Nobody—Anybody—Somebody

One day in the year 1892, the patient he had just cured threw her arms around his neck. He told himself what he had suspected for some time: “That gesture cannot be the result of my charms. It was not intended for me.” This suspicion gave birth to the idea of transference, that “false connection” as Freud first called it with unmatched precision. Transference is thus a love letter without an address, the result of an omission: the psychotherapist withdraws as an individual in order to allow himself to take the place of her other, her indissociable other whom she loves today, whom she may detest tomorrow. Transference therefore is love addressed to nobody, for it is addressed to her other, a protean, unstable yet imperious image.

This other that I am is the product of the meeting and interpenetration of images, people, events, or things with which I have identified, wanted to identify, or could not help myself from being identified with. In short this other is the product of all the landmarks in my life, whether I am aware of them or not, of all the characteristics which have blended into a new me, inevitably different from the other individuals of my species. But these more or less unified images, simultaneously faces, figures, accidents, or objects, are not merely the history of my distinctiveness. Insofar as they have become my indelible other, they permanently mark my future; they may constitute the image for me of my destiny, for I will never