You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalysis provokes in mankind a narcissistic wound, calling into question the illusion of the ego of being ‘master in its own house’ (Freud 1917b: 143). We naturally encounter some conscious productions corresponding to this illusion of the ego. And the ego resists accepting any knowledge likely to cast doubt on this illusion: Freud studies this resistance as an epistemological obstacle. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that this obstacle may be found inside the psychoanalytical process itself.
I shall examine certain forms of resistance that are manifested in the transference. I define these as the resistances that the ego puts up during the analysis faced with the disillusion of not being the centre and the master of its world. Transference proved to be an unavoidable but fecund obstacle for Freud, on condition that it was not ignored (he learned this from Dora in a radical way). Similarly when considering the obstacle furnished by the ego I will do this following Freud's method, i. e. working on the obstacle itself.
I shall define this obstacle as narcissistic, giving the term narcissistic a precise connotation: The ego's love for itself and for its objects, based on the illusion of being the centre and the master of its world. The ego loves itself as an object and this love and this illusion form the basis of the actual structuring process of the ego.
The ego in fact refuses to recognize the following:
1 The impossibility for the subject to beget himself, i. e. that the world existed before him, the difference between generations.
* Translation, with minor modifications, of the text published in French in 1981.
2 The difference between the sexes (recognising that each sex reflects the other as incomplete1).
3 Otherness.
In other words, the ego refuses to accept the wound inflicted by the Oedipus conflict. This resistance seems even more important in that it can present itself as totally accepting the analytic situation, thereby giving the illusion that what i