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Wordsworth found in stones the sermons he had hidden there.
Serious readers of Jacques Lacan all find themselves sooner or later grappling with the nature of his Freudian encounter: whether and in what ways he read Freud into himself or himself into Freud. Was Lacan the humble “herald” trumpeting the return to an oracular genius or, more darkly, the renegade Lucifer usurping the Almighty's voice? (Lacan , 114, 121)
Signs of influence clearly abound—from imitation to subversion and inversion—resonating along those lines first systematically explored in Harold Bloom's anxiety-of-influence theories about belated sons struggling with strong father-poets. This paradigm of the creative process, however, condenses to oedipal issues facing the poet qua poet in a cultural tradition exempting personal history; only insofar as Bloom rather whimsically considers Freud a strong poet and Lacan foregrounds linguistic constructions of the unconscious, does a literary model seem apropos here. But given Freud's fathering a radical method to interpret everyone's generational conflicts and Lacan's coming of age amidst unparalleled self-scrutiny, a pursuit of the deeper sources of influence within a transference ambience promises the more inclusive approach.
There are key historical precedents for discerning transference phenomena among analysts outside the analytic setting, notably Jung's confessing to Freud feelings that were assuming the “character of a ‘religious’ crush,” and a memory of having been the “victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshipped” (; Dervin 1996, 235). Otto Rank also