Landscapes of therapeutic encounter

Some weeks ago, I saw Far from men, a film by David Oelhoffen based on a short story by Albert Camus. In this film, Daru, a colonial schoolteacher, is given the task of conducting Mohamed, a young Arab farmer accused of killing his cousin, from a remote mountain plateau to town for a law suit. While they cross the rocky desert landscape, menaced by both colonial militaries and native retaliators, Daru responds to Mohamed's helplessness with growing empathy as he gradually realizes the extent to which the young Arab is trapped between pressing needs, such as hunger, and harsh clan laws. Finally, he is able to give Mohamed the liberty of a choice between going to trial and fleeing to a new beginning. Daru himself seems to have gained in insight from this journey, through which he is “transferred” to landscapes of his own past.

If we reflect on a possible metaphorical dimension of this film, we can think of the encounter between the analyst and the patient – a transferential and countertransferential journey in a shared landscape. Freud wrote that “transference … creates an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made” (Freud, 1914, p. 153).

Transference is not a phenomenon specific to psychoanalytic therapy. In this volume of International Forum of Psychoanalysis, Salomon Resnik, in his article “Transferring and transference,” reminds us that transference arises in all human relationships, just as it does between the therapist and the patient. Resnik expands the concept of transference to intrapsychic relations as well. He writes of “transference being viewed not only in terms of outer relationships (dyadic and group experience), but also inner relationships related to different parts of the body and in terms of Freud's and Melanie Klein's inner world, that is, the way in which internal objects and thoughts are in mutual relationship.”

The landscape of the intermediate region, as it is described by Freud