be easy to live if, at every moment, we had the feeling of presence, with all the mystery that it implies. It is a mystery from which we distance ourselves, and to which we are, in a word, inured.”

We could make a distinction here from Derridean deconstruction where “presence” is very much a (metaphysical) concept to be deconstructed in favour of the play of the signifier. Lacan turns the tables: it is rather presence itself that is inherently stabilizing (as in the case of the Real, of the missed encounter), and we could even say, that deconstruction and its focus on the signifier already comes to gentrify, to keep at bay, this menacing presence of the object (here the analyst’s presence).

Of course, the analyst must precisely be tactful here, not overwhelm the analysand, anxiety must be given in small doses, because it is what makes the subject keep on thinking and desiring. The point is not paralysis, getting swarmed or engulfed by jouissance, but how make it a vehicle, to enact a change, that something may happen in the subjective economy.