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.
Cosnier discusses three topics in the transmission of psychoanalysis: what transmission is; what is transmitted; and the desire to transmit. It is uncertain what transmission is, she claims. It is banal to say that psychoanalysis cannot be transmitted like other sciences, that it requires the singularity of an experience. The paradox of transmission is the same as the paradox of that which is discovered; it is a paradox in Winnicott's sense of the created-found. It has become especially important to recognize this since the recent work by Viderman on the transitional space of analysis and the creative aspects of treatment. Some of the limits of transmissibility can be discerned. The personal background of each analyst limits what comes to him from experience and what he can use of his experience, of his own personal psychic economy. And, just as analysts show differences in their ability to use their experience, so patients differ in their openness to change. As for what is transmitted, it is the creation of a new system of mental functioning, of intra- and intersubjective perception. Psychoanalysis has opened the world of representations to the plurality of desires, fantasies, identificatory positions, etc., with a displacement of values onto psychic reality as determined genetically through the personal history. There is also a creative remembering, rather than a simple recall. Not just a knowledge of the unconscious is gained, but an experience of it. The analyst tends to transmit his own means of elaboration and to transmit different things at different times,