Negativising Transferences

Negativising transferences - or transferences of the negative - must be distinguished from negative transferences proper. Linked to a negativity in the transference that is often difficult to reverse - or to a negativisation of the transference - they neutralise the process by annihilating its transformative capacities, by devitilising it and emptying it of its richness - a sterile approach that culminates in anti-processuality. They are at the basis of the questions and theoretical/clinical advances concerning certain aspects of psychic functioning which may appear, in the course of the analytic process, to be borderline or non-neurotic.

They are a defensive manoeuvre in the subject who seeks to preserve - when faced with the dependence implied by the transference-object and the object of the transference - his narcissistic integrity by deploying a destructive narcissism (Green, 2001 [1983]; Rosenfeld, 1987) which may only become apparent during the analysis because the drive mobilisation induced by the encounter with the other becomes threatening. Hence the destructive opposition to any form of “introjective” availability in the transference (resistance to change due to painful separation and/or intrusion anxieties. The destructive attack (full of hatred) is directed against the link uniting the patient and the analyst. This makes interpretability all the more uncertain in that the subject no longer seems capable of displacing cathexes that would mobilise the expression of affects in other ways than against a background of pain. This pain is sometimes so intense that it can lead to the subject's incapacity to utilise transferability.

While they are noisy in cases of transferences of an erotic or passionate type, they can also be silent and thus give the analyst the feeling that the analysis is repudiated, and the analyst, neutralised in his otherness, may then feel powerless and “dissociated from his function” (Neyraut, 2004 [1974]).

This is what seemed to be happeni