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When nietzsche's (1887) perspicacious Madman rushed into the marketplace and accused humankind of having killed God, the people stood astonished and uncomprehending, neither able to recognize the act of deicide as their own nor able to apprehend the vastness of its terrible implications. Amid their stricken disbelief, the Madman wonders how, after this momentous murder, we can ever procure consolation. “Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?” he asks. “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” (p. 181). Elsewhere Nietzsche (1883) writes, “God is a conjecture; but I desire that your conjectures should not reach beyond your creative will” (p. 197). This forecasts our themes.
Paul Ricoeur (1970) names Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud “the three masters of suspicion”—each having deepened the doubts of our Cartesian heritage, each having mercilessly demystified the sacred. One major aftermath of that demystification has been the antirealist thought that has culminated in so much poststructuralist expression. Among other results, this antirealism has destabilized our commonsense notions of reality. Especially it has assailed those notions as they have been incorporated in the Myth of the Given (West, 1981) with all its attendant incarnations of what Derrida depicts as the logocentric dream of presence and plentitude that has possessed the mind of Western metaphysics. In art, this dismantlement of realist reality has furthered what Heller (1959) traces as “the Artist's Journey into the Interior.”
Out of that immemorial wish for presence have derived all the stabilities of our manifest, commonsense world—that world that Nietzsche (1887) pronounces a fable. I approached transference from that perspective, as an attempt to reinstate a realist metaphysics of presence. As Freud (1912) asserted, during an analysis we cannot slay anybody “in absentia” (p. 108). And yet, within the crucible of Freud's hermeneutics, the substantiality of suc