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The Urgency of Locating the Transference Correctly

Several transference modes coexist in the School: the transference which is the product of the falsche Verknupfung which the analysand performs between the analyst and other figures within his life, and the transference of work among analysts, which as far as I know has not been said to be also the product of a falsche Verknupfung.

It is because the Other does not exist that we create the School. Jacques-Alain Miller comments [1] that when Lacan founded his School in 1964, he referred to antiquity, to a time when the Philosophical School was a way of finding refuge from the malaise in culture; a way of learning to cope with what life throws at us. Undoubtedly, the Psychoanalytic School does not protect us from the discomfort (Unbehagen) in culture, even less so since Miller started the ZADIG movement, proposing another path of treating discomfort; this movement does not produce comfort (this has been my experience in Israel) but it probably teaches us to believe in the real without adhering to it, and moreover, to oppose it.

The accent which Miller has placed on his reading of Lacan’s prologue to the English translation of Seminar XI [2]falls on an absent word; that word is Transference. Miller draws attention to the fact that Lacan stops talking about transference in order to shift the emphasis to the satisfaction one expects to get from analysis. It is the urgency to obtain this satisfaction which brings the analysand back to the next session, not the love for the analyst.

This clarification is very important, because transference-love is an illusion which sedates the patient and sedates the analyst, and can divert them from their work towards the real. It can turn the relationship into a refuge from the real instead of constituting that work which allows us precisely to dare to face it, to face that which requires us to acknowledge the undeniable, and to come to terms with that which cannot be repaired.

Lacan clarifies, in “La troisième,” (Rome, 1974), that the analyst is responsible for the discourse which welds the analysand not with the analyst, but with the couple analyst-analysand.

Miller, meanwhile, in his 2006 speech [3], also in Rome, ends his presentation by stating that an analyst’s analysands, even those crowned with the title of Analyst of the School, are not his works of art

Both clarifications seem urgent to me because they require us to adopt a certain modesty, and to ask ourselves what type of partner we wish to be for our analysands and for our colleagues at the School. The School allows a pluralization of transferences, a phenomenon which we study in psychoses. Within this plurality we learn “that if in this race to the truth one is but alone, although not all may get to the truth, still no one can get there but by means of the others.” [4] This means that in the School we search for a satisfaction which allows the invention of each one of us, supported by the presence of the others. This encourages a more interesting and profound way of living the mirages of love.

¹Cf, Miller, J.-A., Filosofia <> psicoanalisis, L’envers de Paris. Editorial Tres Haches, 2005.

²Miller, J.-A., Sutilezas Analiticas, “L’orientation lacanienne. Choses de finesse”, course of 21-01-2009

³Miller, J.-A., “Objectsa in the analytic experience”, tr. T. Svolos, Presentation on the theme of the 2008 Congress of the WAP, Rome, July 15, 2006, online: http://www.lacan.com/LacanianCompass9miller.htm

⁴Lacan, J., “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty”, Écrits, W.W. Norton, New York/London, 2006, p. 173.