On: transference, countertransference and projective identification

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In this essay, I define the psychoanalytic concept of transference and its development in the hundred plus years since Freud’s discovery. I illustrate it with a clinical example of a patient’s transference to me. I follow by using the same structure; define, historicise and illustrate, for the concepts of countertransference and projective identification. How countertransference is used differs by analytic school and I make a reference to the differences between Freudians, Kleinians and Independents. These foundational concepts do not belong to the consulting room only. I reference how they inform the psychosocial worlds, notably race, before concluding.

Transference is a process. Its key is ‘displacement’, displacing an unconscious idea, from the object to which it was once attached, and on to the analyst. For Freud, what was transferred was a window into unconscious assumptions, via feelings that properly belong elsewhere (Frosh, 2012). In his ‘Dora’ case study, Freud (1905) had defined transference as “new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies … aroused during the progress of the analysis”. Transference, then, is the “actualisation of unconscious wishes” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967) and a form of the mother-infant dyad (Winnicott, 1960), an illusion where someone, not consciously recognised, represents something, which forms the basis for a repetition of a relationship with an important historic figure (Sandler, Dare and Holder, 1973). The impulses (Freud, 1937) have their source in the earliest object relations and come forth as a consequence of the compulsion to repeat. The analyst works to strengthen the analysand’s ego, so that there is less displacement and the gap between fantasy and reality becomes better understood.

Its discovery and its evolution began with the attachment formed by a patient of Freud’s colleague, Breuer, later anonymised as ‘Anna O’. (Freud, 1893). Freud’s original frustration with transference, that it was a resistance to the analysis, shifted to recognition that it made the therapeutic alliance about emotion (Freud, 1910, 1912, 1914). Freudians consider that treatment is about recognising how the analysand’s transference is informed by an attempt to gratify drives, designed to reduce unpleasure (Lemma, 2016). Freud’s initial focus, was on erotic and romantic transference. Therapy was effected by love, and early appreciation of what is now described as positive transference. The negative transference, (Klein, 1952) when an analysand brings forth hostile feelings from developmental relationships, was not really considered until Klein’s work. Kleinians believe hostility is linked to the death instinct, and that hatred and envy are innate. Klein also hypothesised that what might be transferred on to the analyst might be parts of the analysand’s self, such as the superego, rather than historic relationships. (Klein, 1952, 1957). Transference today is more a projection (Kleinian) model than a displacement (Freudian) one. Post-Kleinians, including Winnicott and Bion, look at the transference developmentally. Just as the mother receives the projections of the infant and moderates and mitigates, so that the infant can receive them back, so the analyst behaves for the patient. The analyst needs to remain alert and thoughtful, in a state of ‘reverie’ (Bion, 1962). All of the communications from the patient “contain something relevant to the transference situation”. (Segal, 1981)

To illustrate the concept, I share an experience from my personal clinical work: I have been working with a patient, ‘A’, who was largely raised by a disciplinarian stepfather, who appears to have had little affection for his stepson. His biological father left when he was three. In the transference, I am sometimes the stepfather: ‘A’ splits an eagerness to please me, to get it ‘right’, but also an anxiety that he will draw my ire. ‘A’’s childhood in his stepfather’s home was, as he recalls it, dominated by the demands to be useful, by completing a number of chores. At the outset of the therapy, he talked about decorating the NHS consulting room, if he had the right tools. I understood A’s inner world to be shabby and neglected, and his need to show he could be useful, and compliant. This is evidence of displacement, as are other times, when I sense I become A’s father, albeit idealised, as someone who was understanding and interested. What emerges then, is A’s infantile desire to be interpreted and loved. In my countertransference, I feel something parental and am reminded of the unconscious desire many therapists have to repair, something Klein (1952) highlights.

Countertransference like mine, is unresolved, unconscious elements within the analyst (Freud, 1910), evoking intense feelings. (Carpy, 1989) The analyst has an unconscious reaction, identifies the analysand’s role in bringing it about, and then examines the effect on both parties (Money-Kyrle, 1956). Freud had regarded it as an impediment that should be resolved by the analyst developing more ego strength in their own analysis. No analyst is “wholly free of infantile dependence” (Racker, 1948) and feelings and impulses are determined by the past, meaning that aspects of the Oedipal situation are repeated in every countertransference. Forty years after Freud’s anxieties about countertransference, Heimann (1950) redefined it as “an instrument of research” into the patient’s unconscious, because the analyst’s unconscious understands that of his patient. The analyst, is both an interpreter and an object of the impulses felt by the patient. Klein (1952), although prioritising the child’s phantasy life and unconscious phantasies, held similar views to Freud, claiming that only by analysing “the transference situation to its depths” could the past in both real and phantasy be understood.  However, it is the ‘post-Kleinians’ (Bion, 1959, Segal 1975, Rosenfeld, 1987) that have been at the forefront of countertransference’s development. Currently, it is usually defined as being both the analyst’s own transference and the analyst’s response to the analysand’s transference.

Despite the significance of Ferenczi and Alice Balint’s views, that the analyst’s own feelings should be shared with the analysand (Heimann, 1950), little was written about countertransference until the end of the 1940’s (Racker, 1948). In developing Klein (1946), Winnicott (1947), had been amongst the first to grasp its significance for working with psychotic patient populations when describing hatred towards the patient. This is relevant for our contemporary understanding of issues like racism, founded upon the “irrationality of the unconscious” (Timimi, 1996). It was Heimann, though, that encouraged a more constructive view of something she felt was created by the patient; the aforementioned instrument of research. Klein (1952), who prioritised the child’s phantasy life and unconscious phantasies, rarely used the term countertransference until writing about the infantile roots for both parties in seeking ‘reassurance’ (1957). Ten years after Heimann, writing that the analyst needed to ‘sustain’ and not ‘discharge’ feelings, the word countertransference was “in danger of losing its identity” according to Winnicott (1960). He was inclined to Freud’s view and defined countertransference as “neurotic features” disturbing the analysis and spoiling the analyst’s “professional attitude.” Independents and post-Kleinians have been at the forefront of subsequent development, making it a “fertile, intersubjective field” (White, 2006). Winnicott (1963) and Bion (1965) looked at it developmentally, and Ogden (1994) has made it more about intersubjectivity, with his concept of the ‘analytic third’. More contemporary views are that the analyst should allow themselves to participate in the enactment required by the patient’s projections, in order to become conscious of the phantasy and emotion (Rosenfeld, 1971, Joseph, 1989, Bollas, 1987,1992).

In my work with a woman, ‘B’, I often find myself struggling to concentrate. I wonder if she is making me mad (Winnicott, 1960). I find myself wanting the sessions to come to an end and notice her need for attention, but how I seem to be resisting giving it. Her mother was diagnosed as schizophrenic, after ‘B’ reached adulthood. Her father left pre-adolescence and had a second family, so she has half-brothers. Everything about her world and world view appears to be influenced by splits. Her maternal care and her parents’ divorce concretised her views, I believe, and pulled her back from a developing depressive position to paranoid schizoid (Klein, 1946). I experience her as happiest when complaining about her family, friends, colleagues, and employment. I, guilty with inattention, sense a whining child, starved of gratification. Racker (1953) would suggest the patient is emotionally blocking and I am succumbing to “pampering”, initiated by my guilt at my wandering attention. By pampering, I re-focus intently and become a good Object for ‘B’, as the father was before he left. Sometimes my countertransference is paternally protective, (Money-Kyrle, 1956), but I think I often act out the neglectful mother, creating a guilt, which is a consequence of my inability to be a necessary container for her anxieties (Bion, 1959, 1962). This acting out has made me sympathetic to the Joseph, Rosenfeld and Bollas approaches.

Projective Identification, (PI), pre-dates Heimann’s constructive view of countertransference but had already transformed the transference/countertransference dynamic from a displacement to a projection focus (Klein, 1946). PI is an unconscious, omnipotent phantasy best captured by the lay phrase ‘giving someone a piece of my mind’. It is not everything that makes up the countertransference, (Heimann, 1950), but invariably seems to be the dominant feature in a therapeutic relationship; most commonly manifested as a part of the patient’s self, projected into the object (Segal, 1964) and where the projector is psychically aligned with the person into whom it has been projected. This is done, with the aim not simply of expulsion, but of using the projection to control the therapist, (Segal, 1981) inducing feelings or thoughts or by provoking forms of enactment. The object is transformed by the projection (Feldman, 2009). The projector fantasises taking over the therapist and influencing the recipient so that they think and respond in a way that is congruent with the projection (Ogden, 1982). The therapist processes what is projected, so that it can be palatably returned and the projector can introject what had needed expelling.

PI has been taken up by many theoreticians, notably Bion (1959, 1970), who adapted it by identifying what was projected as ‘beta elements’ that the therapist made sense of thanks to utilising ‘alpha function’, and then being able to reproject them. He considered that PI was understood as ‘a three-dimensional space’, into which patients projected the parts of their personality that they had split off. Klein thought that this was ‘observable’ in psychotic and borderline patients and Bion agreed with her that the ‘degree of fragmentation’ and the distance to which split-off fragments were projected was a measure of the distance a patient had from contact with reality. In his studies of the containment process (1959,1962), he observed how a mother takes in and allows herself to be affected by her infant’s projection of distress. The mother/analyst has not only contained an experience but transformed it. For some, enactment opens analytical work to “deep unconscious identifications and primitive levels of functioning” which are beyond the reach of the intellect, (Tuckett, 1997) albeit recognising one’s own feelings can be difficult (Brenman-Pick, 1985)

One of my experiences of PI came from a patient, ‘C’, presenting as depressed and unable to develop relationships. ‘C’ earned his PhD at Oxford, where his father was a fellow, while his grandfather was a celebrated and distinguished medic. He now edited a well-known scientific magazine, but felt his achievements were inferior to his family history, and he was ‘phoney’. (Winnicott, 1960). In our early work, he let me know that he thought that psychotherapy was “pointless”. Anyone working in the NHS, was probably unable to develop a private practise. He projected feelings of inferiority into me, in order to rid them from himself (Rosenfeld, 1987) and to enable him to adopt the superior status he associated with his father and grandfather. I found myself identifying with the intellectual inferiority, responding by making theoretical and technical interventions in the sessions. I became the boy he had been, desperately trying to show my academic and intellectual accomplishments to a demanding father. I was compliant and beginning a “defensive collusive arrangement” (Feldman, 2009).  I had acted out something congruent with what had been projected into me, seeking attention and admiration. Once I became aware of what was happening, we were able to think about the competitive need for superiority. Eventually, he was able to introject the split off part and to accommodate it, recognising that he was still seeking parental love.

The concepts of transference, splitting and PI are fundamental to our psychosocial world. Klein (1952) asserted that transference operated throughout our lives influencing all relationships. Transference includes other significant figures beyond the parental couple, taking in the realm of the collective social unconscious. The social world contains multiple projected and introjected transference contents. External events, such as those affecting race or gender often catalyse a regression in psychic functioning activating defences. (Hamer, 2006) ‘D’, a Pakistani male patient of mine, projected his feelings of being unwelcome, on to outbursts against the Polish builders working on his apartment block, because of their use of their native tongue. He wanted to rid himself of being identified as an immigrant Other, and identify with my white, native born status. Reciprocal projective identifications can establish a preferred element of the self in the white. (Timimi, 1996). He may also have harboured suspicions of my unconscious and unexpressed attitudes to race. Racism might be transference in a regressed state (Hamer, 2006) characterised by splitting of the self, obscuring the ‘true self’ (Winnicott, 1960) to protect it from annihilation. Splitting is the psychoanalytic basis for racism (Timimi, 1996)

I have defined and illustrated the concepts of transference, countertransference and projective identification. In my work, I find I incline more to the Freudian displacement of past relationships, than to Kleinian split off parts of the self, but appreciate the contemporary use of enactment, intellectually and affectively. I like Racker’s (1948) observation that psychoanalysts choose their work based on “the object relations of infancy” and because of its reparative nature (Money-Kyrle, 1956), which seems rather Kleinian. Her assertion that transference operates all through our lives, influencing every relationship, is why I believe we need to apply what we can learn in the clinic to the world beyond; what the IPA’s podcast characterises as psychoanalysis “off the couch”. It requires a longer essay to do justice to the great psychosocial themes of race, ethnicity, religious marginalisation, sexual identity and fluidity, as well as social constructs around ‘normality’, disability and social class, but I have demonstrated the power of the unconscious, and how something once perceived as an impediment, is now a critical therapeutic tool.

References:

Balint, A & Balint, M. (1939) On transference and countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 20.  pp.225-230

Bion, W.R. (1959) Attacks on Linking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 40, pp. 308-15

Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.

Bion, W.R. (1965) Transformations: Change from Learning to Growth. London: Heinemann.

Bion, W.R. (1970) Attention and Interpretation New York: Basic Books

Bollas, C. (1987) The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. London: FAB

Bollas, C. (1992) Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience London: Karnac

Brenman Pick, I. (1985). Working Through in the Countertransference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 66, pp.157-166

Carpy, D.V., (1989). Tolerating the countertransference: A mutative process. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis70, pp. 227-241.

Feldman, M (1997) Projective identification: the analyst’s involvement International Journal of Psycho-Analysis78, pp.287-294.

Feldman, M. (2009). Doubt, Conviction and the Analytic Process: Selected Papers of Michael Feldman Hove, East Sussex. Routledge.

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Freud, S (1914) Remembering, Repeating and Working Through. In: SE12 Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud pp. 145-156

Frosh, S. (2012). A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hamer, F. (2006) Racism as a Transference State Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75(1) pp. 197-214

Heimann, P (1950) On Countertransference International Journal of Psychoanalysis 31.  pp. 81-84 

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Joseph, B. (1985). Transference: The Total Situation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 66.  pp.447-454

Joseph, B (1989) Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of Betty Joseph London: Routledge

Klein, M. (1946) Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 27 (3).

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Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J-B. (1967) The Language of Psychoanalysis London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

Lemma, A. (2016) Introduction to the Practice of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Money-Kyrle, R.E. (1956) Normal Counter-Transference and Some of its Deviations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 37 (3) pp. 360-66

Ogden, T (1982) Projective Identification and Psychotherapeutic Technique New York: Jason Aronson

Ogden, T (1994) The analytic third: working with intersubjective clinical facts. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 75.  pp. 3-19

Racker, H. (1948) The Countertransference Neurosis. In: Transference and Countertransference. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Racker, H (1953) The Meanings and Uses of Countertransference. In: Transference and Countertransference. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

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Segal, H (1981) The Work of Hanna Segal New York: Jason Aronson

Timimi, S (1996) Race and Colour in Internal and External Reality. British Journal of Psychotherapy 13(2) pp. 183-192

Tuckett, D (1997) Mutual Enactment in the psychoanalytic situation. In: The Perverse Transference and Other Matters: Essays in Honor of R. Horacio Etchegoyen.

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On Transference and Countertransference

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“It is only by analysing the transference situation to its depth that we are able to discover the past both in its realistic and phantastic aspects”. (Klein, 1952). In this essay, I shall attempt to define the psychoanalytic terms transference and countertransference. I shall begin with definitions and Freud’s discovery of transference, and go on to explain how the idea of transference and its utility in the analytic process has changed with time. Change came with later psychoanalysts, but the most profound impact may have been that of Melanie Klein, and so I consider her work, and the impact of theories based on projection and projective identification. I then attempt to review what transference is when it is in the clinic, referencing several post-Freudian analysts. Before discussing what countertransference is, I consider the term negative transference, in order to distinguish it from countertransference. I go on to think about transference in the analytic session, how it works, and also to reference the importance of erotic transference. I consider if transference is used outside the clinic given that psychoanalysis is not just a form of therapy. Lastly, I make a few short conclusions.

How does one define transference, which I regard as fundamental to the analytic process? Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) give one of the best definitions, in my opinion: “A process of actualisation of unconscious wishes. Transference uses specific objects and operates in the framework of a specific relationship established with these objects. Its context par excellence is the analytic situation. In the transference, infantile prototypes re-emerge and are experienced with a strong sensation of immediacy.” Transference, whilst unconscious can be brought into consciousness and enacted. Many analysts believe that how the analysand reacts to the frame i.e. the fixed timing and location of the session, is a form of transference. Lateness is interpreted as a punishing anger, and early arrival as something revealing anxiety. Transference might come into a session as (attempted) manipulation or as a provocation. Frosh (2012, p.192) cites Spillius et al (2011) in considering how transference became central to psychoanalysis from its early beginnings. It now seems to be much more about externalising unconscious fantasy, informed by the past and developed in the relationship in the analytic sessions, whereas Freud held that it was a displacement of an unconscious idea from a person in the analysand’s past, on to the analyst in the room. Having originally thought transference interfered with the work of analysis, he came to see value in the analysand’s feelings, believing that they had value as a means of understanding a neurosis. In his 1914 paper “Remembering, repeating and working-through” he explored how primitive emotions could have free expression and become useful for self-exploration.

The origin or discovery of transference is attributed to Freud. However, in 1917, in letters to first Sandor Ferenczi, and then to Karl Abraham, he draws their attentions to the work of Georg Groddeck, with whom he had just started corresponding and who may be regarded as the first ‘wild analyst’. Groddeck eventually stayed outside of the psychoanalytical organisations, but was famous for his work on somatic and psychosomatic illnesses. Groddeck had emphasised the importance of transference, particularly negative transference, which I explore later in this essay, which had impressed Freud. Freud originally thought of transference as an obstruction and that it inhibited a patient from free associating. Transference was discovered by Freud, when thinking of the difficulties that caused Breuer to stop seeing his patient, known as ‘Anna O’. Breuer was worried by the unconscious emotional charge in the room, as it was erotic. It complicated the work. It was a little later that Freud himself came to understand its efficacy, as a tool for ‘working through’. The analysand brings buried feelings and thoughts from past relationships and ‘transfers’ them to the analyst.

Freud identified its more positive influence (1905, p.116) as part of what became known as the ‘Dora case’. He wrote of “new editions of the impulses and phantasies” which was about how feelings were transferred into the room when they properly belonged elsewhere. Freud came to see himself as the recipient of ‘transferred feelings’; things that were unresolved from past relationships and a window into the unconscious of the analysand. Although ‘Dora’ ended her therapy with him, and he came to see it as a ‘failed case’, it is one of the landmark moments in the development of psychoanalysis. He thought if analysands could be helped to identify what was being transferred, especially how patterns of past maladaptive relationships tended to repeat, then they could be helped to moderate the impacts. Freud went on to note that it was the most difficult, as well as the most important, part of analytic technique. In 1914, he was writing that the analytic setting was a playground where the repetitions could take place and in his 1915 paper, “Observations on transference love” he noted “there can be no doubt that the outbreak of a passionate demand for love is largely the work of resistance”.

A little after Freud, Strachey (1934) wrote about transference interpretation. Its weight and significance is conveyed by “that which the analyst most feared and most wished to avoid”. One of the reasons for the fears, are what is happening to the analyst. Money-Kyrle (1956) noted that “the analyst’s experience of the patient’s projections may be linked with the analyst’s own internal reactions to the material.” I develop this below when discussing projective identification and countertransference, which Money-Kyrle (ibid. p.361) called a “delicate receiving apparatus”. It was Fairbairn (1958) who best summarised the centrality of working with transference as part of the treatment: “psychoanalytic treatment resolves itself into a struggle on the part of the patient to press-gang his relationship with the analyst into a closed system of the inner world through the agency of transference” (my italics). The transference is of little use without acknowledgement, and more significantly, interpretation. Strachey understood it as a lengthy process, “modification of the patient’s super-ego is brought about in a series of innumerable small steps by the agency of mutative interpretations, which are effected by the analyst in virtue of his position as object of the patient’s id-impulses and as auxiliary super-ego.”

Around the time that Strachey was writing, Melanie Klein was developing her ideas and in 1946 produced the seminal paper on projective identification. She wrote, “projective identification involves projection in that it is an identifying of the object with split-off parts of the self. Projective identification has given an added dimension to what we understand by transference, in that transference need not now be regarded simply as a repetition of the past.”. Transference, from a clinical point of view was evolving. Sandler (1987) felt it gave an ‘added dimension’ to transference “in that transference need not now be regarded as a repetition of the past”. Arundale and Bellman (2011) wrote that the projection of “early infantile states of mind” are akin, clinically, to transference and countertransference in having both ‘communicative’ and ‘evacuative’ functions. Feldman (2009) described Klein’s formulation of projective identification as “an unconscious phantasy in which the patient expelled what were usually disturbing contents into another object”. He goes on to describe how the object is then transformed in the patient’s mind because it now contains the expelled material. He added that it was not just a “method of evacuation” but provides other comforts for the patient such as believing that they can possess or control the object. “The patient’s phantasies, expressed by gross or subtle, verbal or non-verbal means, may come to influence the analyst’s state of mind”. 

The modern and Kleinian work of analysis is to contain the projections, work them through until they can be handed back, ‘introjected into’ the analysand, in a tolerable form. Klein saw transference as feelings being remembered and used. Steiner (1993) described it thus “We have come to use countertransference to refer to the totality of the analyst’s reactions in his relationship with the patient. The recognition of the importance of projective identification in creating these reactions led naturally to the idea that counter-transference is an important source of information about the state of the mind of the patient.” However, he warns “self-deception and unconscious collusion with the patient to evade reality makes counter-transference unreliable without additional corroboration”. Brenman-Pick (1985) reminds us that “constant projecting by the patient into the analyst is the essence of analysis”. Feldman (2009) describes projective identification as using an ‘omnipotent phantasy’ to defend primitive anxieties. He also highlights Bion’s work on containment to note “the mother’s responses to normal or pathological varieties of projective identification, emphasised the mother’s crucial function of taking in and allowing herself to be affected by the infant’s projection of severe anxiety or distress”.

The analyst also has his or her own transference. One thing the analyst has to be aware of, and be able to analyse, is the possibility of an analysand working through an enactment, sometimes called an ‘actualisation’. This is when something unconscious affects the participants and the responses cannot be contained and become part of the behavioural responses. Often these can lead to damaging and inappropriate responses known as ‘boundary transgressions’. The analyst needs to isolate the analysand’s responses and to understand when they might be acting out something informed by past relationships. If done well and appropriately, it becomes something to discuss, to ‘work through’ and can be explored as part of the therapy. Auchincloss and Samberg (2014) describe it thus: “Enactment is a co-constructed verbal and/or behavioural experience during a psychoanalytic treatment in which a patient’s expression of a transference fantasy evokes a countertransference “action” in the analyst. Enactments are “symbolic interactions” … in that they carry unconscious meanings for both patient and analyst, unconsciously initiated by the patient and evoking unconscious compliance in the analyst.” What is happening is exemplified by Brenman-Pick (1985), describing the clinical temptation to be a maternal figure, “we may act out by becoming excessively sympathetic to the patient”.

In the clinic, it is often this relationship, with the primary carer, that is transferred, and the analyst that needs to do the maternal containing, usually because it had been absent in the past, through reasons of a mother being overwhelmed and neglectful. Brenman-Pick (1985) described a state of mind which sought another state of mind “just as a mouth seeks a breast as an inborn potential.” The analysand may make assumptions about the analyst’s personal life and therefore thoughts, even though she has no information on which to base such assumptions. The analyst uses these fantasies rather than dismiss them. Winnicott (1947) goes so far as to describe ‘exploiting’ the transference. An analyst might note how the analysand is prone to assume something about them especially if it feels judgmental. This may be because of a past where judgment, particularly if it was from a parent, has been common. An analyst can illustrate that the analysand is responding as if she was attacked, and yet there was no attack from what is likely to have been an open ended, perhaps ambiguous comment. It might manifest as a need to impress, perhaps by listing achievements, which might reveal an insecurity about not being respected, by a teacher or an employer. It might be a hastiness to agree with an interpretation, which is little more than speculation, but is transferred from avoiding conflict in other relationships, often a spouse.

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Arundale (2011) reflects on Feldman’s work in this area and writes “As he understands it, the historical objects from the patient’s past are alive in the present moment as internal objects, so that they are available as transference objects”, she goes on to add that when the transference relationship is understood and properly experienced it allows the past to become clearer and for internal objects to be modified. She credits Strachey (1934) with creating a template for psychic change for future generations of analytic schools by identifying “mutative transference interpretation”. In the work, the relationship with the analyst is a foundation; a template for how future relationships might be formed to break the patterns of the past. Ultimately the aim is to reach a Bion moment of significance, when the analysand can be introduced to his or herself. Frosh (2012, p.190) puts it very concisely “…the reality of the analyst’s behaviour. Why should the analyst’s silence be interpreted as hostile judgment rather than supportive listening? The answer here is ‘because of the transference’”. Sandler (1976) considered the manipulative element of the dyadic relationship and wrote that “in the transference…the patient attempts to prod the analyst into behaving in a particular way and unconsciously scans and adapts to his perception of the analyst’s reaction”. He writes about the analysand resisting the impulse to be aware of any “infantile relationship” that he/she might be trying to impose. Separately Sandler (1990 p. 869) wrote about how an analysand might try “to impose on the situation a role relationship with the analyst”, which is the enactment described above.

What to do with all this transferential material, though? Roth (2001) observes that the transference has different levels of interpretation in the clinic. At one level, it links what is happening in the clinic with the analysand’s past, but moves to a level linking events in the analysand’s life outside the clinic and on to interpreting unconscious phantasies about the analyst and the analysis. The deepest level is to “enact phantasy configurations”. Roth opens her paper referencing another analyst’s material about a dream, but what is being considered is transference. She goes on to use other clinical examples of her own, to consider the multiple ways a transference can be interpreted and what the clinician needs to be aware of. How to separate layers of material and how to identify working with transference on the countertransference. I write about countertransference in more detail below. Roth notes how she is reviewing “complex transference manifestations” as she attempts to maintain the analysand’s trust and interest, but to get her to understand the links between what she is saying and what it means, and how it is being brought into the clinic. She guides us through her work deeper, by transference interpretation level, past an aggressive projective identification to a level four enactment which is a kind of seduction scene. Her conclusions summarise the importance of transference, which I regard as the foundation of the analytic work; “our sense of conviction about our patient’s internal world comes ultimately from our understanding of the here-and-now transference relationship between us”.

What happens when the analysand is transferring something from a difficult past relationship, or needs to project aggressive, hostile and unwanted, intolerable feelings into the analyst? This is the realm of negative transference; hostile feelings that the analyst’s presence elicits in the analysand. Analysts often have to start their work by demonstrating a caring side to become a ‘good object’, so that there is trust. This is the ‘therapeutic alliance’, but most often the effective work is done when the analyst becomes the ‘bad object’, and can show the analysand that the clinic is a non-judgmental space, and that difficult feelings can be contained and worked through. Understanding a phenomenon such as negative transference and more importantly, appreciating its utility, was largely the work of Melanie Klein, who had developed the ‘good breast/bad breast’ understanding of infantile love and hate, and she noted that the analyst was often split by the analysand into a good figure and a bad one, often in the same session. The demand of the analyst is to contain the anger, to ‘work through it’ and to behave as the nurturing mother of early infancy, and once again, to not judge the person from whom the hostility has come. The gentlest of questions, the most ambiguous of references, the calmest of silences can all be interpreted as hostile by an analysand with a negative transference. In Klein’s 1952 paper she wrote “we can fully appreciate the interconnection between positive and negative transferences only if we explore the early interplay between love and hate, and the vicious circle of aggression, anxieties, feelings of guilt and increased aggression, as well as the various aspects of objects towards whom these conflicting emotions and anxieties are directed.” And “I became convinced that the analysis of the negative transference, which had received relatively little attention in psycho-analytic technique, is a precondition for analysing the deeper layers of the mind.”

There is something in the word ‘counter’ that suggests resistance and even an aggressive return, as in ‘counterpunch’. Negative connotations perhaps, so is it related to negative transference? No. Countertransference has more than one definition, but is not negative transference. It might be a psychic response to it, though. Laplanche and Pontilis (1973, p.92) define “the whole of the analyst’s unconscious reactions to the individual analysand – especially to the analysand’s own transference”. Also, “some authors take the counter-transference to include everything in the analyst’s personality liable to affect the treatment, while others restrict it to those unconscious processes which are brought about in the analyst by the transference of the analysand.” This is difficult because if, as in some definitions, it is to be used as a tool in the analytic work, how can we deploy something that is unconscious? Nonetheless, prominent post-Freudians such as Winnicott (1947) thought it played a central role in the analytic work. He described it as “the analyst’s love and hate in reaction to the actual personality and behaviour of the patient”. For Freud, it was the analyst’s transference, how she had been affected by what the analysand had brought to the session. He regarded it as the neurotic response of the analyst, not a good thing, and something to be resolved by more analysis for the analyst. Sandler (1976) notes that Freud saw it as impeding understanding, because it clouded the mind, which was the tool needed to do the work; an interference with the work of interpretation.

More lately, with a Kleinian influence, it has come to mean the specific response of an analyst to the analysand’s transference. It is about taking in the analysand’s projections and being able to contain them. The analyst, in this way, comes to feel what the analysand is feeling and her ability to absorb and reflect helps the analysand when the projections are passed back and reintrojected. The analysand starts to feel things are more manageable and to be able to master integration, shifting from paranoid-schizoid positions to a depressive one. The working out of transference and countertransference go on together as a relational event – the feelings in the analysand become the data to analyse, upon which interpretations and reflections can be based. The analysand will be looking for signs that what she has projected into the analyst is being contained and perhaps cared for, or alternatively what is happening, if it is causing some panic or discomfort. In this understanding of countertransference there is a view that it signals to the analyst what is happening in the analysand’s unconscious life; rather different to the Freudian sense that it was exclusively an issue for the analyst. So, it is both the analyst’s own transference and her response to the analysand’s transference. Not only does an analyst feel her own countertransference but must then productively and subsequently analyse it.

Heiman (1950) was the first analyst to consider the positive influence of countertransference, “an instrument of research into the patient’s unconscious” – she describes it as the “patient’s creation” and that it is a part of the patient’s persona. Therefore, the analyst can use it as a guide to understanding the transference the analysand offers. She noted that the analyst has to sustain the feelings stirred within her, and not to let them go as the analysand does, but to “subordinate them to the analytic task” functioning as a “mirror reflection” to the analysand. Her definition was “all feelings which the analyst experiences towards his patient”. Her paper was the first to suggest that countertransference was ubiquitous. All feelings and everywhere makes it a complicated tool to use. To what extent is one dealing with the analysand’s material and to what extent might it be more about the analyst’s own past? Being able to engage, and yet analyse the situation with detachment, is a critical skill. Heimann wrote that the analyst “has to perceive the manifest and latent meaning of his patient’s words, the allusions and implications, the links to former sessions, the references to childhood situations behind the descriptions of current relationships”. She best summarised it as “in the comparison of feelings roused in himself with his patient’s associations and behaviour, the analyst possesses a most valuable means of checking whether he has understood or failed to understand his patient.” 

The post-Heimann approach continues to evolve and become more nuanced. Roth (2018) takes Heimann’s mid-twentieth century view as countertransference being something pathological, and something for the analyst to own for her own self-analysis, and shows how it moved into being accepted as a tool to help with an analysand’s development. How to utilise it has been subtly different in the techniques of many analysts and he cites Balint, Fairbairn, Tower and Winnicott. Nonetheless he emphasises Heimann’s view of it as a creation brought to her. What it meant was a shift from conventional analysis requiring the neutrality of the analyst, sometimes called ‘the blank screen’, to the analyst being actively involved in a process; a more dynamic therapeutic alliance, properly open to projection and introjection. To clarify this, he cites Money-Kyrle (1956) “as the patient speaks the analyst will, as it were, become introspectively identified with him and having understood him inside will re-project and interpret”. In Segal’s 1997 paper, “The use and abuse of countertransference”, however, there is a warning to emphasise the need of proper understanding. As Segal suggested, whilst it can be “the best of servants” it can also function as the worst of masters. One example might be ‘enactment’ – against which Freud had warned – as I highlighted above. Roys (2011, p.163) describes how the analyst shifts position back and forth between concordant (a sense of sharing the analysand’s experience) and complementary (when the transference has affected the analyst so that something is felt towards the analysand).

Freud’s early encounters with transference were noteworthy because of the erotic elements. Having explored the erotic transference as resistance, he wrote, “of the first kind (of resistance) are the patient’s endeavour to assure herself of her irresistibility, to destroy the doctor’s authority by bringing him down to the level of a lover”. What he understood was the need to work with it, having initially seen it as nuisance. “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”. He thought it would be bringing repressed material into the conscious realm, but then ensuring it was repressed once more by a fearful patient, who would “feel only the humiliation, and she will not fail to take her revenge for it”. For clarity’s sake, “analytic technique requires of the physician that he should deny to the patient who is craving for love the satisfaction she demands”. He added that the patient would have “what all patients strive for in analysis – she would have succeeded in acting out”, which is probably the first reference to what I refer to above as ‘enactment’. Freud’s patients were, of course, predominantly women and usually treated for hysteria, hence the slightly unbalanced gendered views; modern clinical work is consistent with transference from male, female and non-binary individuals. As he noted, though, ‘transference-love’ must be worked through in the therapy “and traced back to its unconscious origins”. An analyst must be able to demonstrate distance from the transference love as Mann (1999, p.7) observed, “the erotic connects people at deeply unconscious levels, driving them into relationships at least at the level of fantasy”. He thought that closeness activates erotic material in the unconscious, but also that the greater the activation of erotic material in the unconscious, the closer the bond two people develop.

Before concluding this essay, it is important to ask, ‘does transference exist outside the clinic?’ Klein (1952) was clear, “in some form or other transference operates throughout life and influences all human relations”. I think it is helpful to imagine walking into a room of strangers at a party or a conference. Does one want to be seen and not heard, or to be acknowledged, heard and visible? What is happening? We are seeing around us a number of people as hostile, or as potential allies. This is informed by our past relationships and some form of transference is underway. Sandler, Dare and Holder (1973) observed that it enters all relationships and these (e.g. choice of spouse/employer) are often determined by some characteristic of the other person who (consciously or unconsciously) represents some attribute of an important figure of the past. It seems highly probable that it goes on at all times in our lives. Psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick, suggests it is a form of transference that political leaders exploit to facilitate what the psychologists understand as ‘group processes’. Generations after generations this seems to be a constant, as we note today with the tragic manipulation of the Russian people.

This essay has discussed the psychoanalytic terms, transference and countertransference. It has described their origination and their development. It has asserted that they are fundamental to the work of psychoanalysis in the clinic, but also that they are ubiquitous and exist outside the clinic. It has considered how such an important concept continues to evolve as the theoretical baton gets handed on to each new post-Freudian generation, but has focused on what Melanie Klein and Object Relations Theory brought to developing Freud’s discovery, and how Paula Heimann was the critical developer of countertransference by seeing it as an important tool for the clinician. In conclusion, I suggest that psychoanalysis is only effective when the pillars of the clinical work, that are transference and countertransference, are properly understood and deployed.

References

Arundale, J. and Bellman, D.B. eds., 2018. Transference and countertransference: A unifying focus of psychoanalysis. Routledge.

Pick, I.B., 1985. Working through in the countertransference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis66, pp.157-166.

Britton, R. and Steiner, J., 1994. Interpretation: Selected fact or overvalued idea? International Journal of Psycho-Analysis75, pp.1069-1078.

Carpy, D.V., 1989. Tolerating the countertransference: A mutative process. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis70, pp.287-294.

Etchegoyen, L., 2010. The analyst’s response to the effects of the transference: On Lacan and Bion. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis91(2), pp.399-401.

Fairbairn, W.R.D., 1958. On the nature and aims of psycho-analytical treatment. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis39, pp.374-385.

Feldman, M., 2009. Doubt, Conviction and the Analytic Process. Routledge

Freud, S. (1917) Letter from Sigmund Freud to Karl Abraham, November 11, 1917. The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham 1907-1925 52:361-362 

Freud, S. (1917) Letter from Sigmund Freud to Sándor Ferenczi, June 3, 1917. The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914-1919 26:211-212 

Freud, S., 1958. Remembering, repeating and working-through (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works (pp. 145-156).

Freud, S., 1953. Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (1905 [1901]). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901-1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works (pp. 1-122).

Freud, S., 1955. Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X (1909): Two Case Histories (‘Little Hans’ and the ‘Rat Man’) (pp. 151-318).

Freud, S., 1958. Observations on transference-love (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis III). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works (pp. 157-171).

Frosh, S., 2012. A brief introduction to psychoanalytic theory. Red Globe Press

Heimann, P., 1950. On counter-transference. International journal of psycho-analysis31, pp.81-84.

Heimann, P., 1960. Counter-transference. Part II. British Journal of Medical Psychology.

Katz-Bearnot, S.P., 2014. Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, edited by Elizabeth L. Auchincloss, MD, and Eslee Samberg, MD, Yale University Press, New. Psychodynamic Psychiatry42(4), pp.700-702

Klein, M., 1952. The origins of transference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis33, pp.433-438.

Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J., 1967. The language of psychoanalysis. London: Karnac.

Money-Kyrle, R.E., 1956. Normal counter-transference and some of its deviations. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis37, pp.360-366.

Roth, P (2001) Mapping the landscape International Journal of psychoanalysis 82 p.533-43

Roys, P., 2018. Two impulses to end an analysis: exploring the transference and countertransference. In Transference and Countertransference (pp. 157-179). Routledge.

Sandler, J., 1976. Countertransference and role-responsiveness. International Review of psycho-analysis3, pp.43-47.

Sandler, J. (1987) The Concept of projective Identification London: Routledge

Sandler, J., Dare, C., Holder, A. and Dreher, A.U., 2018. The patient and the analyst: The basis of the psychoanalytic process. Routledge.

Segal, H., 1977. Countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy6, pp.31-37.

Spillius, E.B., Milton, J., Garvey, P., Couve, C. and Steiner, D., 2011. The new dictionary of Kleinian thought. Routledge.

Steiner, J., 1994. Patient‐centered and analyst‐centered interpretations: Some implications of containment and countertransference. Psychoanalytic inquiry14(3), pp.406-422.

Strachey, J., 1934. The nature of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Classics in psychoanalytic technique, pp.361-378.

Winnicott, D.W., 1994. Hate in the counter-transference. The Journal of psychotherapy practice and research3(4), p.348.

On: Literature and Psychoanalysis – a symbiosis

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“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch”, so said William Styron. What is the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis?

In this essay, I want to explain what psychoanalysis is when it is applied ‘outside the clinic’. I develop the thinking by focusing on the relationship between both disciplines. In an oft-cited paper Felman (1982) considered the relationship, but talked about psychoanalysis as dominant to literature, akin to the master-slave relationship. I consider that paper and why I find that problematic. Using examples from writers who pre-date the birth of psychoanalysis, when the first of Freud’s papers were published in 1895; first, I think about how literature gave psychoanalysis the descriptive skill that articulates the impact of the unconscious. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Flaubert and Dickens are all relevant. Second, I then consider Freud’s writing, specifically ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) and how it defines something presented to us by Shakespeare’s melancholic, Jaques, from ‘As You Like It’, and from Dickens’s Miss Havisham. Is this an example of psychoanalytic mastery and dominance? I suggest it is not, but that the relationship is one of symbiosis: mutualism not parasitism. Third, I continue by considering the psychoanalytic reader. What is the emotional impact of being a reader and how does reading words on a page engage our emotions? What is happening unconsciously and to our unconscious?

Finally, I consider modern literature and what psychoanalysis has brought to it – I wonder if it allowed us to tolerate damaged psychic states and so gave room for the publication of something like Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”. If literature has informed psychoanalysis, it must be in how it presents itself. Therefore, I consider psychoanalytic writing, as distinct from bringing psychoanalysis to reading. The brilliant analysis of Freud’s Dora case analysed by Marcus (1976), allows me to examine the writing of modern psychoanalysts such as Thomas Ogden and Adam Phillips before I draw my conclusions.

What is it for psychoanalysis to be outside the clinic? Psychoanalysis is far more than a therapeutic treatment. Whilst it is a method for treating neuroses, it is extended to a body of knowledge about the mind. It is also a research tool; a method or approach, in seeking knowledge. The tool is the therapeutic use of ‘free association’ rooted in the work done in the clinic. The critical claim is that there is an unconscious. What is psychoanalysis, when it is outside the clinic? Is there a difficulty that a text cannot respond, unlike the analysand in the clinic? The response to an interpretation is part of the clinical work, so how can psychoanalysis work, never mind thrive, outside the clinic? Can you draw on psychoanalysis without being an analyst? Can you have not undergone analysis, but still be able to lend insights back to psychoanalysis? I think so. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan thought so, emphasising one must analyse the words, not the person, not unlike a literary critic. The difficulty is that the unconscious is dynamic. Text is static, but how we read it is dynamic – it can suggest different things to us. We are not stepping into the same river twice. We notice different things each time we read a text, watch a film, hear music or look at a sculpture. What is psychoanalytic, is the comfort with one’s ‘not knowing’. An analyst does not tell an analysand the meaning to her life, but lets it emerge, so that the analysand feels she has more awareness.

In considering the work of Hanna Segal, Bell (1999) argues for psychoanalysis outside the clinic. He asserts that his perspective views psychoanalysis as “a body of knowledge of the mind”, which is distinct from the application of that knowledge. This is important when considering the master-slave relationship in the Felman essay. Bell suggests that critics of psychoanalysis look for validation of its core claims when examining accounts of treatments, but he suggests a “realist ontology” for the objects which it investigates. He talks about transference and projection as being as real as tables and chairs. He cites Freud’s 1908 paper “Creative Writers and Day dreaming” and he notes that psychoanalysis meets literature “on a number of different terrains”. First, it might be that literature is something that can illustrate psychoanalytic theory, second, the reverse, the theory can illuminate the text, noting that Klein wrote three papers with literary themes. Segal too, used psychoanalytic theory to illuminate a number of literary texts. This illustrates the concept of the portability of the clinic. The theory can move beyond the physical analytic frame, which is the clinic. Outside the clinic it is the application of theory.

Similarly, Frosh (2020) notes that a psychoanalytic setting, the clinic, can move, and that what is retained “is little more than a theoretical orientation that accepts a notion of the ‘unconscious’ as crucial for understanding motivation and behaviour.” That is not to disparage its existence outside the clinic, but to recognise it. The key element is language, interpreted using psychoanalytic principles. The theoretical constructs are the dynamic unconscious, free association, transference and interpretation. This is not an exhaustive list. Psychoanalytic interpretation is not restricted to the intellect, but to the nature of relationships, and it is relationships that provide the opportunity for transference, countertransference and then interpretation. Frosh emphasises the role of the clinic: “The clinic out of which psychoanalysis has developed, the crucible for its concepts and practices, is thus a metaphorical space surrounding a live encounter”. Where, he later argues, it is not always welcome, is because applied psychoanalysis is often “an attempt at conquest rather than partnership” – in common with the start of the Felman essay I discuss below.

Psychoanalysis is a tool for understanding, not just individuals, and not just literature and the humanities, but also the social, legal and political worlds. So, if we accept it has migrated from the clinic, what impact does it have and is it beneficial? Frosh states that the two purposes of applied psychoanalysis are first to extend its reach, and second providing support for its claims. He reminds us of the formation of the magazine, Imago, by Otto Rank and Hans Sachs in 1912, which was “concerned with the application of psychoanalysis to non-medical fields of knowledge”.  Frosh cares for psychoanalysis enough to highlight its role in advertising how the unconscious speaks through a subject but is not controlled by it, what he calls the “central importance of otherness in personal and social life”. Preserving this function is critical to keep psychoanalysis relevant “and prevent it ossifying into a form of expert received knowledge”. Like the unconscious; it must be dynamic. “Psychoanalysis holds something significant for all the other disciplines – specifically, a capacity to theorise subjectivity in a way that is provocative and unique, through reference to the unconscious.” Bell believes that Klein used literature as a means of expressing her ideas by “having a conversation with the artist”. This is different from applying theory to characters, which Jones famously did with Hamlet. An example of the Kleinian conversation is Segal’s 1984 paper on Conrad. A different meeting of the disciplines comes in her paper on Golding’s “The Spire”, which Bell claims, is more of a meeting of psychoanalyst and author coming to similar discoveries but via differing perspectives. Segal interprets Golding’s story of the building of a cathedral as a destructive delusion. In her 1981 paper, “Delusion and Artistic Creativity” she asks if the work of an artist or author is itself a creation or a delusion. She introduces us to the psychotic in text. How will we elaborate the text in the same way that the analyst listens to the analysand and is able to elaborate what they say? In other words, this is a textual and theoretical encounter, and its purpose is to raise questions and open up meaning, not dogmatically impose answers. This, as identified by Spillers (1996) is psychoanalytic hermeneutics. Does having a literary understanding enhance the work of a psychoanalyst? Felman writes that “there are no natural boundaries between literature and psychoanalysis”.

In her essay, Felman presents a case that literature is somehow a slave to psychoanalysis’s master. Can it really be realistic to think of literature and literary texts as something that can be enslaved. Are texts malleable? If we think of the clinic, the analysand seeks interpretation from the analyst. It is true that psychoanalysis lends an analytic interpretation to literature, and I argue below, might enhance literature, perhaps even making it publishable in the case of Morrison’s “Beloved”, but I find the master-slave argument stretched. A text cannot be made to do the master’s bidding and even more so, it cannot resist. This lack of the corporeal undermines Felman, I feel. She opens with a comment about the mutual relationship of literature and psychoanalysis, but within a couple of paragraphs moves to suggesting it is one in which literature is subordinate to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, as a “body of knowledge” is called upon to interpret literature, a “body of language”. She claims that literature plays a role in service of the desires of psychoanalytic theory. Actually, Felman herself rows back from this point of view, and repeated re-readings of the essay have made me feel that she provocatively engages defenders of literature with the master-slave analogy, before explaining her own much more nuanced views.

She makes psychoanalysis sound active, “exercising its authority and power”, to a passive literary field. This is important because it reminds the reader of Freud’s essays on sexuality and his suggestion about active masculinity and passive femininity, views which have much less currency today. She continues that psychoanalysis is seeking its own satisfaction. I think this is revealing. It may seek mastery of itself, but that is very different from being master to another. She notes that a literary critic would desire a true dialogue between both as fields of knowledge and of language, and that what is required is avoiding a “universal monologue of psychoanalysis about literature”. This feels like a more appropriate position to me. This allows her to remind her reader that psychoanalysis falls “within the realm of literature”, and moves on to discussing the disruption of the master-slave relationship, in either direction. It is the text, like an analysand, where knowledge and meaning are expected to reside. This allows one to consider the importance of ‘not knowing’ which is critical to the work of the analyst in the clinic. She concludes that we should not think about the application of psychoanalysis to literature, what might be thought of as psychoanalysis working outside the clinic, but that we should think in terms of ‘implication’, not bringing a scientific knowledge to bear upon a text but rather, “to explore, bring to light and articulate”. She concludes, “literature is therefore not simply outside psychoanalysis, since it motivates and inhabits the very names of its concepts, since it is the inherent reference by which psychoanalysis names its findings.”

The spirit of both fields of language exploring the other, bringing to light and articulating is best illustrated, I believe, when considering Freud’s paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, (1917) which may be one of the greatest literary psychoanalytic contributions. The syntax and the form demonstrate why he was awarded a Goethe prize. The melancholic, however, was something literature identified for psychoanalysts. Two examples: Dickens’s Miss Havisham and Shakespeare’s Jaques. Miss Havisham is one of Dickens’s greatest portraits, almost certainly informed by Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholia’ (1621). Abandoned, jilted and defrauded by her betrothed, she cannot recover from this trauma and lives on in her wedding attire, to maintain a link to her loss. She lives out of sunlight – a representation of her broken, dark, inner world. She has all the clocks stopped at the time when she received the letter from her fiancé, that revealed the deception. The issue of stopped time was of interest to Freud because the unconscious has no temporality. Freud observed, “in melancholia, what is lost is the ego”. Melancholia is linked to a narcissistic pathology and to mania. It is clinical depression and distinct from ‘ordinary depression’ with which we all come into contact and does not prevent us from functioning. Havisham adopts a young girl, Estella, seeking to protect her from the hurts she has herself suffered. Freud described melancholia as “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity”. Keeping the world at bay by avoiding sunlight, she projects into Estella her hatred of men, but ultimately this too will leave her abandoned and unfulfilled. Avoiding the world is because, Freud notes, melancholia “culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment”.

What is different from mourning is that “when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again”, whereas a melancholic displays “an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale”. Miss Havisham’s self-regard is destroyed when she is jilted. She fails to mourn the loss of the romance and becomes melancholic. As Freud elegantly observed “in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” – a melancholic attitude is one of intense self-denigration. Before Dickens, Shakespeare had provided us with Jaques. He blames the outside world for imposing its “infections” upon him, leaving him to wrestle with his inner world: “Cleanse the foul body of th’infected world”. He is described as being able to “suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs,” and is sufficiently self-aware to describe “a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness”. In his most famous speech “All the world’s a stage”, Jaques lambasts everyone else. They are all merely performers, and are hiding from their true selves. 

I choose these two examples to make a couple of simple points. First, literature pre-dates Freudian understanding. Second, Freud was able to find the language for the psychic condition he noted, and how it differed from the condition of mourning, because of the literature with which he was familiar. I think Freud’s brilliant understanding enhances literature, but is not imposing any sort of mastery. Jaques tells us he is a melancholic, but Miss Havisham, sometimes dismissed as a sort of cruel and damaged crone, becomes an object of pity when we understand her melancholic affect.

I believe that psychoanalysis has enhanced literature and not subordinated it. I want to continue examining reading psychoanalytically, before moving on to what psychoanalysis has offered writers. Flaubert, like Dickens pre-dates Freud. In Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” we see the impact of a delusional fantasist on those around her, as well as her own death drive path to destruction. Sodre (1999) showed how psychoanalysis and literature come together in the typical analyst/analysand relationship in a paper titled “Death by Daydreaming”. She considered Bovary in the context of Kleinian Object Relations, of her projections, and the overwhelming destructive death drive. Bovary is in thrall to a life in which her wish-fulfilling dreams dominate her mental life. She loses touch with reality. Her dreams have such force (id overwhelming ego) that she is forced to act them out and make them real. Enactment is frequently something that happens in the clinic and is in need of interpretation. Sodre notes, that the text shows us Emma’s repetitive romances are played out in her mind, as a defence against the impoverishment of her actual life, and that impoverishment drives the enactment of her dream life. She adds that as the novel progresses Emma becomes more contemptuous of people around her, whose weakness is that they do not live up to the standards of her dream companions. Sodre thinks that this allows Flaubert to introduce us to what we learn from Klein is an attack on her ‘good objects’, somewhat pre-dating Object Relations Theory. We also see how Emma, who is unable to love her daughter, Berthe, is also a ‘Bad object’. Emma’s fantastical thinking is a means for the reader to understand that the more attached she is to unconscious dreams, the more her sense of self deteriorates, as she is threatened by her internal reality. Sodre notes that she projects her awareness of her deteriorating inner world by covering up – both expensive material adornments and “elaborate, detailed and richer mis-en-scenes” because external reality is too ugly.

Freud himself remarked about how the philosophers and poets had been first to discover the unconscious – his discovery was a scientific method for understanding it. Given psychoanalysis is a relatively young science it is only reasonable to think of the way literature’s giants had already given a language to how what happens in our psychic lives takes place. We have only to refer to Oedipus and to Narcissus. I think that there is something psychoanalytic as far back as Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales frequently use tales of sex to illustrate drives and wishes. The device of the storytellers being on a pilgrimage gives the reader a sense of a frame. In the same way, a clinician listens to multiple tales as his work as the analyst. Although it is physically moving, the frame’s elements are fixed. In this sense Chaucer may be described as being the first writer to be working psychoanalytically, both in and outside a clinic.

Roth (2020) explores three main psychoanalytic interpretations of the reader experience. First, the transference relations toward the literary characters. Second, the impact of the text as a means of transcending the reader’s self-identity and third, how that allows the reader to achieve a new integration and “psychic equilibrium”. She notes the contemporaneous emergence of a publishing boom, improving literacy and the widespread development of public libraries, around the turn of the twentieth century, with the emergence of psychoanalysis. This led to academic enquiry, which she feels shifted the focus from “’scientific facts’ to ‘the subject’. She notes that Proust’s 1905 essay “On Reading”, allowed the emergence of contemporary literary theory. Proust writes about a trio comprised of author, book and reader. This is almost a hundred years ahead of Ogden’s (1994, 2004) ‘analytic third’. Proust explores the reader’s experience of being detached from reality and of the loss or freezing of time, as well as the identification that characters arouse in the reader. He suggests that readers can explore their psyche, “those dwelling places”, that would otherwise be impenetrable. We could say, the dwelling places are the unconscious. Some of this was taken up more specifically by Barthes (1967) is his essay “Death of the Author”, when the meaning of the text ceased to be dependent on author and content, but reconstructed by the reader; much as the analyst helps the analysand reconstruct what has constructed their own meaning. This confers dynamism on the text. It is not static, and dynamism takes us back to the unconscious. A modern example of this is Morrison’s “Beloved”; a harrowing tale, but also one of what trauma does to the psyche. We see it in the psychic fragmentation evident in both the protagonist, Sethe, and also in her sometime lover Paul D, who demonstrates splitting as a defence. The death drive consumes Sethe. Putting aside black authorship, characters and a white-dominant publishing industry, I think that the publication of the novel owes something to psychoanalysis, insofar as it enabled readers to comprehend and tolerate trauma.

Roth describes how the reader projects into the text a search for meaning, a fear of ‘other’ and existential fears such as life’s finitude. She argues that meaning and identity lead to processes of transformation, in both psychoanalysis and literature, but we remain unsure of exactly how. “The patient in analysis, like the reader of literature, is invited to drop everything else and raise, without any form of censorship, every topic that appears ‘in the pages’ of his awareness”. Optimum conditions are established for the transference relations towards either analyst or characters. A reader is alone in a book’s presence in a way that shares space with Winnicott’s (1958) view of the merits of talking “alone in the presence of someone”. In this way, we return to the merits of psychoanalysis outside the clinic. The reader has utilised the portability of the clinic.

What has psychoanalysis done, outside the clinic, for writing? Frosh notes that, especially in the form of case histories, that psychoanalysis is expressed in its own narrative form and that “it also treats its patients as literary beings, characters in search of stories that make sense”. Psychoanalysis is a literary endeavour in itself – exemplified by the case history, which Steven Marcus (1975) described as starting with Freud’s ‘Dora case’ and being a new literary form, distinct and structurally significant. Psychoanalytic journals are filled with vignettes and verbatim. These take the form of dialogue and are often presented as a playwright shapes a play. In his chapter “On psychoanalytic writing”, in “This Art of Psychoanalysis”, Ogden suggests, by using an example of his own clinical writing and an example of Winnicott’s theoretical writing, that “the way the language works” is essential to “the literary genre of analytic writing”. I like to think of this as evidence of one of literature’s gifts to psychoanalysis and a refutation of Felman’s proposition that it is slave to psychoanalysis. Ogden describes analytic writing as “a conjunction of interpretation and a work of art”. He quotes Bion: “I have had an emotional experience; I feel confident in my ability to recreate that emotional experience, but not to represent it” when explaining that what the reader reads is not the experience itself, but a new literary representation of it by the writer, about time spent with the analysand. He continues, “the analytic writer finds himself conscripted into the ranks of imaginative writers”. In recreating an analytic session, he notes that he is creating “characters’, something informed by the experience of enjoying literature. Both conscious and unconscious processes go into the writing. “Psychoanalysis is an experience in which the analyst takes the patient seriously, in part by treating everything that he says and does as potentially meaningful”. He makes it clear that he appreciates the symbiosis of literature and psychoanalysis, “What, for me, is certain is the idea that experimenting with the literary form used in analytic writing is part and parcel of the effort to develop fresh ways of thinking analytically”

Phillips (2016) talks about the psychoanalytic method as a way of telling a life story – free associating, “telling a life story by not telling a life story, but by saying whatever comes into your head”, adding “the analyst is giving the fragmentary discontinuous speech of the analysand a new narrative coherence”. He explores the extent to which Samuel Johnson pre-empted much of Freud, citing the work of Walter Jackson Bate, especially regarding the theory of repression. He adds that both Johnson and Freud believed in a Reality Principle, although Freud alone, called it that. Bate wrote in, “The Achievement of Samuel Johnson” that Johnson had anticipated psychoanalysis, and when he wrote of an inner resistance, he was identifying what psychoanalysis thinks more contemporarily as ‘defence mechanisms’.

On his work as both psychoanalyst and writer in several conversations that were published as a Paris Review interview and included in his book, Phillips noted that “psychoanalysis does not need any more abstruse or sentimental abstractions….it just needs more good sentences”. How literary a request can one get? He talks of the poor quality of reading contemporary psychoanalysis, excepting only Bion, Winnicott and Milner and adds “They were writers. Freud, to me, originally was a writer”. Freud, to him, he said, made sense “not in terms of the history of science or the history of neurology, but in terms of the history of literature”.

Phillips likens the form of psychoanalytic writing, specifically the sessions, as unlike novels, epic poems, lyric poems or plays, (although they are like play dialogues), but that they have the structure of an essay. “There is the same opportunity to digress, to change the subject, to be incoherent, to come to conclusions…” Literature has brought its own influence to bear on psychoanalysis, not least in treating Freud as a writer rather than a scientist. It offers something back to psychoanalysis, what Frosh noted is an understanding of “its own textual unconscious”.

In this essay, I have attempted to demonstrate that there is a symbiotic relationship between psychoanalysis and literature and not, as is sometimes asserted, one where psychoanalysis adopts a position of superiority and of a more profound insight. Psychoanalysis has much to thank literature for, and in turn, has provided insights into texts, characters and the psychosocial that have made literature richer. My conclusion is that the relationship is symbiotic; I reject Lacan’s ‘master discourse’ and Felman’s ‘master-slave’ ideas and believe there exists a mutuality, rather than something parasitic. There is definitely a place for psychoanalysis outside the clinic and it is the place of broadening understanding. Not just in literature but in other fields such as law, the social sciences and film and the arts, I think that is additive, rather than imposing and superior. Literature’s place in our minds before psychoanalysis makes me clear that it has offered as much, if not more to psychoanalysis, as psychoanalysis has contributed as an interpreter of literature. Indeed, it was Felman who wrote that, “in the same way that psychoanalysis points to the unconscious of literature, literature, in its turn, is the unconscious of psychoanalysis”. Perhaps, an emphasis on the ‘is’.

Photo by Ricardo Esquivel on Pexels.com

References

Barthes, R. (1967) The death of the author, Aspen 5–6.

Bell, D. (1999) Psychoanalysis and culture: A Kleinian perspective. Psychology Press.

Brink, A. (1979) Depression and Loss: A Theme in Robert Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy” (1621). The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry24(8), pp.767-772.

Felman, S. (1977) To open the question. Yale French Studies (55/56), pp.5-10.

Freud, S. (1917) Mourning and melancholia. Standard edition14 (239), pp. 1957-61.

Freud, S. (1925) Creative writers and Daydreaming Standard Edition 9: 143-153. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. Standard Edition18, pp. 65-143.

Frosh, S. (2010) Psychoanalysis outside the clinic: Interventions in psychosocial studies. Macmillan International Higher Education.

Jones, E. (1949) Hamlet and Oedipus. New York.

Marcus, L. (2014) Introduction: Psychoanalysis at the Margins. A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture, pp. 1-11.

Marcus, S. (1976) Freud and Dora: story, history, case history. Psychoanalysis and contemporary science5, pp. 389-442.

Ogden, T. (1994) The concept of interpretive action. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly63(2), pp. 219-245.

Ogden, T. (2004) The analytic third: Implications for psychoanalytic theory and technique. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly73(1), pp. 167-195.

Ogden, T. (1996) Reconsidering three aspects of psychoanalytic technique International Journal of Psychoanalysis 77 (5) pp. 883-99.

Phillips. A. (2017) In Writing. Penguin UK.

Proust, M. (1905) On Reading. New York: Three Syrens Press

Roth, M. (2019) A psychoanalytic perspective on reading literature: Reading the reader. Routledge.

Segal, H. (1974) Delusion and artistic creativity: some reflexions on reading ‘The Spire’ by William Golding. International Review of Psycho-Analysis1, pp. 135-141.

Segal, H. (1984) Joseph Conrad and the mid-life crisis. International review of psycho-analysis11, pp. 3-9.

Sodré, I. (2018) Death by daydreaming: Madame Bovary. In Psychoanalysis and Culture (pp. 48-63). Routledge.

Spillers, H. (1996) “All the Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother”: Psychoanalysis and Race. Critical Inquiry22 (4), pp. 710-734.

West, J. (1985) Conversations with William Styron. United Kingdom: University Press of Mississippi.

Winnicott, D. (1958) The capacity to be alone. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis39, pp. 416-420.

On: Death, Drives and Sir Antony Sher

Year of the King: Amazon.co.uk: Antony Sher: 9781854597533: Books
Genius – on and off the stage

Antony Sher is dead. RIP. He was one of the greatest actors I got to see live. He was also a novelist, playwright, diarist and artist. A renaissance man. Fortunately, as well as seeing his “bottled spider” of a Richard III, and other great performances, I saw his last London stage appearance in Kunene and the King. I am going to think about some of those performances and the pleasure that I got from them and what great artists, musicians and sportspeople can do to us, but death is very much on my mind, and not just because of a couple of weeks of studying Melanie Klein and Sigmund Freud and the Death Drive.

About a fortnight ago I heard that a friend of mine had killed herself. She messaged me at the start of that week, to decline an invitation to a group lunch of our student group, and said she was having some problems with her mental health. It was the first I had heard of it, and when we had built our friendship pre-pandemic, at the university, I marvelled at her love for her family – a husband and two adult sons – and her capacity for work. It was no surprise that she graduated with a first class honours degree. And yet, her internal world must have been crumbling. I don’t think I am in denial, but I am so shocked and numbed by the news that I am not sure I feel anything yet.

Just today, one of my children’s godmothers has let me know that her mother died yesterday. I spent some time working with the Cruse, the grief counselling charity, and even with that experience I don’t know what to do as an immediate response. I know that listening is critical, and encouraging those grieving, to talk about the person they have lost, but somehow it all feels inadequate right now.

My brother recently gave the eulogy at a celebration of the life of one of his great cricketing friends. A man who had the joys of representing his country, but who had to take on cancer after the discovery of an inoperable brain tumour twenty or so years ago. We know life is finite, but we also think that it will be lengthy. We may not believe in our immortality, but we tend to expect to be mortal for some time to come. I wonder how one lives with something like the news of an inoperable tumour. I never met him, but my brother has long celebrated him, like a brother. A man with a largeness of heart that few could rival, and with a compassion for others, rather than dwell on the compassion he himself warranted.

Melanie Klein was responsible for Freud giving greater consideration to the Death Drive, and the experience of World War I veterans made him revise his earliest ideas about the primacy of the sexual drives. But death is an inevitability and life, therefore, should be about preparing for as good or satisfactory a death as possible. To be clear, the death drive is not about a unhealthy wish to die, but an angry, destructive drive, with annihilation at its heart. People who die in acts of uncommon bravery, especially in war, are not consumed by the death drive, but those pursuing a war for whatever political or territorial aim, definitely are. For Klein it was present from the outset for the newborn. She maintained that the baby attributed any of its pains and discomforts to hostile and persecutory forces, including the mother that nurtures it, but occasionally did not provide the nourishment it needed, as soon as it was needed. Hence the ‘good breast/bad breast’.

I have not seen the Ricky Gervais drama ‘After Life’ but there is little doubt that humour, however wry, or discomforting, can allow discourse to happen, where it usually prefers to hide. It seems that it is the most perfect vehicle for understanding our drives and our grief. Freud thought we pursue pleasure, or more accurately avoid unpleasure, and that was the life drive – Eros. The death drive (Thanatos) is constantly trying to overwhelm it, and provide unpleasure. Gervais manages to get audiences to laugh at a scenario where a man loses his wife to breast cancer and contemplates suicide. He wants to project his anger and guilt upon just about anyone, but is frustrated by the way people respond to his anger and guilt and grief, and show him the best of humanity.

I think this is the concept I am wrestling with. Just as my brother grieves, and my daughter’s godmother does, and as I think how fortunate I am that my parents have made it into their eighties, and are still relatively free from health difficulties, I know I will have to think about a time when I no longer have them in my world. However, this exercise was not meant to be maudlin. It was to think about the ends of lives as a point at which one celebrates the life lived, and highs for me often come from watching great actors, sportspeople and musicians. Sher, was one who made me marvel at the exceptional skill, the interpretive genius, and as I learned more about the actor behind the mask, was someone who I admired as someone who could shape his circumstances, not be defined by them. For me that is something of a leitmotif.

My introduction to him was through television. The History Man (1981) – playing Howard Kirk. In the mid-80s I was working, and earning enough to enjoy the best seats at the theatre, and that was how I spent my time when I wasn’t playing non-league football or Essex league cricket. In 1984 in Stratford, and in ’85 at the Barbican, Sher, despite the competition from ‘new Olivier’, Ken Branagh, redefined Shakespearian acting with a performance of such physicality and vocal menace, that I cannot see another actor as Richard III. (And yes, I did think Cumberbatch was pretty impressive). Whilst playing the ‘bottled spider’ and writing ‘The Year of the King’, Sher was ‘dragging up’ for an extraordinary performance in Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy’. It is some play, but I think I saw it because he was in it, rather than for the play.

If it was possible, the best may still have been to come. In 1987 I saw him redefine Shylock. The pain that he revealed, of a man, who is outsmarted in court, and who seemed to come out from behind his character’s mask, as he gave the heart-wrenching ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ speech, is still familiar to me. “If you prick us do we not bleed?” What would he have made of the disgraceful attack on the young Jewish bus passengers this week?

Critics loved his King Lear, but for me it was the one true disappointment. It came three years after his groundbreaking Falstaff. Once again his facility with the Shakespearian lines meant I can still hear him saying them – in this case the brilliant ‘Honour’ speech. “What is in that word “honour”? The Falstaffian contempt for it, “therefore I’ll none of it, honour is a mere scutcheon”, seems to me to be closely associated with our government of today. The Lear, was the only time I could not see his character clearly, and I felt that there was still some Falstaff coming through.

At different times he hid his homosexuality, before finding love with director, Gregory Doran; his faith (his parents had gone to South Africa to escape pogroms in Lithuania) and his white South African heritage, ashamed by apartheid. Yet he became an eloquent speaker about each of these issues that shaped who he was, and why he liked playing someone else on stage. So, I admired him for his multiple artistic talents and for his ability to speak out when necessary.

And so, 2019 came around. I did not know that it was to be the last time to see him on the London stage, but I was very excited by Kunene and the King. A two hander with John Kani, it pushed a black man and an irrascible, dying white man, together, as the black man reluctantly nurses the bigoted patient. Sher played Jack Morris, a fading Shakespearian actor. He has been offered King Lear, but knows he may not be well and strong enough to take it. Through reading parts together, the two men find ways of thinking about the changes in S Africa in the 25 years post apartheid. Morris is astounded that his carer knows Julius Caesar well – from a Xhosa version.

Sher gave a performance of extraordinary nuance and depth. How could he patronise a man, initially dismissed as an identity-less member of “you people”, if like Morris, he appreciated and understood Shakespeare? Sometimes you go for the play, sometimes the playwright, often the actor. It was magnificent. I would have gone to see Sher in anything, like McKellen, or Branagh, or Rylance. He played Sigmund Freud, at Hampstead, in the play ‘Hysteria’, which I wish I had seen. As well as Freud, the other thing I would like to see, if we could travel through time, would be his BAFTA winning turn as Primo Levi (he not only won this acting award, he wrote the play!). It started at the National, but there are film versions. One can only hope it makes it back on to the screen as part of the tributes to him.

He had been ill. We all die. But some deaths make you think deeply about mortality, and about family. They also make you think about the need to live your life well, whilst you have the health and the mental fortitude to do so. A gay, Jewish, South African was probably not the role model I sought when I started work, and as I left school, and yet, I think he has played a big role in my life, as someone to admire and to appreciate just how complex we all are, and we all can be. And he put it on stage and screen, and I was lucky to see him showing me what it is to be multi-faceted, complicated, but above all ‘good’. Professionally, personally and probably morally. RIP.