Familiarity

I used to like epigraphs. I like them less now, but something of the feeling remains. I would like to reproduce a painting of Magritte's here, the one showing a pipe with the inscription: “Ceci n'est pas un pipe” (“This is not a pipe”).

From one pipe to another, or from transference to a history.

Why do we always speak of transference love, never of transference hate? If transference were what it is alleged to be, both passions would be reproduced in it. There may be such a thing as transference love, but not transference hate. The analytic space would explode.

Transference love itself poses a formidable problem, which Freud saw — that of echte Liebe. But can echte Liebe and transference love be reconciled? It would be ridiculous for me to define echte Liebe. I have too many predecessors. What probably makes transference love viable in analysis, and analysis viable in transference, is that the analysand, whatever is wrong with him, as well as the analyst, whatever he pretends, both know they are acting. Except the psychotic. The consequences of this can be seen. What we are acting, on the other hand, every day, fortunately, is more Labiche than Racine.1 The analyst knows that he knows but thinks

the other doesn't know it. So the more mistaken of the two is not the one we think.

How could there be Übertragungsliebe when such Liebe is only another, more refined avatar of that which is put up a Widerstand?

As soon as we pose the two terms of what is for Freud a relation of equivalence, we notice that this Liebe can only be conceived negatively. “Don't be native,” says Freud essentially, “it isn't you that she/he loves. Just look at yourself. Or me.” A decoy, a display, or a pairing off the wrong way rou