Deferral and the Quiproquo

In his book Le Transfert, Michel Neyraut (2004 [1974]) states: “Transference is the quiproquo (displacement) of the unconscious” (p. 7). It is a deferred displacement whose resolution consists in returning it to whomever it concerns and to wherever it comes from. He goes on to ask himself: “Why is there this quiproquo in man and why does man, who loves discriminating between things, have this capacity within himself to confuse them, to the point that, without this capacity he would perhaps be mad? It is a strange contradiction” (p. 7). He compares transference to animistic thinking, according to which spiritual beings animate human beings in such a way that souls can migrate from one body to the other. Animistic thinking is governed by the omnipotence of ideas and present in all the neuroses. It leads the patient to mistake someone who is there now for someone else (quiproquo) who was there then (deferral: at a different moment).

The patient sat on the couch, then suddenly got up again and hurried towards the door: “I have to go to the toilet!” she said. The analyst was taken aback. She felt ill-at-ease, invaded by the disagreeable impression that she was witnessing a totally quirky scene that had emerged from elsewhere, from another time and from another place, with other protagonists. Trying to regain her composure, she told herself that this patient was clearly inhabited by parental imagos that had been intruding upon her analysis since the beginning: the inadequate mother who was unable to contain her and the seductive and exciting father who had precipitated her flight towards the toilet. Knowing that the transference reactualises an infantile relationship in the context of a contemporary conflict, the analyst wondered how to interpret her act in the transference by “returning it to whomever it concerns and to wherever it comes from”.

The patient returned to the couch, taking up the associative thread of the last session. She said: “I am gender-neutral… Born with