Transference or Transmission?

At the conclusion of the Psychoanalysis <> Politics conference, as attendees were milling around, mingling, making for the exit, or sidling up sympathetically to the organizers who had just been subjected to the extended exercise in mass cruelty that was the closing discussion, I shared a look with one of these organizers from across the room, a friend of mine and sometime fellow traveler along the royal road. The look was a transmission. I do not mean something was transmitted there, some object or idea, for which our shared glance was the conduit across which a message was exchanged. The look was the message. If I could translate it into words—although doing so cannot but be a mistranslation—the message said simply this: “Go, speak!”

So we did.

“Good God!” I began. “I’m rethinking my life decisions. If these are the colleagues I have to look forward to by becoming a psychoanalyst, I don’t want to be a psychoanalyst.”

“This?” he replied, cocking one eyebrow over the madding crowd. “This is not psychoanalysis.”

I was reassured, if also unconvinced. What, then, was “this”? Politics? The upstart attendees were certain that, whatever else the conference was, politics was nowhere to be found or had been shut out from the beginning. Was their discontent the incursion of the political, the return of the repressed? Or was “this,” perhaps, the lozenge at the center of the conference title? The smoldering condition that results when the two, psychoanalysis and politics, are rubbed together a bit too vigorously, and the pleasure of the friction tips into a stimulation without satisfaction? Was the pleasure in the torment, like smoke without a flame? Or was “this” none of that, and less?

Having myself been involved in many, many academic conferences, in every way, ad nauseum—organizer, panelist, interlocutor, interloper, spectator, chauffeur to keynote speakers, fetcher of coffee, server of wine, fundraiser, publicity manager, attendance tracker, hapless A/V technician, warden of the lost and found—I was flummoxed and appalled by the ingratitude and ignorance this … this rabble had imposed on my colleagues, my friends, and, as I was one of the speakers there, myself. This was an exceptional event: thoroughly engaging, thoughtfully arranged, creative and formally unique, intellectually adventurous, provocative, special. If it failed to grant the mob what they were looking for, these unhappy customers could try their business elsewhere, and good luck with that.

Even in the pejoration and petulance of my use of the term “rabble,” so unkind, you will have noted that I was by no means shielded from the heat in the room. My defensiveness, my ire, my sense of offense sprang from the feeling that this precious jewel called psychoanalysis, my psychoanalysis, the heart of “my life decisions,” had been profaned, leaving me either to abandon it to the fallen world or, as my friend had implied, reclaim it from the devils who had so sullied it, with much righteous vituperation.

Was this transference?

This was the hypothesis advanced by many of the practicing analysts with whom I spoke later that evening and over the following days. The organizers had been treated to the sort of projection of unconscious material, fantasy formations, and otherwise irrational and therefore uncontrolled and unaccountable affects with which analysts are so familiar from their clinical work. The conference was doing its work even or especially because of the resistance it invoked. All the shouting about its having been a failure was a sure sign of its success. As for my own resistance to the resistance? My aggressive and patently egoic defenses of “my” psychoanalysis? If the organizers found themselves in the analyst’s position with respect to the rabble, then was the latter analogously placed in the analyst’s position with respect to myself?

Inasmuch as my spontaneous reaction to all this was both met and made by that voiceless transmission impelling me, “Go, speak!” I am tempted to answer yes. What my friend assured me was definitively not psychoanalysis was, indeed, psychoanalysis, precisely because it was not psychoanalysis, and I knew it, and I was agitated, and in my anxiety, I sought to talk it out.

This kind of dizzy reasoning will be familiar to many analysts who well know that a neat rationality rarely, if ever, obtains in matters of the psyche. As an analyst-in-training and an unrecoverable academic of the literary-theoretical variety, I am less comfortable with such paradoxes, and unapologetically so. If loops in logic are to stand, as they often do even in the rarefied domains of metaphysical abstraction, where paradoxes and aporias and antinomies operate as the engines of thought itself, they must be carefully justified; otherwise, they are not the engines of thought but signs of its absence, or worse. Wilfred Bion (1962) famously defined thought as the capacity to tolerate frustration. Tolerance, however, is no easy thing, because frustration is by definition painful and difficult. Suspended in the interval of desire, Bion (1962) writes, where the satisfying object is excruciatingly absent, one can either evade frustration or modify it (p. 307). Neither option affords an easy way out. And anyway, out of what?

The heart of my frustration is this:

While surely psychoanalysis and the phenomena that concern it extend far and wide, I remain unconvinced that that particular phenomenon called transference can be generalized beyond the highly specific and strange situation of the clinic. Singular to the rapport between each analyst and each analysand, singular also to the experience of the unconscious on the other side of language and beyond what can be represented or articulated except in its inarticulability, and, still further, to every session and perhaps to every moment in the session, transference is what makes psychoanalysis just what it is, nothing more and nothing else. It is transference that distinguishes the experience, the practice, and the theory of psychoanalysis from any other domain of inquiry and endeavor. Or, more exactly, transference is the theorization of this particularity, the conceptual designation of what psychoanalysis is according to what it does, or fails to do, under specific conditions. And it thereby constrains our theorizations of these conditions, in the classical analytic dyad or the group, on the couch or face-to-face, to both the practical question of how best to foster and sustain the work and the ethical question of just what “the best” can mean here.

In short, the question What is transference? is inseparable from the question What is psychoanalysis? and, just as importantly, from the question What is not psychoanalysis? The phenomena and experiences grouped under the heading of “transference” do not precede their psychoanalytic theorization; at the same time, these phenomena and experiences are the very condition for the possibility of the psychoanalysis that theorizes them. No transference without psychoanalysis, and no psychoanalysis without transference.

It is understandable that analysts and other friends of the unconscious would want to push this concept beyond the clinic. Once attuned to the unconscious, one finds it in action everywhere. This, of course, was already Freud’s wager. The unconscious is there in politics, in identity and identification, in the fraught libidinal bonds among groups, in seemingly meaningless slips of the tongue, in the affective register of the voice, in the body and its symptoms, and in dreams and their interpretation, insofar as all these domains of human endeavor are traversed, transected, and transformed by the friction between the action of the drive and the exigencies and expectations of the social link. But is it right that we should paint all these manifestations, to the extent that they bear upon a subject’s encounter with an other, any other, as instances of transference? Transference in the classroom. Transference in the waiting room. Transference in the boardroom, the bedroom, the ballroom, and the ballgame. Transference at the coffee shop, on the subway, in the ballot box…. The applicability is suddenly so broad as to render the concept vacuous, which is to say, practically useless and ethically bankrupt. Psychoanalysis becomes yet one more strategy of explanation, one possible theory among others, and by no means the best. Who needs that? Who wants that?

It may be objected that transference is an especially fruitful framework for interpretation. If this is so, we would do well to remember that, at its best, psychoanalytic interpretation is not explanation. It is a generative and self-generating means to the continuation of the analysis, an incitement to speech that does not illuminate so much as it initiates ever more of itself. This generativity hinges upon specific transferential conditions. Psychoanalysis must articulate these conditions, and rearticulate them again and anew in response to the radical singularity of every analytic encounter, or else it will reduce itself to a few theoretical platitudes and technical maneuvers and thereby cease to exist. If we are tempted to see transference even in an outburst of collective disaffection at a pretty-damn-good conference, we will have to do the laborious, painstaking work of translating the clinic into the conference. Doing so, we should also keep firmly in mind that, as with any translation, something of the essence of the original will have been lost.

Psychoanalysis is, of course, in the business of lost objects. Perhaps this is why it so constantly courts the danger of losing itself.

A formative precedent for this dangerous generalization is Joseph’s (1985) widely regarded article “Transference: The Total Situation.” Joseph argues that transference is in operation even where one least expects it—in the punctuality with which a patient arrives at the appointed time; the readiness with which she acquiesces to an interpretation; the way his body contorts or slackens on the couch; and so on—because this total situation manifests a total psychic situation, from infancy onward, far in excess of what can be verbalized. The crux of Joseph’s position, the countertransference this induces in the analyst, emphasizes the relational dimension of the analytic encounter, which, in addition to the patient’s psychic reality, fully constitutes the total situation to which the analyst ought to be attuned.

Joseph’s (1985) important corrective rightly attenuates the importance of talking for the talking cure. At the same time, it risks giving license to a confusion whereby any instance of emotional entanglement—in other words, any relation at all—may be conceived as a fragmentary reflection of the total situation. Transference and countertransference become synonyms for some far more nebulous notion of feeling, and psychoanalysis becomes a rationalization of sentimental attachments.

Underlining this risk, I do not wish to provoke a quarrel. I invoke “The Total Situation” here only to situate an alternative conception of transference that will return us to my initial distinction between transference and transmission. I am thinking of the Lacanian angle to which the Psychoanalysis <> Politics conference more closely hewed—as is evident even in the conference title and its allusion to Lacan’s notorious mathemes. From this angle, countertransference is, in a sense, out of the question. Lacan (1951/2006) emphasizes the necessarily dialogic dimension of transference, but this should not be understood colloquially, as a relation welded by speech, nor intersubjectively, as the idea of countertransference (at least as Joseph [1985] describes it) seems to suppose. For Lacan (1951/2006), the hinge of the transference is, precisely, the non-relation. Etymologically, dia implies not a duality but a gap, a disconnect, which is also a crossing and a space between; and logos, speech, is also logic, reason, ground, ratio, or limit. Dialogue, then, is a speech that arranges, formalizes, and circumscribes an encounter that takes place across the gap between signifiers, that is, between speaking subjects. Dialogue here is not an exchange, this for that, your transference for my countertransference, your outrage for my defensive rejoinders. In the analytic scene, the analyst (however else understood) is only a logical position within a structure of address through which the unconscious moves on its way back to the subject who ventures to speak. So, Lacan (1951/2006) writes, the dialogue is active even before the analyst says a word, and especially in the analyst’s silence.

The analyst in this account is not an ego with some ultimately narcissistic investment in exercising their investigatory acumen and prestige; the analyst is the other without whom the one would have nowhere to place their wager to say that which has never before passed through speech and which, through this passage, creates an opening in which something new, surprising, and seemingly impossible might emerge. It is, in other words, precisely the analyst’s non-knowledge, inexpertise, and ethics of ignorance—the desire to know, without the hope of some satisfaction at the far end of that desire—in which the transference inheres. Transference thus begins, if it begins, where explanation ends, in the gap where certainty falters and nonsense has its day.

If this seems frustratingly obtuse, as Lacan’s writing often does, then you might recall Winnicott’s (1974, p. 105) insight from his posthumously published “Fear of Breakdown,” according to which it is only once the patient’s faith in the analyst is shattered, only once the analyst’s ignorance is exposed and undeniable, that an analysis can really get going.

It is not that Winnicott’s writing, here and elsewhere, is any more clear than Lacan’s—or Freud’s, for that matter, once we really begin to read him. Or, where the writing seems clear, it is deceptively so. Our reasonable (as in, rational) urge to render transparent the workings of the unconscious easily gets the better of our knowing, from clinical experience and from the experience of reading, that every effort of transparency at best ends in failure, but more often in misprision, misapprehension, and theoretical reductionism. The unconscious, as we have already intimated, makes its move there where rationality falters. This is precisely why rationality is so useful, why conceptual precision and rigor are so integral to theorization: so we can better see where and how it breaks down, and where the real work of analysis begins, and begins again, interminably.

This brings us back, finally, to the problem of transmission. My wager is that transmission is a crucial psychoanalytic concept because it is the signal of a positive non-relation that is far more mundane than transference, therefore more useful for psychoanalysis in extension, beyond the confines of the clinical scene. It is not a communication of information, psychic or otherwise. Transmission is the experience of impact when one lost object collides with another.

This was the kind of impact I tried to describe above, in the glance across the room, through the milling crowd, that set my friend and me vibrating on the same wavelength. Vibration, in fact, is as good a term as any to characterize what happens when the action of the unconscious upon a given subject redounds upon another subject, generating a resonance which is not an identity. Pluck a guitar string alongside a violin and the latter will vibrate at the same frequency; it is not yet music, but it is an invitation to take up the instruments and make them sing. “Go, speak!” is the psychoanalytically salient analogy for this resonance and invitation.

On my reading, Lacan’s two best treatments of transmission are themselves transmissions in the colloquial sense, as well as demonstrations of the meaning and function of transmission as articulated from the position of the analyst. I have in mind “Psychanalyse” (later transcribed, edited, and published as Télévision [Lacan, 1974/1990]), which was broadcast in primetime on French television in 1973, just as Lacan was concluding his teaching on the sexual non-rapport, and Radiophonie (Lacan, 2001), Lacan’s earlier interview with Robert Georgin for Belgian and French radio, broadcast in 1970 under the shadow of the political upheavals of 1968. Can you imagine? Even for the initiated, these disquisitions on the same media through which they are packaged for mass consumption are notoriously unintelligible. They resist transparency. Their interpretation demands far more ink than was spilled in their first composition, as is also the case, of course, with the interpretation of dreams.

Consider a far less unusual form of unintelligibility on the airwaves: the fizzle of interference, the static hum between frequencies, or the electric snow of a dead channel. In the standardized and mass-consumable range of collective life bound by the social link and the language that structures it, this is all noise. As an analogue of the unconscious, however, it is pure signal. What it signifies is no definite content, no more than the unconscious is a fulsome intrasubjective depth awaiting its excavation by the analyst’s shovel and pick. Like Lacan’s speech, which performs rather than explains transmissions of the unconscious, it signifies other frequencies vibrating on another scene, already there among but drowned out by the more familiar image and noise that passes itself off as information, knowledge, and entertainment.

The point of this analogy is to insist that the unconscious is interference, at least as far as it can be found here on the far side of what Freud termed the primary processes. It is there where the mechanisms of mass communication—including politics, inasmuch as communication implies community and its discontents—break down, where the signifier falters, and speech becomes a conduit for the transmission of otherwise unheard frequencies that are too easily dismissed as senseless frictions in a well-tuned machine.

So, at Psychoanalysis <> Politics, a great deal of transmission took place. Interferences abounded, multiplied, conjoined into feedback loops, whines and shrieks and static distortions signaling a real frustration—the sort of frustration where thought takes place or from which a well-worn, worn-down, worn-out theory beats its retreat into the false assurances of information exchange and knowledge confirmation. All these transmissions incited an anxiety that speech, as ever, proved powerless to cure. This was psychoanalysis, after all.