A Note on Multiple Analysis and Emotional Climate at Training Institutes

It was Freud's great virtue to have discovered that a prolonged analysis, a training analysis for instance, leads inevitably to concentration upon the transference. Its analysis by reduction to primae figurae is, in theory, necessary to make the patient into an analyst. Naturally, any dilution of the emotional difficulties between analyst and candidate would prevent this reduction and leave the analysand bound up in the prima figura, a transference neurosis linked to the Oedipal situation. It was Jung's great virtue to have recognized that beyond the prima figura is the prima primarum, the self. The transference is therefore ultimately a religious problem, a relationship with the self, aspects of which have been projected upon the analyst. This information, which any candidate may read on the first day of his work, is of course in no way enough to redeem what is always a long, heavy, and desperate effort. But because of this addition to Freud's insight—an addition which shifts radically all the valences of the elements—there can be no question of “dilution”. The transference cannot be diluted because it is there per se from the beginning, in the sense that the ego's fundamental relation to the self is there at the beginning and always. This “transference to the self”, if you will, cannot be diluted, but it can be falsely intensified, magnified, cultivated, by narrowing attention to the interpersonal situation, or what is called “the transference”.

The best way to intensify the transference is to force unnaturally all projections into the one vessel of the one relationship with the one analyst. This is justified only if the self is left out of the theory as, say, in Freudian analysis where this unnatural forcing process is used to pump up and work through as much of the repressed and forgotten as possible. The tighter the disciplinary vessel, the greater the suction that can be applied. The transference is simply the basic family (Oedipal) complex. The analyst is inst