The Truth About Freud's Technique. Michael Guy Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ of a world that is perceived or ignored. It is the community of relationships where we reside and take part, where we take chances, commit errors, suffer failures, and enjoy success. Reality is our abode. It isn’t “inside” or “outside”—it’s where we live, suffer, and survive.

      Freud’s essential insight into the nature of psychosis is epitomized by the significance he attributed to delusions and what they, in turn, tell us about our experience of reality. He realized that ostensibly crazy beliefs—just like other forms of phantasy—conceal a meaning that, when properly understood, makes our suffering intelligible, once we recognize how delusions—no matter how bizarre—convey a purpose. They tell us something about the people who experience them. The trend in psychoanalysis, however, increasingly conceives of psychosis as a “process”—impersonal to be sure. This process is governed less by drives and intentions—with meaning—than it is by “mechanisms” and “defense.” Whereas Freud was the first to employ denial as an essential feature of psychosis, he emphasized the inherent intelligence at the heart of delusion. Because of this intelligence we are able to know these people in their psychosis. They are not that different from ourselves, because they are a reflection of ourselves. They are us, and we, them.

      Delusions, like phantasies in general, are a door to the unconscious. They are crucial elements of a dialogue that psychotics are having with themselves. Delusions, like all linguistic expressions, are actually acts of revelation. They contain a truth that, if discovered, can explain the nature of the reality that has become so unbearable to the person who avoids it. On the other hand, psychotics aren’t the only ones who suffer delusions! Freud’s most famous obsessional patient, the Rat Man, suffered them, too (see Part Five). Perhaps it is reasonable to say that there is a bit of the psychotic in all of us, that the gap said to separate “us” from “them” isn’t as wide as it seems.

5 Real Love and Transference-Love

      One of Freud’s most valuable insights was the discovery that falling in love frequently occasions a peculiarly pathological reaction. The phenomenon of falling in love with one’s analyst, though initially perceived as a hindrance to the progress of therapy, soon became an essential and anticipated aspect of the treatment. Freud mused over the mystery of love in a variety of contexts and the question of its nature has become a cornerstone of analytic theory in general. My present concern, however, is more limited. I would like to examine Freud’s efforts to differentiate between “transference-love” on the one hand and real, “genuine” love on the other. Nowhere does Freud explore this distinction more poignandy—and ambiguously—than in “Observations on Transference-Love” (1958d). I will explore the practical import of this paper later when I review its contribution to psychoanalytic technique (see chapter 19), but for now I would simply like to examine those aspects of the paper that pertain to Freud’s conception of reality.

      Freud’s objective in this paper was to advise analysts how to handle expressions of erotic yearnings manifested by their patients. While arguing that erotic demands should never, under any circumstances, be returned, Freud sympathizes with the unique difficulty analysts face if they hope to avoid alienating their patients in the process. Freud believed analysts “must recognize that the patient’s falling in love is induced by the analytic situation and is not to be attributed to the charms of his [her] own person” (160–61). Naturally, a person falling in love with her doctor (Freud typically uses a female patient as the prototypical example) may become the object of a scandal in the eyes of her relatives and friends. Yet, Freud insists that one’s patients should never be admonished against these feelings; nor should they be enticed to concoct them:

      It has come to my knowledge that some doctors who practise analysis frequently prepare their patients for the emergence of the erotic transference or even urge them to “go ahead and fall in love with the doctor so that the treatment may make progress.” I can hardly imagine a more senseless proceeding. In doing so, an analyst robs the phenomenon of the element of spontaneity which is so convincing and lays up obstacles for himself in the future which are hard to overcome. (161–62)

      Freud characterizes this phenomenon as one in which the patient “suddenly loses all understanding of the treatment and all interest in it, and will not speak or hear about anything but her love, which she demands to have returned” (162). Under this “spell of love,” the patient typically loses or denies her symptoms and “declares that she is well” (162). On encountering this behavior, some analysts may be tempted to assume that they’ve achieved a miraculous cure and that her being in love is tangible proof of the treatment’s success. On the contrary Freud suggests that, faced with this development, “one keeps in mind the suspicion that anything that interferes with the continuation of the treatment may be an expression of resistance” (162). The reason for this degree of caution is due to Freud’s efforts to distinguish between expressions of affection, on the one hand, and signs of resistance, on the other. He explains that an affectionate transference (i.e., a positive transference) is a welcome development because it motivates the patient to cooperate with the analysis. But passionate expressions of erotic attraction are something else again. At the time this paper was written, Freud had not distinguished between erotic and positive transferences, though virtually all that he subsequently had to say on this subject is contained in this discussion on transference. For one thing the emergence of an erotic (transference) reaction has a distinctively troublesome air about it because it jeopardizes the progress of the work that has been accomplished. Previous signs of comprehension and cooperation disappear:

      Now all this is swept away. She has become quite without insight and seems to be swallowed up in her love. Moreover, this change quite regularly occurs precisely at a point of time when one is having to try to bring her to admit or remember some particularly distressing and heavily repressed piece of her life-history. (162)

      Freud’s painstaking distinction between “love” and resistance now comes to the fore. “If one looks into the situation more closely one recognizes the influence of motives which further complicate things—of which some are connected with being in love and others are particular expressions of resistance” (163). However, the emergence of erotism itself isn’t synonymous with resistance, per se. Expressions of erotism in analysis merely strive to achieve the same purpose they might on any other occasion: to transform the object of such feelings into a willing partner. The part resistance plays, however, is far more subtle, even devious. Freud warns that any effort on the analyst’s part to satisfy these longings will probably only arouse his patient’s aggression. In fact, “the patient’s condition is such that, until her repressions are removed, she is incapable of getting real satisfaction” (165; emphasis added). In other words, the patient’s erotic feelings, once manifest, tend to engender a resistance to the analysis that, in turn, acts as an agent provocateur by seizing on this love and exaggerating its passion. The consequence is a deepening of the repression against the patient’s capacity for genuine love.

      The emerging resistance acts against whatever feelings of love that are aroused, and takes their place while masquerading as genuine love in order to resist the psychical changes that were beginning to occur. This is why, if the analyst commits the error of responding to the patient’s entreaties, “in the further course of the love-relationship she would bring out all the inhibitions and pathological reactions of her erotic life, without there being any possibility of correcting them” (166). But if the initial expression of love for the analyst—the “affectionate” transference—is a welcome, and crucial, development for the work of analysis, why shouldn’t these feelings be encouraged rather than “analyzed”? In fact, Freud warns the analyst against inadvertently hurting the patient’s feelings by behaving in a rejecting manner: “To urge the patient to suppress, renounce or sublimate her instincts the moment she has admitted her erotic transference would be not an analytic way of dealing with them, but a senseless one. . . . The patient will feel only humiliation, and she will not fail to take her revenge for it” (164).

      Some patients become so overwhelmed by their emotions СКАЧАТЬ