THE PROS AND CONS OF FIDELITY
Thoughts on transference, inspired by Roustang:
Freud’s criticism of groups: everything is centred on love of the leader, the ideal ego. But he couldn’t find another model – so a psychoanalytic group must be based on the same love – for Freud himself.
Yet isn’t the aim of psychoanalysis to dissolve the transference? How can this be, when the group is based on maintaining this transference?
What is the transference? A love which clothes the other with knowledge – if I knew what he knows about my situation, I would be cured. The analyst is supposed to know. The analysand puts his faith in her.
But this faith is the opposite of religious faith. Religious faith must be maintained, even through the severest doubts. Psychoanalytic faith must be forced to melt away – because it is not my faith, it is the faith/desire of s/he who I love and/or hate, s/he who de/formed me.
In other words, God will know forever; but the analyst will be revealed as a placeholder – her knowledge is temporary (retrospectively we can see, it never existed in the first place).
I the neurotic long to desire or speak from the place of the other, because I can’t find my own place to desire or speak from.
I the analyst will therefore find the place of the other, and desire or speak from there – but with the ambition of shining a light on this place, so that this place, and this other who occupies it, evaporate.
So what happens when it doesn’t evaporate? What happens as a person trains, as s/he goes through the passe, as s/he becomes, perhaps, a training analyst or a teacher? S/he will, presumably, have undergone an extensive analyst which, perhaps, has dissolved the transference – so that the other, on the whole, has less hold over the subject than it did previously. And yet, having dissolved one transference, hasn’t the analyst fixed another?
Put more simply, the trained analyst must believe in some fundamental truths: let’s say, the fundamentals of repetition, the unconscious, transference, the drive. We all have faith in Freud. If that transference has dissolved, can one call oneself an analyst? But if any transference has been reinforced, can one really call oneself analysed?