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The author, a professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington who has written previously on the relationship of psychoanalysis and hypnosis, maintains that, since Freud in “An Autobiographical Study” (1925 [1924], S.E. 20) equated the transference with hypnotic rapport, the “difference between analytic treatment and hypnotic treatment lies uniquely in the dissolution of the transference” (p. 56). He states that the “transference is a resistance to remembering” (p. 57), but also that “affects do not want to be remembered. Affects appear in the present”; and he goes on to argue that.
For remembering to be possible, the emotional tie would have to be presented to the subject … as a representation…. [T]his presents no
Page 153problem so long as we hold to the idea that the transference repeats some portion of the Oedipus complex [R]ecollection becomes more problematic when Freud informs us.. that Oedipal ties in turn … reflect a more archaic emotional tie that [he calls] … primary identification or incorporation… “Identification is the original form of an emotional tie with an object” ( [Group psychology and the Analysis of the Ego] S.E. 18: 107) this means that the ego is born in the devouring identification with the other … because “I am the breast” ( [Findings, Ideas, Problems] S.E. 23 299), I am nothing before this earliest identification [p 60]
In the absence of an ego, there can be no representation, and Borch-Jacobsen proceeds:
It is from the point of view of representation that transference resists. It is because Freud stubbornly continues to think that affect hides representation But affect does not resist anything the patient cannot know anything, at least in the sense of representation affect does not think, it is acted … affect is the peculiar cogito of the unconscious [pp. 143-145 Cogito here is a reference to Descartes' cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am”]
The author then tells us that
Just as the person under hypnosis executes his