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The “motor” of an analysis is the strange connection that the analysand forms with their analyst: Freud called it transference or even “transference love.” The status of this love can be quite troubling both for the analyst as well as the analysand, not to mention the general population who tends to view this love with an uneasy suspicion. Josef Breuer was horrified when he realized that Anna O. had produced a hysterical pregnancy out of her love for him. He fled, abandoning her treatment. Freud, on the other hand, persisted. He advocated a position of “neutrality” in relation to transference love, which allowed him to discover the unconscious and to pursue his exploration of it.
This “neutrality,” in orthodox psychoanalytic circles, is taken to be an “objective” response to what is seen as a “false” or “neurotic” love. The analyst, undisturbed in his or her “objective” position, does not confuse transference with “true” love. However, this characterization of transference is actually unsupportable from a psychoanalytic perspective, at least in Lacan's view. Lacan showed that transference is not merely a product of the analysand, but that it is a structure that always includes the analyst (Lacan, 2001). Transference is fundamental to the structure of all human relations, which is why it is so powerful. If this is the case, how then can the analyst have a position of “neutrality”? Or should the analyst even strive for such a position? Yet, Lacan argued that Freud, in adhering to a position Freud called “neutral,” was able to persist and to discover the formations of the unconscious. So what exactly was Freud's position?
Freud first explicitly invoked the psychoanalyst's “neutrality” (Alix Strachey's translation for Indifferenz) in Observations on Transference-Love (Freud, 1958). In a discussion of the difficulties dealing with erotic impulses elicited in the analysand due to transference, Freud considered several possible options. He noted that denying the satisfaction