Chapter 4 Transference and Countertransference

At the beginning of an analytic session, what state of mind am I in for responding to what the situation requires of me? I think I am adopting an analytic position when, having endeavoured to keep my attention as free floating as possible – we will see that it is not straightforward, and sometimes runs into serious difficulties – I hear the analysand’s communication from two perspectives simultaneously. On the one hand, I try to perceive the conflictuality within him and, on the other, I consider it from the angle of the message, implicit or explicit, that it constitutes for me. The conflictuality to which I am referring does not concern the particular dynamic conflicts that could be identified by interpretation, but the way in which the discourse alternately moves towards and away from a meaningful nucleus or a set of meaningful nuclei which are trying to enter consciousness. It is not necessary to have a precise idea of what is activating or, on the contrary, inhibiting or diverting the communication, in order to notice the movement which sometimes carries it towards a more explicit or precise expression, and sometimes distances it from the verbalization of what is trying to communicate itself. One can, then, notice these variations intuitively even if one does not know the exact nature of the focal point around which they gravitate. This will appear more or less suddenly, sometimes perfectly clearly, and sometimes in a more accidental manner, in the course of the discursive process. It is in this latter case that floating attention undergoes a change of state and becomes investigative acuity, during a phase of reorganizing what has slipped under the fluidity of the ‘suspended’ reception of the analysand’s more or less free associative discourse. In this description it is not just a question of naming the resistance, as it is encountered when activated moments of transference are approaching. I am referring to the background state against which