The Subject of Reading and the Colonial Unconscious: Countertransference in J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Central to the concept of countertransference developed by either Freud and Lacan is the problematic relationship between the subject of reading (both reading and read) and the unconscious desires. Actually, countertransference in psychoanalytic situations exposes “the primal scene” in which the analyst fully dramatizes his unconscious desires in front of the analysand. Similar kinds of primal scenes, I discover, figure importantly in J. M. Coetzee's fiction Waiting for the Barbarians to address the issues of the subject of reading and unconscious desires within a postcolonial context. Henceforth, countertransference is an important theoretical apparatus to explore the relationship between the colonizer's reading and the colonial unconscious of the Empire in Coetzee's fiction.

Freud's concept of countertransference is generically based on and inherently developed from his theory of transference. In “The Dynamics of Transference,” Freud offers his first general exposition of the idea of transference which is, according to him, mainly associated with “imagos” of the father and through transference patients unconsciously redramatize their relationship to the parental figures of the past in the analytic process, therefore, revealing an Oedipal structure (SE XII 100). Similarly, in Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Freud observes that in transference, “a whole series of psychological experiences are revived, not as belonging to the past, but as applying to the person of the physician at the present moment” (138). In short, transference exposes a situation wherein the patient resurrects and redramatizes a previous relationship (real or imagined) in a