Chapter 7 Working as a Double1

Psyche is extended; knows nothing about it.

We do not doubt the importance of the close relationship between transference and counter-transference forming the central axis of the analysis in any treatment. However, in this chapter, we will primarily be concerned with elucidating the existence of certain psychic processes that are covered over most of the time by the transference/counter-transference dynamic. We shall also be trying to identify situations where a shared complicity – frequently an unconscious homosexual complicity – between the two protagonists of the session, impedes the emergence of a certain mode of relating that, owing to its unusual or strange nature, is experienced as disturbing or even disorganising. A feature of this mode of relating is that an area of the psyche of which the subject was hitherto unaware strives to find its way into consciousness. In the first place, our intuition will be based on an idea halfway between scientific hypothesis and fiction, concerning the evolution of Freud's thought and his successive transferences on to Fliess, Jung, then Romain Rolland, and finally Moses, at the end of his life.

The orientation of our research into the notion of homosexual investment may be compared with the attitude Freud (1900) recommended to analysts in a footnote of 1925 in relation to the dream:

I used at one time to find it extraordinarily difficult to accustom readers to the distinction between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dreamthoughts … The need to interpret it would be ignored. But now that analysts at least have become reconciled to replacing the manifest dream by the meaning revealed by its interpretation, many of them have become guilty of falling into another confusion which they cling to with equal obstinacy. They seek to find the essence of dreams in their latent content and in so doing they overlook the distinction between the latent dream-thoughts and the dream

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work … It is the dream-work which c