What Fuels Analytical Work?

The detractors of psychoanalysis are used to making fun of the long, drawn-out treatment it can be. The feigned surprise of these skeptical detractors is very often dictated by an anticipated scorn, but a reliable answer to their suspicious disparagement is, nevertheless, not so easy to provide.

Freud (1905/1953) pretends to face the same interrogation, one he puts, in fact, in the mouth of a supposed patient-“How long will the treatment take? How much time will you need to relieve me of my trouble?”(p. 259)-he responds by alluding to one of Aesop's fables. A traveler to Athena asks a shepherd how far it is to the city. The shepherd replies: “Go. I will walk with you at your own pace, and when we arrive at Athena, I will know the exact value of your pace. Then, I could tell you how far we were when you asked me.” But, Freud immediately adds that the comparison is not a good one because “the neurotic can alter his pace all the time.” Did he mean, then, that the analyst is not a shepherd?

Let us, rather, suppose that the word transference is the first term to be taken into account when considering this matter of duration, but with one caveat-without reducing it to the feeling of love or hatred addressed to the analyst. The first meaning Freud gave to this word referred to the link established between two ideas through any kind of connection, including what he named very early simultaneous cathexis. This conception can be found in the first part of the Project for a Scientific Psychology, when Freud tries to explain this simultaneous cathexis, which he presents as: “the foundation of all the connections between the neurons Ψ,”(1895/1966, p. 319) present in the psychical apparatus. Let us try to figure out how this type of connection works.

We learn in chapter 11 (1895/1966, p. 319): “The quantitative cathexis is transmitted from a neuron Ψα to a neuron Ψβ when α and β have been once cathected simultaneously from φ or anywhere else” (which means from outside or from inside