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In a footnote to her book Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1982), Janet Malcolm wonders whether “she is getting a little carried away” in her discussion of Freud's interest in Pandora and her box. The footnote appears in Malcolm's discussion of the case of Dora, the name Freud gave to his adolescent patient, Ida Bauer, when he wrote “Dora: Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905/1953).
As Malcolm points out, one reason why this case continues to hold such interest for psychoanalysts is the extent to which Freud gets caught in a web of erotic phantasy, a web, in fact, far more complicated than that which he explicitly addresses. And of course, it is one woven by the desire of the doctor as well as the patient. The web includes the name Dora as the pseudonym Freud chose and, especially, all that he doesn't say about that choice.
Malcolm discovers that transference is a web involving both doctor and patient, and that coming to terms with this interactive matrix has been (and continues to be) a critical challenge and source of new possibilities in the development of the field. This discovery is not only theoretical. Malcolm encounters the transference web in her relationship with the analyst “Aaron Green,” with whom she is meeting, but also in her encounter with Freud through his texts. The passage about her “getting a little carried away” conveys this latter truth.
The transference to the text appears secondarily in Malcolm's book, but it is just as significant, as is her transference to the analyst. If psychoanalytic work takes place only insofar as there is transference, then this principle can extend to psychoanalytic writing as well, as a form of psychoanalytic work. In that case, psychoanalytic writing eschews the scientific ideal of the dispassionate author and instead embraces an engagement between author, text, and reader that dwells in that matrix of love/hate and its interactive effects with ignorance/knowledge that constitutes the transf