The Truth About Freud's Technique. Michael Guy Thompson
on the other. He explains that an affectionate transference (i.e., a positive transference) is a welcome development because it motivates the patient to cooperate with the analysis. But passionate expressions of erotic attraction are something else again. At the time this paper was written, Freud had not distinguished between erotic and positive transferences, though virtually all that he subsequently had to say on this subject is contained in this discussion on transference. For one thing the emergence of an erotic (transference) reaction has a distinctively troublesome air about it because it jeopardizes the progress of the work that has been accomplished. Previous signs of comprehension and cooperation disappear:
Now all this is swept away. She has become quite without insight and seems to be swallowed up in her love. Moreover, this change quite regularly occurs precisely at a point of time when one is having to try to bring her to admit or remember some particularly distressing and heavily repressed piece of her life-history. (162)
Freud’s painstaking distinction between “love” and resistance now comes to the fore. “If one looks into the situation more closely one recognizes the influence of motives which further complicate things—of which some are connected with being in love and others are particular expressions of resistance” (163). However, the emergence of erotism itself isn’t synonymous with resistance, per se. Expressions of erotism in analysis merely strive to achieve the same purpose they might on any other occasion: to transform the object of such feelings into a willing partner. The part resistance plays, however, is far more subtle, even devious. Freud warns that any effort on the analyst’s part to satisfy these longings will probably only arouse his patient’s aggression. In fact, “the patient’s condition is such that, until her repressions are removed, she is incapable of getting real satisfaction” (165; emphasis added). In other words, the patient’s erotic feelings, once manifest, tend to engender a resistance to the analysis that, in turn, acts as an agent provocateur by seizing on this love and exaggerating its passion. The consequence is a deepening of the repression against the patient’s capacity for genuine love.
The emerging resistance acts against whatever feelings of love that are aroused, and takes their place while masquerading as genuine love in order to resist the psychical changes that were beginning to occur. This is why, if the analyst commits the error of responding to the patient’s entreaties, “in the further course of the love-relationship she would bring out all the inhibitions and pathological reactions of her erotic life, without there being any possibility of correcting them” (166). But if the initial expression of love for the analyst—the “affectionate” transference—is a welcome, and crucial, development for the work of analysis, why shouldn’t these feelings be encouraged rather than “analyzed”? In fact, Freud warns the analyst against inadvertently hurting the patient’s feelings by behaving in a rejecting manner: “To urge the patient to suppress, renounce or sublimate her instincts the moment she has admitted her erotic transference would be not an analytic way of dealing with them, but a senseless one. . . . The patient will feel only humiliation, and she will not fail to take her revenge for it” (164).
Some patients become so overwhelmed by their emotions and the frustrations they engender that they opt to quit if the analyst doesn’t comply. Freud describes them as “children of nature who refuse to accept the psychical in place of the material, who, in the poet’s words, are accessible only to the “logic of soup, with dumplings for arguments.’ With such people one has the choice between returning their love or else bringing down upon oneself the full enmity of a woman scorned” (166–67). The only possible response, according to Freud, is to resign oneself to accept their limitations, and wish them good luck.
Obviously, a love that is so demanding and intolerant of frustration must be distinguished from one that is “less violent,” which can accept the analyst’s neutrality and is capable of assuming an analytic attitude. The “analytic attitude”—in fact, a form of love—entails compliance with the analyst’s efforts at “uncovering the patient’s infantile object-choice and the phantasies woven round if” (167). Freud conceived of the analytic attitude as one that was consistent with the kind of love he characterized as genuine. “Genuine love, we say, would make her docile and intensify her readiness to solve the problems of her case, simply because the man she was in love with expected it of her. In such a case she would gladly choose the road to completion of her treatment, in order to acquire value in the doctor’s eyes and to prepare herself for real life” (167). Indeed, is genuine love even possible within the scope of psychoanalysis? Is it possible, in other words, for a patient to experience genuine feelings of love for her analyst in the course of therapy from the vantage of her analytic attitude—or is this genuineness only possible after her analysis is over, once she is “cured”? Freud believed that evidence of genuine love actually precedes resistances that only subsequently undermine it. In other words, our capacity for love is manifested in our adherence to the analytic attitude, demonstrating a capacity for cooperation that is already inherent in each patient’s personality. That is why one’s capacity for genuine love needs to be harnessed to a willingness to collaborate with one’s analyst by acknowledging—and striving to overcome—resistances that arise.
Not everyone, however, is capable of genuine love. Sometimes the analyst encounters a patient who is dominated by a form of resistance that only pretends to love, already poisoned by the forces of repression. According to Freud, “she is showing a stubborn and rebellious spirit, she has thrown up all interest in her treatment, and clearly feels no respect for the doctor’s well-founded convictions. She is thus bringing out a resistance under the guise of being in love with him” (167). Having drawn this elaborate distinction between transference-love (compromised by resistances), on the one hand, and genuine love (which tolerates the analysis of those resistances), on the other, Freud questions whether so-called transference-love isn’t actually real when compared to ordinary, everyday love. “Can we truly say that the state of being in love which becomes manifest in analytic treatment is not a real one?” (168). What, precisely, does Freud mean by the term real in this context? Does it refer to a love whose achievement is the culmination of a successful analysis? Or is he describing, as he seems to have been implying, a love that is sincerely felt, the kind of love that any “analyzable” person is capable of at the beginning of analysis?
For those who always assumed transference-love, by definition, isn’t “real” because, after all, it’s the consequence of unabated infantile longings, Freud’s question must come as a shock—even bewildering. Furthermore, what place could real love enjoy in psychoanalytic treatment? Isn’t the basis of transference rooted in phantasy? In response to this entirely unexpected, and frequently overlooked, question, Freud says something that in hindsight is truly amazing: “The part played by resistance in transference-love is unquestionable and very considerable. Nevertheless the resistance did not, after all create this love; it finds it ready to hand, makes use of it and aggravates its manifestations” (168; emphasis added). To make sure we understand what Freud has in mind, he goes on: “Nor is the genuineness of the phenomenon disproved by the resistance. . . . It is true that it repeats infantile reactions. But this is the essential character of every state of being in love. There is no such state which does not reproduce infantile prototypes” (168; emphasis added).
If there isn’t any kind of love that doesn’t derive from “infantile prototypes”—genuine, real, or transferential—then what distinguishes the real from the transferential? Throughout this paper, Freud contrasts the two in respect to their aims. Genuine love presumably aims at a “real” object, whereas transference-love aims at “the patient’s infantile object-choice and the phantasies woven around if” (167). What’as more, Freud adds, “It is precisely from this infantile determination that it receives its compulsive character, verging as it does on the pathological” (168). In other words, the relationship between love and infantilism doesn’t define the pathological, but merely “verges” on it. What, then, distinguishes “transference-love”? “Transference-love has perhaps a degree less of freedom than the love which appears in ordinary life and is called normal; it displays its dependence on the infantile pattern more clearly and is less adaptable and capable of modification” (168). Recall that it is love’s aim that characterizes the difference between the infantile and the normal, rather than the specific emotions that we customarily attribute to our experience