Man and Dentist

“Darling, you must come to my dentist; he is simply unequalled.” “Oh, nothing will stop me from continuing to see mine. In all of Paris, there's no one who can compare to him.” Both women continue to talk—the end result is that each of them stays true to their dentist.

One might say that this deals with womanly stereotypes, that perhaps one of these two dentists is a “heartbreaker.”1 But that is not the case; we find the same relationship to dentists among men. Only the tenor of the men's discussion is a bit different; there is more gravity in their voices. But the facts remain the same, whether the men are idle rich, engineers, lawyers, or even doctors themselves.

We psychoanalysts recognize this phenomenon; we name it transference. This forms, in general, the foundation on which every bond of love, every affection is built. We transfer onto our doctors— psychoanalysts as much as dentists—the same feeling of dependence, devotion, and admiration that we feel towards those who protected and took care of us in childhood.

The absence of any criticism, which is characteristic of all loving relationships, can be seen in the patient's behavior towards his dentist. As a result, you can meet professors of medicine, who, bound by the power of transference, can lose a good deal of teeth before deciding to seek out a new dentist. Should it finally come to pass that the old relationship is dissolved and a new one formed, the jilted dentist seems to be like a deposed god, thrown into a pitiful light by the sudden abandonment. And it is his successor who throws this shade: it seems to be that among dentists one finds the criticism that is absent among patients. The slightest mistake, the tiniest difference or backwardness in the technology of the predecessor, this will be held up to the unlucky patient, so that he, now disillusioned, repents that, in his blindness, he mistreated his jaw for so long.

This story rests partially on an empirically real basis. The advancement of dental te