This paper explores the term counter transference1, enquiring whether this is a useful or meaningful psychoanalytic term. Avoiding an object relations approach to the topic, the author examines what might be a current understanding of counter transference, given Freud's and Lacan's stipulation of the centrality of unconscious transference. The absence of detailed discussion of counter transference in their work is interesting. Drawing on contemporary and phenomenological writing by Laplanche, Levinas and Butler, it is proposed that an ethics of psychoanalysis may be found in counter transference. It is hoped to demonstrate how it might be found precisely in the turning away from viewing counter transference as affect and relationality between analyst and patient, and towards seeing the scene of address in the consulting room as an ethical encounter between conscious and unconscious of the subject. In discussing the ethics of reporting case histories of analytic work with patients, reference is made to Derrida's disturbance at the idea of the sign, and specifically to his suggestion ‘that there is no linguistic sign before writing’.
‘The other does not have to be reconstructed. The other is prior to the subject.’ Jean Laplanche, quoted in Butler (2005: 72)
‘[A]t the horizon of all these visions or quasi-visions it is the world itself I inhabit, the natural world and the historical world, with all the human traces of which it is made…’ Merleau-Ponty (1968: 5)
‘Counter-transference-driven drivel’. Dalagija (2008)
A few years ago, a prospective trainee psychotherapist, A, went for assessment to a psychotherapist. During the interview the candidate was asked to give an account of his recent counselling experience. He presented his work with a woman patient who had been referred to him by an abdominal surgeon and which had lasted about one year. The treatment had resulted in considerable reduction in physical and psychological symptoms and in a change in the nature of the dialogue. The patient came increasingly to see herself, not as the passive sufferer of symptoms and an unhappy marriage, but as an interested party involved in these physical and marital events. The applicant concluded his account by commenting that he was sorry that the patient had ended the therapy. ‘Ah’, commented the interviewing psychotherapist, ‘You fancied her. Your counter transference was erotic and unresolved.’ A was turned down for training and advised to seek further therapy before reapplying.
The reply by the psychotherapist raises many ethical questions about counter transference, about the nature of the unconscious, and about what a self or a person might be postulated to be, as well as questions about technique—specifically about interpreting transference. The psychotherapist, Mr T, is well known for his teaching and writing in the field of object relations psychotherapy. His was not a casual remark, which is why it is worth spending a little while examining it. The first thing to consider is the verb ‘fancy’ in the ‘scene of address’ in which A's future is being judged by Mr T. It is not exactly a technical term, although the applicant, A, would have been in a position to discuss the matter in terms of unconscious desire. It seems obvious that if A was experiencing sexual desire of an adult genital nature for the client, he would have known about it (he says he didn't). On the other hand, if he had some kind of unconscious transference desire (which, inevitably, he did) this would be, firstly, unknown to him, but more importantly it would probably be an archaic, infantile, polymorphous desire for which the word ‘fancy’ seems completely inappropriate. So what did Mr T mean? It is not clear.
The tone of Mr T's remark is worth analysing. He ‘knew’, after a half hour meeting and a five minute case presentation, what A had not discovered after a year of supervised work. This is certainly not a remark by a psychotherapist who has read phenomenology! A is no longer a unique individual with specific forms of desire and relating, but is merely a (male and presumed to be heterosexual) counsellor. Similarly, the patient's individuality has been collapsed and she is now merely an object of sexual desire. There is an underlying series of assumptions about counsellors, about males, about heterosexuals (although Mr T never inquired about A's sexual orientation) and about the nature of desire. The very specific and individual relationship between A and his client, which was certainly warm but not sexual in any genital way, was swept away in a grand gesture of certainty. So what is left?
The next point to examine is the unresolved nature of the transference. Since A still thinks about his client, and to Mr T's way of thinking, still ‘fancies’ her and since A did not interpret the transference (if A fancies her, then she must fancy him) then, according to Mr T, A has committed an error of technique, demonstrating that he is insufficiently analysed. But what if, in this interview, A was only thinking about his client because he had been asked to present a case? What if his regret was that, having once been interested in his client and ‘desired her desire’, he had not ceased experiencing these affects and thus become indifferent to her with the passage of time? What if therapy is never complete and transference and counter transference continue in the minds of both participants after the ending? How could a year's weekly therapy end in an absence of memory and affect?
Roustang refers to an almost identical outcome of analysis, ‘namely, the patient's decision to recognise his state and his suffering, to stop lamenting them as if they stemmed from an ineluctable fate, but rather to take responsibility for them in every respect’ (Roustang 2000: xviii). The more one thinks about it, Mr T's ‘object relations’ interpretation exemplifies a whole attitude which is deeply problematic. Apart from the use of the word ‘transference’, where, in Mr T's remarks, is the radical understanding of humanity and of sexuality that Freud introduced? Mr T seems to imply that A was divided from himself and that he should not have been; that he had sexual feelings of which he was unaware; and that his unconscious transference should be known to
him. But if the latter is unconscious, how could it be known? The crassest thing of all is that because the client was a woman and A a man, Mr T assumed that A ‘fancied’ her. Every single feature of the case could have been the same had the client been a man. I wonder what Mr T's interpretation would have been if A had presented his client as a man?
This paper is not about the counter transference as understood by such object relations practitioners as the one in the anecdote. However, what can we understand of what is going on for the therapist as he sits with his2 patient, looking and listening for the transference? Is there an unconscious transference for the therapist? What can we know about it? Should we pay attention to it? What should we do with it? Can such questions help us towards an ethics of analysis?
If an ‘object relations’ trained therapist abandons the idea of an all-pervasive counter transference, and wishes to understand the therapy relationship in terms of an embodied subject, of an unconscious that is unknown, of a phenomenological understanding of time and being, where is he to turn? In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler writes of the ‘scene of address’ which is ‘the interlocutory scene in which one is asked what one has done, or a situation in which one tries to make plain, to one who is waiting to know, what one has done, and for what reason’ (Butler 2005: 13). This term is helpful in the present context. Mr T, listening to A's account of himself, is not ‘waiting to know’—he thinks he knows already. His confidence precludes the interlocution. That is the problem. In the following discussion I will examine scenes of address in which there is less certainty about who or what speaks, listens, reacts, provokes… Counter transference provides a point of entry into the ethics of the analytic relationship because it ‘constitutes a point of opacity and interrupts a sequence’ (Butler 2005: 66). But what is counter transference?
Sigmund Freud coined the term ‘counter transference’ yet only referred to it a few times in his writing. For him, the term refers to, ‘the result of the patient's influence on the [physician's] unconscious feelings’ and is
not, as some writers extend it to mean, ‘everything in the analyst's personality likely to affect the treatment’. For Freud, ‘no psycho-analysis goes further than [the analyst's] complexes and internal resistances permit’ (Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J-B. 1985: 92).
Coming to a starting definition of counter transference is made more complicated by Lacan, who is often critical of the term itself. In his paper, ‘Presentation on Transference’, responding to Freud's account of his analysis of Dora, he defines it as, ‘the sum of the prejudices, passions, perplexities, and even the insufficient information of the analyst at a certain moment of the dialectical process’ (Lacan 2006: 183). Some terms that are relevant to this discussion are defined in Seminar XI:
The transference is a phenomenon in which subject and psycho-analyst are both included. To divide it in terms of transference and counter-transference—however bold, however confident what is said on this theme may be—is never more than a way of avoiding the essence of the matter.
The transference is an essential phenomenon, bound up with desire as the nodal phenomenon of the human being—and it was discovered long before Freud. (Lacan 1994: 231)
In the patient's transference the analyst not only knows, but is a ‘subject supposed to ‘know’ (sujet supposé savoir). ‘The analyst, I said, occupies this place in as much as he is the object of the transference’ (Lacan 1994: 233). Thus, according to Lacan, the analyst's task is to render desire enigmatic, obscure to the patient. The analyst's supposed or presumed desire keeps the patient ‘working’ since the analyst occupies the position of the other and the patient's fundamental fantasy emerges in the transference. For Lacan, the desire of the analyst is the engine that drives psychoanalysis. However, it is not a desire to cure, nor for identification, but rather is ‘a desire to obtain absolute difference’ (Lacan 1994: 276).
The above discussion indicates then, that counter transference is variously, part of the transference, a distraction from the transference, ‘nothing’ and/or a resistance to be analysed away. To avoid tedious
pedantry, I shall henceforth assume that we are talking about counter transference as the therapist's transference to the patient, including the unconscious elements of the therapist's reactions to the patient, but not the whole of his emotional reaction; although, of course, each of the writers discussed below gives the term different nuances.
Referring again briefly, to the ordeal of the unfortunate trainee, Mr T said to him, ‘You fancied her. Your counter transference was erotic.’ Who exactly is the ‘you’ that has a counter transference in these statements? I have criticized the psychotherapist for having an unproblematised idea of the subject. There is not space in this paper to develop a full exposition of what is meant when a person is referred to as a ‘subject’ or a ‘self’, although for the purposes of my argument, it is important that the notion of the subject is dynamic. Freud, in his ‘Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’, has this to say on the dynamic nature of psychical phenomena:
We do not derive the psychical splitting from an innate incapacity for synthesis on the part of the mental apparatus; we explain it dynamically, from the conflict of opposing mental forces, and recognise it as the outcome of an active struggling on the part of the two psychical groupings against each other. (Freud 1910: 25)
Freud's definition is challenging: an ‘I’ that is unconscious as well as conscious; an ‘it’ that is unconscious but in constant rebellion. One of the problems with Mr T's statement then, is that it implies that there is a ‘you’ who has an unproblematic, undivided unconscious. By contrast, Freud postulates ‘an active struggling on the part of two psychical groupings against each other.’ Lacan expands this idea in Écrits, ‘[Freud] wrote Das Ich und das Es in order to maintain the fundamental distance between the true subject of the unconscious and the ego as constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications’ (Lacan 1977: 128).
If we say that what is unconscious is other, then in the therapeutic encounter there is the patient who is other to the therapist, the therapist
who is other to the patient, and the unconscious which is other to the therapist. It may be that it is in paying respect to this otherness that the ethics of the encounter can be explored.
The significance of otherness for Levinas in Time and the Other is its absolute otherness, its radical alterity, ‘If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other. Possessing, knowing, and grasping are synonyms of power’ (Levinas 1987: 90). In this text, Levinas does not refer to the unconscious, nor does he conceive of the subject as dynamic and conflicted. His idea, therefore, remains as a kind of metaphor or metonymy for the purposes of this paper, although using it in this way is strongly encouraged by his own tendency to slide across different applications. At first, other is future, then it is death, soon it is the erotic, then feminine, and finally son. For Levinas, it is precisely our powerlessness that makes alterity so important. However, there is a Heideggerian acknowledgement that the apprehension of alterity is not automatic. In everyday life, Levinas says, and, we might add, in some forms of talking therapy, ‘The solitude and fundamental alterity of the other are already veiled by decency. One is for the other what the other is for oneself’ (Levinas 1987: 83). Levinas' concept of alterity seems blazingly powerful—or, to use language closer to his own, darkly, mysteriously potent. But the difficulty with it is that it is so absolute, so simple, that one is at a loss as to its mundane practical implications. Perhaps indeed, the implication is that one should not to do anything. If my patient is other to me, un-knowable, un-graspable, immune from possession, and if the same is true of the unconscious that is called mine, what am I to do? Apart from taking Beckett's advice, ‘Fail again! Fail better!’ And apart from the decency with which alterity is veiled, perhaps a Levinasian analyst would, essentially, do nothing—faced with solitude and fundamental alterity. Perhaps, extending another part of Levinas's theme offers a clue. In the section on Eros, he at first appears to come close to solipsism, ‘In positing the Other's alterity as mystery, itself defined by modesty, I do not posit it as a freedom identical and at grips with mine; I do not posit another existent in front of me, I posit alterity’ (Levinas 1987: 87). Later in the same section he writes about the
caress, and maybe here we could imagine the face-to-face (a term he employs himself in another context) of the analytic encounter as being equivalent. ‘The seeking of the caress constitutes its essence by the fact that the caress does not know what it seeks’ and ‘It is like a game… with something other, always other, always inaccessible and always still to come [].’ (Levinas : ) The caress, then, is a seeking, a reaching out. Could this, perhaps, be likened to the enigmatic desire of the analyst—searching, reaching out, but not so concrete or final as ‘holding’ or ‘containing’ as some traditions of psychoanalysis would have it. Presumably there is, in Levinas' scene, an answering caress by the other, towards the otherness of the subject. However, the counter caress is never named in this text. In this beautiful, poetic, and self-consciously romantic depiction of the erotic caress, there is no sense of asymmetry—describing it as a ‘game’ seems to stop short of the possibility of seduction. At least, there is no explicit reference to that possibility and the notion of a ‘game’ is left unexplored. The very emphasis by Levinas on the otherness of the lover leaves blank how this ‘game’ is received by the other. Taking my metaphor towards therapy, we can see a dance or game in which the desire of the analyst, in a Lacanian sense, is a caress which, remaining enigmatic, provokes the caress in transference of the patient seeking the other. Levinas provides a memorable and graphic way to think about otherness in the scene of analytic address, but he does not allude to the reciprocity implied in the term ‘counter transference’. Since the other for Levinas is unknowable, there is no notion in this text of the counter caress. There is no hint that the ‘game’ might be cruel. Sadism, masochism, seduction and rape are out of the picture, (though not, I suspect, masturbation).
The other problem in this Levinasian view is his use of the word ‘mystery’. He writes of the ‘modesty of mystery’ in the erotic caress—does this mean the same as ‘the unknown’? A circumscribed unknown? A mystery can be defined as a ‘hidden or inexplicable matter’; the word ‘mysterious’ (‘delighting in mystery’) has a particular, positive, alluring quality. Levinas seems to be more poetic than precise here. Significantly perhaps, Laplanche defines the three terms ‘riddle’, ‘enigma’ and ‘mystery’ in such a way that he consigns mystery to the theologians (Laplanche 1999: 254 fn). Perhaps he was alluding silently to Levinas. This omission of the question of reciprocity tends towards solipsism
(and masturbation) and begs the question of ethics in relation to the other. Levinas has given us alterity, but it is without transference or Nachträglichkeit (‘afterwardness’ in Laplanche's translation of Freud).
Analysts undoubtedly have a transference to their patients; Freud suggested that counter transference constituted an unconscious response to the patient's unconscious. Furthermore there is the troubling spectre of seduction unearthed in my critique of Levinas. If transference is always in some sense sexual, and if the analyst, at least in the patient's transference, is the one presumed to know, how can the caress of the analytic encounter escape being a seduction? And should it escape?
In clinical terms, it seems to me that Levinas gives us, in his delineation of alterity, a profound respect not just for the difference, but for the unknowable nature of the other. After reading Levinas, one is encouraged to approach the patient modestly, with respect for what cannot be known and with delicacy towards what cannot be done. However, there also seems to be something missing; in search of this something, I turn next to Laplanche.
In considering what Laplanche has to say about counter transference, I am aware that psychoanalysis, although it offers perhaps only a partial theory of knowledge, is always caught somewhere between philosophy and technique, between epistemology and ethics.
In his essay, ‘Transference: its Provocation by the Analyst’ (Laplanche 1999), Laplanche applies his project of trying to recover what he describes as the characteristic of ‘going-astray’ (fourvoiement) which he detects in Freud's thought; he proposes that this may be done by de-centering the concepts of transference and counter transference. In a footnote he sees off Lacan quite briskly:
Lacan's failure to succeed fully in the radical de-centering required, as well as the fact that he does not truly formulate it in his seminar on transference, is due, we think, to two reasons: 1. An abstract and purely linguistic conception of the signifier, the ‘Other’ being reduced to the ‘treasury of
Page 43signifiers' in a completely impersonal way. 2. The total mis-recognition of the seduction theory, which alone ennobles the so-called ‘supremacy of the signifier’ to be put back into its originary frame: the real primacy of the concrete adult over the child. (Laplanche 1999: 226 fn)
For Laplanche, the ‘desire of the analyst’ is not an interesting matter for enquiry. He says:
The ‘desire of the analyst’—no doubt there is one, even several, and very diverse; but my question is a different one. Are we able to conceive that it is the offer of analysis, the offer of the analyst which creates… what? Not analysis, but its essential dimension, transference. (Laplanche 1999: 226)
This idea is presented in a slightly different formulation in the introductory epigram to this essay:
Analyst: You are taking me for someone else, I'm not the person you think.
Analysand: But the other in the originary relation was, precisely, not the person I thought. So I'm perfectly right to take you for someone else. (Laplanche 1999: 214)
Laplanche's notion of internal alterity leads directly into the transference from the originary situation and therefore the enigmatic signifier which is described in the quotation below:
The sexual enigma is presented to the child by adults in an address, and this address is enigmatic in so far as the other (the one who sends it) does not know entirely what he is saying: he is other to himself… The adult's sexual, provocative, traumatising enigma is, for the child, what has to be ceaselessly mastered, translated, brought back into constancy. (Laplanche 1999: 229)
Laplanche here seems to be ‘layering up’ what Butler calls ‘the scene of address’. The attitude of the analyst in provoking this transference, and in thereby offering in analysis a certain path towards truth is Laplanche's version of counter transference. He remarks, ‘We offer the analysand a “hollow”, our own interior benevolent neutrality, a benevolent neutrality concerning our own enigma’ (Laplanche 1999: 229). Laplanche's proposal of this neutrality is not a static or passive thing since, ‘The image of neutrality is inevitably that of the blank screen or, rather, the mirror. Offering projection as much room as possible, allowing solipsism its full space, finally to overthrow it in a confrontation… you have projected, and I give you back your projection, I counter-project.’ (Laplanche 1999: 228 italics in original)
The ideas of the ‘hollowed-out’ (en creux) and the ‘filled-in’ (en plein) transference are very complex but central to the project of analysis as conceived by Laplanche. The ‘filled-in’ transference is only understood as an unconscious state. It is an unanalysed condition where projections have not been returned, where screen memories dominate the scene, where transferences are indistinguishable from present relations. In this crowded place what is unconscious and unknown remains unknowable because of the clamour of its own manifestations. The ‘hollowed-out’ transference, on the other hand, is something the analyst offers the patient: ‘We offer the analysand a ‘hollow’, our own interior benevolent neutrality, a benevolent neutrality concerning our own enigma.' (Laplanche 1999: 229)
Is counter projection Laplanche's view of counter transference? His whole construction here depends on the concept of the analyst's transference to his own otherness and therefore to the other person since, as he says, ‘He is other than me because he is other than himself. External alterity refers back to internal alterity’ (Laplanche 1999: 221). It is the analysts' role to offer ‘a place for speech, for free speech, but not, properly speaking, the place of an exchange’ (Laplanche 1999: 227–8). Laplanche speaks of the movement of transference being not a development or process but instead a translation or what is lost in translation. The filled-in transference changes into the hollowed-out transference by a re-opening of the dimension of alterity. Characteristically, Laplanche falls back onto the problem of translation: ‘analysis—that is, Lösung… [meaning] analysis, solution and resolution, dissolution’
(Laplanche 1999: 230). Laplanche stresses this point since it is a struggle to understand words in different languages just as we struggle to re-translate the trauma of the originary seduction.
Thus Laplanche offers a very satisfying and subtle reading of the transference of the analyst which includes a practical injunction as much as a metapsychology. We are a very long way away from Mr T now.
Laplanche's position with regard to transference leads to a number of questions:
Is the analyst's provocation, which allows the transference, not simply a repetition, albeit in the transference, of the originary seduction?
The ‘neutrality’ of the analyst to his own ‘hollowed-out’ transference is a very fine and beautiful thing, but what does it really mean?
Could there be a time in analysis when the analyst could say: Ah! Now the analysand's transference has dissolved into a hollowed-out one? And what would that look like?
Why does Laplanche not directly address the question of counter transference?
Is counter projection the same as counter transference?
The whole thrust of Laplanche's thinking in this essay is towards transference, not counter transference, though to read his celebration of neutrality as synonymous with passivity would be incorrect. Even his depiction of the analyst's stance as a screen or a mirror, within one sentence, becomes a ‘confrontation’ and a ‘counter-projection’. This mirror is not inanimate! The image of the mirror here, as well as alluding to Lacan's mirror stage, is importantly the real adult whose internal alterity provokes the enigmatic signifiers which in turn stimulate the life-long work (and also the analytic work) of de-translating and un-binding.
It is a curious effect of reading Laplanche's essay that, although he never directly addresses counter transference, and only refers to it
briefly and in passing, we do seem to grow nearer to it even though we are headed in the opposite direction! I am reminded of Alice in her world of mirrors, when she had lost her way and discovered to her surprise that the Rose's advice was correct and to approach the Red Queen she merely had to walk in the opposite direction.
Laplanche, by not directly addressing the question of counter transference, exemplifies his idea of the hollowed-out: by clearing away, and looking away, something is permitted to be seen that was previously obscured, just as Merleau-Ponty stares at his table and sees the Pont de la Concorde. It is the strenuous activity of this neutrality that both verbalises and thereby creates, ‘[T]he maintenance of the analyst's interpellation by the enigma; the maintenance which not only guarantees access to the diversity of desire, but truly creates, provokes transference’ (Laplanche 1999: 229).
In Essays on Otherness, Laplanche is not responding to Levinas, and yet, with the cautions and questions I have enumerated above, it nonetheless looks very much as if Laplanche's definition above constitutes a step forwards in a psychoanalytic direction from Levinas' position of radical alterity. Some of my questions can be tentatively answered as follows:
As a result of his own analysis, the analyst's provocation should not simply be a repetition of the originary seduction.
The concept of ‘hollowed-out’ transference deliberately evades general classification.
Transference and counter transference are phenomena that are uniquely configured in each analysis.
Far from directly addressing the question of counter transference, Laplanche, directly avoids it, à la Lewis Carroll.
The question of what is meant by counter projection as opposed to counter transference remains elusive.
It is worth pausing momentarily to consider the etymology of the word ‘interpellation’. Its original five English uses had all become obsolete by the seventeenth century but the French meaning (‘the action of interrupting by question or appeal’) reintroduced the word into English in the nineteenth century. It is a word which vividly embodies the dialectic both of analysis itself and writing about analysis. Althusser, while keeping its dramatic and oral sense, introduced its use in philosophy as follows:
I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ (Althusser 1970: 31)
In the case of psychoanalysis, as Laplanche demonstrates, the interpellation can indeed be just as dramatic, since it is the enigma that interpellates, the enigma of alterity, the enigma of originary seduction and the enigma, surely, of subjectivity.
In her book, Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler discusses Levinas and Laplanche in her chapter on ‘Responsibility’. She concludes that Levinas' position is ‘not, finally, compatible with a psychoanalytic one’ but nonetheless she concedes that each of the two in speaking of the other sound very similar at times. Levinas' thesis is that the moi begins as a result of the persecution of the other, the impingement in the face of the other, and that this is the beginning of responsibility. Similarly, Laplanche's notion is of a ‘primary address that overwhelms’ in which ‘the unconscious cannot be understood as “my” unconscious, as something predicated upon an already-existing me’ (Butler 2005: 97). If, for Judith Butler, the two views are finally irreconcilable, nonetheless her discussion of the two in terms of responsibility may throw some light
on the therapeutic encounter as an example of what she terms ‘the scene of address’.
It is possible therefore productively to apply to psychoanalysis the ethical idea of responsibility. After all, who is the analyst to the patient, and how does the analyst comport himself towards the alterity of his patient? Both Levinas' idea of primary persecution and Laplanche's concept of primary seduction lead, not to an imposition or substitution onto an already existing ego, but to the foundation of the moi or the ego. Judith Butler is enthusiastic about the former. Levinas, she claims, argues that, ‘responsibility [for the other] arises from the situation of being persecuted—that is a compelling and counter-intuitive claim’ (Butler 2005: 95). For Laplanche she says, ‘there is a primary helplessness in the face of enigmatic sexual messages relayed from the adult world, and this precipitates a primary repression and the internalisation of the enigmatic signifiers’ (Butler 2005: 98). Thus if, in agreement with Laplanche, the offer of analysis precipitates the transference and if, as Judith Butler says of Laplanche's metapsychology, ‘there is no conversion of the id or the unconscious into ego or conscious’ but ‘self-consciousness is always driven, quite literally, by an alterity that has become internal, a set of enigmatic signifiers that pulse through us in ways that make us permanently and partially foreign to ourselves’ (Butler 2005: 98) then it may be valuable to think of analysis as a ‘scene of address’ in which both Levinasian and Laplanchian notions of responsibility can be understood. Is the analyst sometimes, in transference, apprehended by the patient not simply as knowledgeable but also as persecutory? And may not that ‘transference persecution’ be capable of instigating the sense of responsibility? ‘Whatever the other has done the other still makes an ethical demand upon me, has a face, to which I am obligated to respond—meaning that I am, as it were, precluded from revenge by virtue of a relation I never chose’ (Butler 2005: 91).
Judith Butler's analysis of Levinas and Laplanche seems to apply very aptly to my clinical practice. But here, it seems to me, I am faced with a further problem—the problem of the ethics of writing about analysis. Analysis cannot exist without patients, but can writing about analysis exist without case material? What are the ethics of writing about what has happened in the consulting room? And can the problems be solved by some kind of informed consent?
Freud's own problems of fourvoiement, to some extent at least, emanate from the fact that his main source of material was often himself, so there was only one other (his unconscious). All subsequent psychoanalytic writing, even when it eschews case material (as both Lacan and Laplanche tend to do) is predicated upon analysis of an other and therefore on an other that does not have to be reconstructed. An analyst writing about analysis is inevitably thinking about his patients as he writes. Freud wrote his case studies early and later tended not to use case illustrations. However, writers in the object relations tradition frequently use copious and detailed case studies embedded in their writing. Indeed, an earlier draft of the present essay had two case illustrations. The foregoing problematising of counter transference, however, leaves the position of the patients in a different place when writing about the practice of analysis. In the ‘scene of address’ of the analytic session, many things are consciously known and not known to the analyst (the subject supposed to know), and many others are consciously known and not known to the patient. The analysis, one could say, is an attempt to address these differences. But how can the analyst write down what he believes has been happening? To do so implies ‘an insistence of the… truth, anterior, exterior or superior to the sign.’ (Derrida 1976: 14) It would only be my memory of my impression of what happened; and in any event, how can I write down what I believe has been happening without abolishing myself as a subject supposed to know, since I cannot know more than ‘what it is around which the movement turns’? (Lacan 1994: 230) There are of course some practical solutions such as involving the patient in the writing or in the publishing process, but it is hard to see how any of them address the central phenomenological and deconstructive questions concerning the slippage between the oral and the written, and the ‘exteriority of the signifier and of writing itself.’
I could invent an entirely fictional case, but what would be the point of that apart from illustration—a kind of verbal colour plate inserted at intervals? In view of Derrida's assertion that ‘there is no linguistic sign before writing’ (Derrida 1976: 14) it seems impossible to write down and publish an account of an analysis without fundamentally altering the analysis. I therefore have concluded in this instance that I cannot be sensitive to the ideas I have been discussing and then write down case illustrations.
In conclusion, my temporary resting place is that examining counter transference can be a way of thinking about the ethics of transference. The phrase ‘counter transference’ is not itself drivel, though much drivel has emerged from it. Judith Butler puts it like this:
[T]he point of the transference and the counter transference is not only to build or rebuild the story of one's life but also to enact what cannot be narrated, and to enact the unconscious as it is relived in the scene of address itself. If the transference recapitulates the unconscious, then I undergo a dispossession of myself in the scene of address. This does not mean I am possessed by the other, since the other is also dispossessed, called upon, and calling, in a relation that is not, for that reason, reciprocal. Nevertheless, just because the analyst (hopefully) holds this dispossession better than I do, there is a dislocation that both interlocutors undergo for access to the unconscious to take place. I am caught up in that address, even as the analyst contracts not to overwhelm me with her need. Nevertheless I am overwhelmed by something, and I think I am overwhelmed by her. She is the name I have for this too-much-ness. (Butler 2005: 54)
It can be argued that the existence of the counter transference makes this position tenable. If the analyst was neutral, undemanding, unresponsive, in the belief that the work happens only in the patient's transference, then there would, ultimately, be no need for the analyst and Freud's initial discovery of analysis through self-analysis could become the benchmark of psychoanalysis. According to Levinas however, I only exist as myself owing to the existence of the other. Judith Butler suggests that the patient depends on the analyst to provide ‘a scene of address’ in which the patient can unconsciously relive the primary scene of address where she is interpellated. Finally, it seems helpful to follow Laplanche's proposal, that the analyst's neutrality is active and self-aware, as well as being enigmatic to himself.
There is no agreement on how to spell ‘counter transference’. It comes out as ‘Counter-Transference’ in Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J-B. (1985), ‘countertransference’ in Evans (1996) and ‘Counter-transference’ in Rycroft (1995). I have chosen to keep the two words separate, partly because I am problematising the concept to the extent of questioning whether it has any meaning that is distinct from transference.
Some of the quoted passages refer to the analyst as ‘he’, and some as ‘she.’ Where there is no specific gender, I have usually used ‘he’ because I am a man, but I do not imply any priority.