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Nancy Chodorow' most recent book defines a particular concept of psychoanalysis and then proceeds to show how this conception informs the time-honored relationship between psyche and culture, for Chodorow, psychoanalysis is uniquely defined by the concept of transference. While at first blush such a definition may seem idiosyncratic,
Chodorow' broad concept of transference makes such a view compelling. In opposition to Freud' narrow view of transference as the transfer of childhood images and feelings onto the analyst, Chodorow defines transference as the means by which we imbue the interpersonal world with our own personal meaning. In her view, the human being is compelled, even driven, to utilize unconscious fantasies and personal emotions to endow the world with idiosyncratically constructed meaning. From the stuff of our psyche, we create personal meaning out of an otherwise colorless world. In Chodorow' view, it was Freud' unique contribution to discover that we cannot perceive nor interact with the world without creating meaning from it. With this formulation, Chodorow makes a strong case that transference is the very essence of psychoanalysis. But Chodorow wishes to make an even deeper point: The transference of feelings is precisely what makes life worth living. This is the power of feelings: They make our world. Such a notion emphasizes psychic agency, the continuous creation of personal meaning as “fluid, ever-changing processes rather than expressions of libidinal fixations or enactment of structures of ego or self (p. 32).
Chodorow' emphasis on the notion of agency in psychic life leads her to a view of the relationship between present and past different from the classical position. Adroitly, she points out that the trend in psychoanalytic theory lies in two conflicting directions simultaneously: On the one hand, there is a tendency to view pathology as rooted in developmental experience repeated in the present, and, on the other, there exists the growi