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Freud struggled with what he evocatively named the “daemonic” power of repetition—intense but uninterpretable transference reactions to the analyst. This paradox inhabits psychoanalysis. As Alan Bass puts it in his new book, Interpretation and Difference: The Strangeness of Care. “Demonic repetition haunts the concept of transference itself: transference can be the possibility and impossibility of analysis.” (p. 142). Traditional psychoanalytic interpretation often seems not to unravel these knots, which provides a motive for examining and perhaps refraining the problem.
Bass departs from this aporia toward the three philosophers he uses in his book—Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida—to read from each of them theories of interpretation that, successively and cumulatively, replace the causal/historical theory of interpretation developed by Freud and followed by most analysts today. Though models differ and ramify, each shares in treating the resistances of what Bass calls “concrete” patients as primarily resistance to “difference.” Bass has produced for the committed reader a powerful work of theoretical integration, pursued at the highest level.
The titles of each of the three chapters begin with the names of philosophers. Yet Freud is the protagonist of the book. It is apparent that Bass's goal in many places is to bring others to Freud to illuminate penumbral or latent elements of Freud's theories. But he does not use these three philosophers merely to explain or complete Freud; Freud is also, if not equally, brought to them. For example, Bass suggests that Heidegger's dismissal of drive theory as a merely causal—“metaphysical”—explanatory device may not give Freud's concepts of primary narcissism and the history of the body—“nonmetaphysical” concepts, in Bass's view—sufficient notice (p. 83). In another example of bidirectional exposition,