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‘On risque de pleurer un peu si l’on s’est laissé apprivoiser…’
‘You are likely to cry a little if you have ‘allowed yourself to be tamed…’
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, p. 83
‘I did not come here for you to make me suffer, but for you to rid me of my suffering,’ one of my analysands would protest in response to a transference interpretation of separation anxiety which had struck home. He could no longer deny his suffering, but was becoming able to contain it and express it to me.
The explicit and implicit content of this analysand's words tellingly illustrates how exacting a task it is to become conscious of the painful quality of the transference link; it is a painful experience which causes hostility towards the analyst to flare up again and reinforces the negative transference. It is also understandable that the analysand resists becoming conscious of separation anxiety, and that the analyst hesitates to interpret it—or even resists doing so.
We here touch upon a central point in the psychoanalytic process: emergence from narcissism and recognition of the object. All analysts since Freud agree that it is when the object is not there that the subject notices that the object exists; this discovery is frustrating because the subject becomes aware that he is not himself that object and that the (wished for) presence of the object is independent of his will; however, this discovery is at the same time structuring, because the analysand becomes conscious of his identity as a subject precisely when he comes up against the limits of the object.