Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want anyone to know or than we know ourselves (F.S. Fitzgerald, ‘The Rich Boy’).
In his celebrated painting La trahison des images, René Magritte confronts the viewer with a paradox, a fissure between image and text: a realist rendition of a tobacco pipe above the inscription, ‘Ceci n'est pas une pipe’. The standard reading of this work usually appeals to the ostensibility of the paradox; for, it is pointed out, the viewer is not presented with a pipe at all but, rather, the image or re-presentation of a pipe. The received reading consequently makes of Magritte's work an intervention in the philosophy of art; as a meta-pictorial commentary on the nature of depiction, La trahison is taken to highlight the distinction between the conceptual and the actual, the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the singular. After all, Magritte's pipe is not really a pipe—as Magritte himself quipped—you cannot smoke from it. The ‘treachery of images’ would appear to consist, then, in the fact that although images frequently purport to capture objects at the level of their individuality (the lines on this face; the rain over that landscape; the yellow of these sunflowers) this claim is a deception; images, no matter how particularly or realistically rendered, only ever offer objects as substitutes and abstractions.
Such a reading is reassuring in its naiveté: it confirms one of our most cherished commonsense presuppositions. Namely, that the universal and singular are quite distinct and separate, universals lacking the same ontological status as the singularities from which they are said to be abstracted post res; whereas singular objects have an actual ‘material’ existence, universal concepts have but an ‘immaterial’, referential existence. It is well known that with his so-called ‘theory of forms’, Plato
disputed commonsense by proposing that ideas assume priority over objects and not the other way around. According to Plato, we recognise any particular pipe as a pipe by virtue of the extent it corresponds to – or as Plato prefers to put it, ‘participates in’ – the pure universal notion of ‘pipeness’; we do not form the concept ‘pipe’ by grouping together pipe-like entities and then subtracting from that group the idiosyncrasies of its individual members to arrive at the general concept. So, it might be observed, the commonsense understanding of La trahison conforms to a ‘materialism’ (ideal universals are derived from concrete singulars) whereas the Platonic challenge, on the other hand, comprises an ‘idealism’ (concrete singulars aspire toward ideal universals).
What is immediately striking in this bipartisan account is that it suggests a more fundamental division, a prior epistemic split. For, it would seem, materialism most comfortably aligns itself with empiricism (it is through the investigative observation of the similarities between singular pipes that we can arrive at a universal concept of pipeness); whereas idealism appears most comfortably to align itself with rationalism (it is through the intellectual deduction of the universal category of pipeness that we are able to adduce what is shared amongst idiosyncratically singular entities we can then learn to refer to collectively as pipes). A problem, however, here presents itself. If, for materialism, it is the empirical observation of similarities between singularities which are then abstracted to constitute knowledge of universals, then there is a contradiction: since, to define universals as the similarities between singularities is, in effect, to negate the existence of genuine singularities. Singularities disappear given that, in materialism, every singularity is ex post facto demonstrated to be more or less related to other singularities; to, that is, participate to a greater or lesser degree in a universal. In other words, we are faced with a dialectical reversal whereby materialism retroactively passes over into idealism. Contrariwise, for idealism, if it is the intellectual deduction of universals that permit knowledge of singularities, then genuine universality is annulled insofar as universality is never truly encountered in the singularities which are said to instantiate it since, qua singularities, they are by definition singular and not universal, thereby
forcing the conclusion that we are faced with a dialectical reversal whereby idealism has always already passed over into materialism.
The implications of these reversals are not, however, hereby exhausted. For it is furthermore clear that, for materialism, just as there can be no genuine singularity, there can also be no genuine universality either; symmetrically as, for idealism, just as there can be no genuine universality, neither can there be genuine singularity. Why is this? In order for materialism to establish genuine universality, it would have to be able to exclude the possibility of a singularity being discovered which would not be subsumable under any universal, other than the universal designation of singularity as such; whilst for idealism to establish genuine singularity, it would have to be able to exclude the possibility of the deduction of a universal in which a singularity could be shown to participate. Both, strictly speaking, are impossible: the former posits an ability to examine all possible cases, which by definition is an infinite sum and therefore an interminable task; whilst the latter is, obviously, a straightforward contradiction, given that the designation of singularity is itself a universal, given that all singularities minimally and by definition participate in at least one universal – the universal of singularity.
Now from this it is possible to make the following, crucial, extrapolation: we are able to conceive of a singularity that participates only in its own singularity and in nothing else; what we might, in other words, call a universal-singular. A universal-singular is a singularity in which the instant it coincides with itself, it misses itself in a transmogrifying movement towards universality. Indeed, we can see that such non-coincidence with self is true of the inverse, a universal that participates only in its own universality, a singular-universal: at the precise moment a universal expels from itself anything other than itself – which is to say, anything singular – it disappears as a universal in a paradoxical movement towards singularity. Critically, it is in this movement that we grasp how the universal-singular and the singular-universal are not to be collapsed into either universality or singularity – for that would be to construe identity as stasis and self-coincidence, a construal our foregoing analysis has called into doubt. Rather, the universal-singular and singular-universal
correspond to the non-space at the heart of identity as such, the space separating identity from itself.
Every field of enquiry or praxis adopts a position vis-à-vis the manner in which it treats issues of universality and singularity. Speculative mathematics, for instance, could be defined by its operation in the realm of the deduction and exposition of universals (it is not necessary for its objects to correlate to ‘actually existing’, observable material instances, although of course it may be the case that such instances either exist or are subsequently discovered). Accordingly, its objects are ontologically ideal and epistemologically rational. Alpha taxonomy, on the other hand, proceeds in precisely the opposite direction, being a field definable by its operation in a realm of observable singularities (it is not necessary that the objects under investigation correlate to any pre-established universal categories, although it may of course be the case that such categories do already exist or are later created). Its objects are accordingly ontologically material and epistemologically empirical.
As we have just seen however, such neat apportioning is illusory inasmuch as the stability of any domain of enquiry qua materialism or idealism – and by extension therefore, qua rationalism or empiricism – is being continually dialectically subverted, the one constantly collapsing and passing over into the other, annulling the possibility of a self-sustaining totality or a unity as self-coincidence. Every domain of research is, therefore, subject to a vanishing point: the very instant a domain of research coincides with itself, it disappears into its other, unveiling a blank, a blind spot, a nothingness, a lack, at its core. This nothingness, this blind-spot, is simultaneously its singularity and that on the basis of which it is universalisable; the nothingness of the subject which is the subject, moreover, is what takes the subject spilling out beyond itself. The mode of being proper to any domain of research is, in which case, universally-singular or singularly-universal.
What this invites us to entertain—even, if not especially, in those areas of enquiry that appear to be most complete-unto-themselves—is the necessity of a split, the necessity of split subjects: every subject is always already riven and any chance of holistic, epistemic unity, is ruled out a
priori. Of crucial importance, then, is the manner in which research is organised around the vanishing point that is this gap guaranteeing non-coincidence with self. Indeed, it is in precisely those research subjects where such blind-spots appears least evident, in which the certainty of self-coincidence is most vociferously proclaimed, that we ought most vigorously to counter with an insistence upon what psychoanalysis calls a disavowal…. Since we have strayed into the drawing of analogies with psychoanalysis, let us risk venturing further in order to pose a question: might there be a relationship between this necessarily split subject of research and Freud's foremost discovery – i.e., that every human subject is split and therefore fails to coincide with themselves, a state similarly abandoning the human subject like the research it undertakes, to estrangement, to alienation from self? Might it be the case that the psychoanalytic split (human) subject corresponds to the necessity of the split (research) subject – that the latter conditions the former and the former the latter?
It is our thesis that, because Freud made central to his research the human subject's self-estrangement – an acknowledgement that, at the centre of human being is a nothingness or emptiness we refer to as non-(self)-coincidence – he succeeded in elaborating a program of research foregrounding, rather than effacing, the epistemic lack necessarily inherent in any field of enquiry. Such a thesis leads to the characterisation of Freudian psychoanalysis as positioned on the dialectical pivot, the invisible point of revolution, between the universal and the singular, the rational and the empirical. Or, again: Freudian psychoanalysis is situated in the blank of non-coincidence that is constitutive of any subject as such. To anticipate our discussion of transference, the notion of a complete and non-lacking field of knowledge is thereby to be regarded as what we refer to as ‘egological’ – that is, a result of the falsifying ‘logic’ of the ego, where transference is construed as that mode of the ego's relation with itself, others and the world, manifesting in those moments in which the ego's non-(self)-coincidence risks being revealed to itself. In an attempt to obviate the anxiety arising from confrontations with the blanks of non-(self)-coincidence, the ego resorts to the fabrication of what the
early Freud called ‘false connections’ – spuriously rational perceptual and intellectual links that stitch-up the fabric of the ego's (mis)perceptions and (mis)understandings of itself, others and the world; (mis)understandings and (mis)perceptions that function, moreover, by occluding painful acknowledgements of and confrontations with ‘der andere Schauplatz’, ‘the other scene’ – that is, the unconscious.
Foreshadowing many Freudian motifs, Nietzsche had already reached similarly suspicious views regarding the epistemic trustworthiness of the ego. For instance, in a sarcastically titled aphorism from Daybreak, he sneers at ‘The so-called ego’:
We are none of us that which we appear to be…we misread ourselves in this apparently most intelligible of handwriting on the nature of our self. Our opinion of ourself, however, which we have arrived at by this erroneous path, the so-called ‘ego’, is thenceforth a fellow worker in the construction of our character and our destiny (2006: 198).
The proposal of the ego as an organ of (self)-deception whose function is, in all senses, to ‘stitch us up’, has important implications for the construction of knowledge claims, suggesting that any theory masquerading as unified and complete is egological – which is to say, deceptive. The question, then, is how adequate knowledge claims, not woven from the defensive logic of the ego, can be developed. In many ways, Freud's theoretical and clinical work might be regarded as a single, extended, meditation on this philosophical problem; the implicit strategy he adopts in addressing it being, we believe, to fashion psychoanalysis from the nothingness of the universal-singular which is non-(self)-coincidence, enabling the construction of a theory-praxis of psychological treatment, a certain clinical savoir-faire, which is distinguished by being, when properly practiced, non-egological.
In order to elaborate these claims, we will need now to turn to a consideration of the manner in which the relationship between the universal and the singular might be understood in Freud's work. Transference, we will propose, once introduced by Freud as a clinical frame of understanding began to function in such a way as to reckon with the tension between universality and singularity. It allowed, in a manner analogous to what it enabled with his patients, a mediation of the relationship between the universality of theory and the singularity of the clinical encounter, structuring the tension between them by situating psychoanalysis as neither universal theory nor as a singular practice, but within a suspension of these terms constitutive of the nothingness of universal-singularity – transference being, in the consulting room, the manifestation of the universal-singularity of the ego par excellence. Theory and praxis therefore pass through one another, intersecting without actually meeting – in this respect, we will later find occasion to speak of the ‘chiasmus of the clinic’. It must be stressed, of course, that these formulations are not Freud's own; Freud never explicitly discussed the problem of the universal and the singular and so his treatment of the topic remains implicit in his work and untheorised as such. Nonetheless, we are of the view that the transmission of this problem has had lasting influence on the development of psychoanalysis; as we shall see, it can be witnessed as early as 1930 in the work of Ella Sharpe.
Although, in the history of psychoanalysis, the problem of reconciling tensions between universality and singularity is evidenced across the spectrum of psychoanalytic thinking, space here prohibits a thoroughgoing analysis of the reception and development of this issue in post-Freudian thought. If, however, we are casting around for an example of how this confusion between the universal and the singular plays itself out in psychoanalysis, then we could do far worse than to consider an observation of Paul Verhaeghe's (2006: 72-76). Verhaeghe notes how every psychoanalytic innovator brings in their wake a series of ‘star patients’ who come, in the absolute singularity of their case histories, to substantiate the universality of their analyst's theories, the stories of their treatment forever being rehearsed in the circles surrounding the
particular ‘celebrity’ analyst that treated them. Freud of course famously has his five case studies, which are frequently bandied about as if they constituted the (quint)essence of the psychoneuroses. But Freud is far from alone. Mary Barnes performed this function for Laing and Burke, the mythology of her treatment embodying the potency of ‘antipsychiatric’ ideas for the therapeutic communities which sprung up around Kingsley Hall; Richard and Dick have stood as paradigmatic testament for the disciples of Klein as to the veracity of her theories; and, let us not forget, the patient Jung studied for his doctoral thesis, his cousin and (blatantly fraudulent) medium Hélène Preiswerk, has proven a touchstone case in the Analytical Psychology movement. Such elevation of a certain number of an analyst's key patients, by both the analyst and their acolytes, serves only to mask the fact that, behind the singularity of the patients being held up to represent putatively ubiquitous theories there lies another, more fundamental, singularity being universalised: that of the analyst themselves. In the final resort, psychoanalytic theories remain the universalisation of the singular pathology of one person: the therapist-theorist to whom they owe their genesis. As we will argue later, the analyst has to be careful to resist, as much as this is actually possible, the egological lure of fashioning their patients after the image of their own ego, as this is frequently what patients transferentially solicit their analyst to do, in order to sure-up their own ego, to sidestep their non-(self)-coincidence. Psychoanalytic treatment ought, however, to move in the other (non-egological) direction, bringing the patient to a confrontation with the anxiety engendered by their non-(self)-coincidence.
So far, we have proposed that the relationship between the universal and the singular is axiomatic for any field of research, proposing that the manner in which a given discipline responds to this problem determines its epistemic and ontological blueprint: whether the operation of the deduction of universals (idealism) or the collation of singularities (materialism) is accorded priority, will largely determine whether a discipline is epistemologically rational or empirical. But which of these is psychoanalysis? Is psychoanalysis a rationalism or an empiricism?
At first blush, the Freudian response to this question appears clear.
Despite the revisions of his views over time, did not Freud insist doggedly that psychoanalysis was a science? Doesn't the task amount, then, to the rather banal ascertainment of whether Freud considered science to be an empirical or rational endeavour? It is quite possible to marshal numerous passages illustrating Freud's conflation of psychoanalysis and science, but two will suffice. Right at the start of his career, Freud famously declares in the opening passage of the Project for a Scientific Psychology, that his ‘intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science’ (S.E. 1: 295), whilst at the very end of his career Freud thinks this intention has been realised, stating that psychoanalysis ‘is a part of the mental science of psychology…. Psychology, too, is a natural science. What else can it be?’ (S.E. 23: 282). Unambiguous remarks, to be sure; however, our task is far from simple since quite aside from the general problem in the philosophy of science as to whether the so-called ‘natural sciences’ are to be classed as rationalisms or empiricisms, one theme characteristic of the entire trajectory of Freud's work is the complex interplay between the rational and the empirical he establishes in psychoanalysis. And, as we are about to see, it is just this interplay that frames the interlacing of the universal and the singular. Of course, Freud's work was always clinical work; the issue, however, is the change in approach he took towards what happened clinically.
At the start of his psychoanalytic endeavours, it appears Freud was of the view that it is the rational deduction of universal categories which was of greatest importance in the genesis of science, over and above the observation and description of singularities: theories are first constructed and then applied and tested in practice. Consider this passage from a letter to Fleiss dated the 25 May 1895, concerning the Project:
It is in fact impossible to form a satisfactory general view of neuropsychotic disorders unless they can be linked to clear hypotheses upon normal psychical processes. I have devoted every free minute of the last few weeks to work like this; I have spent the night hours from eleven till two with imaginings, transpositions and guesses like these; and I have never stopped till I came up against some
Page 120absurdity or till I had truly and seriously overworked, so that I found I had no interest left for my daily medical activity. You will have to wait a long time yet for any results (S.E. 1: 282).
Freud here is explicit that a ‘satisfactory’ view of psychological disorders can only be arrived at through the construction of ‘clear hypotheses’, which are formed in an operation of thought halting only when they butt up against ‘some absurdity’. Moreover, it is not from the praxis of his medical or therapeutic endeavours that these hypotheses will be forged, but rather from the remove of nocturnal ‘imaginings, transpositions and guesses’.
After this strongly rationalist start however, particularly with the abandonment of the hope that he would develop a psychology based upon physiological reductions to the functioning of ‘material particles’ or ‘neurons’ (S.E. 1: 295), what thenceforth seems to characterise the vast remainder of Freud's work is the production of theory governed by precise clinical problems; which is to say, the generation of theory becomes dependent upon a priority accorded to empirical observation from within the highly specific therapeutic methodology of the psychoanalytic clinic. After his abandonment of hypnosis and suggestion as techniques of treatment, and having settled on the therapeutic modality specific to psychoanalysis that came to be known as free-association, this emerges as the prism through which all clinical material was refracted, providing the cardinals of organisation determinant of the development of subsequent theorising. Does this not indubitably indicate a shift from rationalism to empiricism?
In fact, not at all; as the philosopher of science and tireless critic of psychoanalysis, Adolf Grünbaum, has observed: ‘after 1896 [Freud] perennially saw himself entitled to proclaim the scientificity of his clinical theory entirely on the strength of a secure and direct epistemic warrant from the observations he made of his patients and himself’ (Grünbaum : 6; author's italics). The transition in Freud's work, then, is from a theory-praxis based upon an ontological rationalism to a savoir-faire grounded in a methodological rationalism. There is, then, a transition from the
construction of a theory-praxis deriving from rationalist deductions and elaborations of a putative materialist ontology (‘material particles’; ‘neurons’), to the derivation of deductions and elaborations from the empirical technique employed in the treatment itself.
This point can, perhaps, best be illustrated with reference to one of his papers from 1914, ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’. Amidst a difficult conceptual discussion concerning the divisional cathexis by the ego of libidinal and non-libidinal energy, Freud pauses to reflect upon the nature of his endeavours. Mulling over the fact he ‘dislikes the thought of abandoning observation for barren theoretical controversy’, he nevertheless feels he ‘cannot…shirk an attempt at clarification’ of the theoretical concepts with which he is engaged. What is more, Freud decides, it is actually the embedding of intellectual acts of clarification within a concrete praxis that forms the ground upon which any reputable science is built, in the first place:
It is true that notions such as that of an ego-libido, an energy of the ego-instincts, and so on, are neither particularly easy to grasp, nor sufficiently rich in content; a speculative theory of the relations in question would begin by seeking to obtain a sharply defined concept as its basis. But I am of the opinion that that is just the difference between a speculative theory and a science erected on empirical interpretation. The latter will not envy speculation its privilege of having a smooth, logically unassailable foundation, but will gladly content itself with nebulous, scarcely imaginable basic concepts, which it hopes to apprehend more clearly in the course of its development, or which it is even prepared to replace by others. For these ideas are not the foundation of science, upon which everything rests: that foundation is observation alone (S.E. 14: 77).
Thus, what constitutes the difference between a ‘speculative theory’ and a science ‘erected on empirical interpretation’ is the importance of ‘sharply defined’ concepts which do not start out so, but rather become such
over time, with the cumulative weight of observation; more exactly then, it is the gradual conceptual rigour which is brought to bear upon the phenomenological data of clinical work that defines a genuine science.
Despite the emphasis on clinical observation then, (singular) empirical observation consistently remains strictly subordinate to the (universal) rationalism of the clinical method itself – which, it must be noted, is strictly non-egological, as it does not aim at a ‘logically unassailable foundation’ but instead remains open, fluid, admitting of the unknown, of the void. What is crucial to appreciate is the shift this marks in Freud's work. Unlike two decades previously, it is not simply the manipulation of conceptual categories by a mind engaged in ‘imaginings, transpositions and guesses’, but rather the labour of an engaged reason animated by a specific clinico-observational methodology. As Freud would clarify in ‘An Autobiographical Study’ a further ten years later in 1925, the ‘speculative superstructure’ of theory can be discarded and modified as demanded by the requirements of clinical work with little effect on the methodological framework of psychoanalysis:
Such [metapsychological] ideas…are part of a speculative superstructure of psychoanalysis, any portion of which can be abandoned or changed without loss or regret the moment its inadequacy has been proved. But there is plenty to be described that lies closer to the actual experience (S.E 20: 31–32).
What thus emerges as essential for Freud is the ‘actual experience’ of doing psychoanalysis, and it is only the scaffolding of this experience which must be retained, as it is this that is responsible for providing the unique conditions under which the data furnishing the concepts psychoanalysis is generated. It is not, therefore, at all surprising that what would gradually assume central importance to Freudian therapeutic work is the notion of transference, and indeed this is what Freud ultimately regarded as the kernel of the ‘actual experience’ of psychoanalysis.
In fact, elucidating the importance of methodological rationalism for the genesis of psychoanalytic theory-praxis helps clarify why, for so
many clinicians after Freud, transference is the psychoanalytic notion to grapple with, more important even than the manner in which the unconscious is understood: because it is precisely how one understands transference that establishes how one conceives of the methodological rationalism of the clinic, and from there how one elaborates the rest of psychoanalysis. We shall return to this issue but, as we have already hinted, ultimately this is a spurious debate between what should receive more emphasis: the universal (of theory) or the singular (of praxis).
Now, Freud first introduced the notion of transference as a specifically clinical topic as early as his and Breuer's 1895 Studies on Hysteria,1 where he describes ‘transference onto the physician’ as being initiated when there is a ‘false connection’ (S.E. 2: 302) made by the ego. In a long but important footnote much earlier in that work (S.E. 2: 67), Freud describes false connections as appearing when there are gaps or missing links in the structure with which the ego orders and coheres its apperception and understanding of itself and the world; gaps which render causally inexplicable certain feelings, thoughts, or sequences of events. These missing links, according to Freud, are intolerable to the ego, and so in ‘cases in which the true causation evades conscious perception one does not hesitate to attempt to make another connection, which one believes, although it is false’.
This early formulation is an already clear gesture towards the classic conceptualisation of transference as the patient's transposition of their feelings and thoughts onto the analyst as an attempt to fill in painful gaps in their perception of the doctor-patient relationship—a conceptualisation echoing Nietzsche's aphorism. What must not be missed here is that transference arises when the ego, alerted to inconsistencies in its structure of palliative coherence, is thereby confronted with its non-coincidence with itself. This non-coincidence jars, causing pain and anxiety; the ego does not just miss itself inasmuch as it fails to coincide with itself, it misses itself insofar as it pines for itself as self-complete: in a bid for amelioration, the ego annuls any inconsistent gaps by disowning them, thereby ensuring the illusion of completeness-unto-self is preserved. This is why one formulation of transference might be that it is a species of
a(void)ance: in and through transference the ego attempts, paradoxically, to void the void that it is, to a(void) the void by expelling itself from itself, discharging its nothingness onto the figure of the analyst or the analytic scenario, thereby sustaining the illusion of itself as a non-lacking unity.
Ten years later, when he came to publish his account of Dora's treatment, Freud would sharpen his definition of transference, specifying it more precisely as an attempt to bridge egological gaps in understanding and perception with ‘new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and fantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis’, which ‘replace some earlier person [i.e., for Freud, a constitutive individual from the patient's psychosexual history] by the person of the physician’ (S.E 7: 116). And, a decade later still, in his seminal clinical paper ‘Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through’, Freud would literally place transference at the epicentre of psychoanalysis – the concept occupying discussions at the textual mid section of the paper, forming the point of contiguity with the other notions he is there concerned to explicate. Transference operates, therefore, as the keystone of Freudian psychoanalysis, holding its differentiated theoretical and practical elements together whilst simultaneously resolving and preserving the tensions between these elements: ‘We soon perceive [during clinical work] that the transference is itself only a piece of repetition, and that the repetition is a transference of the forgotten past not only on to the doctor but also on to all the other aspects of the current situation’ (S.E. 12: 151).
By assuming centrality as the bridge between the clinical and theoretical domains of psychoanalysis transference emerges, in the process, as the organising principle of psychoanalysis, the principle in relation to which all other theoretical and therapeutic developments must, thenceforth, situate and define themselves. We claimed earlier that the notion of transference was what enabled Freud to reconcile, for psychoanalysis, the tension between the universal and the singular. As we have seen, Freud's ambition was to produce a psychology with universal applicability; a psychology that could take its place alongside the natural
sciences, offering a complete account of psychical functioning. This, of course, entails the presupposition of theory as universal.
The problem with confronting a universal theory of human suffering, however, was that Freud was increasingly bedevilled with the clinical lesson that every patient presents as irrepressibly unique, despite certain key structural similarities underpinning, amongst other things, the nosology and aetiology of pathology. In medicine, each boil confronting the physician is doubtlessly differentiated; nevertheless, there will only be a discreet number of causes for its development, whilst the procedure of excision does not have to be reinvented anew each time, physiology remaining consistent enough to permit a standardised treatment. Psychoanalysis, Freud quickly discovered, could not hope for the convenience of a one-size-fits-all approach; there would be no lancing of psychological carbuncles on the Freudian couch – psychological symptomatology and structure being too labile, too mobile. As he complained in his case study of Dora, often a ‘patient's condition shows no noticeable alteration even though considerable progress has been made with the analysis’, so that it is insufficient for a patient's symptoms to be merely deciphered like a ‘text’. What also needs to happen is a reckoning with ‘the relations between patient and physician’, a branch of technique that is ‘by far the hardest part of the task’ and cannot be learned procedurally, as one might the technique of interpreting dreams (S.E. 7: 115–116). In relation to precisely these issues, Ella Sharpe writes concerning analytic treatment that:
We have to remember that [psychoanalytic] technique, if good, has been orientated to the psychology of an individual. It will represent in all essentials the classical norm of Freudian technique; and yet it is the shades and nuances of application to a particular person [i.e. patient] that mark the work of skilled technician. These special orientations to one individual will not necessarily apply to any other. It is this capacity for these subtler adaptations that makes the difference between applying a dead and rigid set of rules and the mobile handling of a real person (1930: 251).
How, then, to reconcile the ambition of creating a universal theory of psychical life, with the fact that every patient relates so differently to the analyst and therefore requires an individual treatment, as Ella Sharpe identifies? This is the ‘chiasmus of the clinic’ of which we spoke earlier: theory and praxis intersect one another even as they miss each other. The question is not only one of how Freud could satisfy his own ambitions, but is inseparable from the whole project of the psychological treatment of human distress: if the experience of clinical work confronts us with the fact that every patient relates to the physician so particularly during the work as to require a treatment unique to them, then what kind of theory can possibly furnish an effective cure for psychological pain and account for these variations?
The Freudian answer is, of course, through a theory of human suffering and the modes of its treatment built around the notion of transference. Transference, qua concept, is a universal; it is a universal inasmuch as it is said to relate to manifestations universally found in clinical work.2 The solution as to why no two treatments can follow the same formula is, surely, the rather platitudinous one that each patient engenders a singular transference, given that the manner in which each patient stands with regards to their failure to coincide with themselves is unique. In order, then, to confront what Freud perceived as the non-correspondence between the universality of theory and the singularity of each case, Freud was led to introduce the notion of transference. However, if transference is clinically ubiquitous then it will be strictly specific to each clinical situation.
This is why it is no accident that one of Freud's key meditations on transference, the Dora case, began life as a study intended to illustrate the universality of certain theoretical psychical functions (the dream work) and the clinical techniques for interpreting them, by recourse to the psychical singularity of a single patient, markedly departing from his previously favoured approach, exemplified in the dream and joke books, of mobilising a kaleidoscopic host of examples. As such, the Dora case study was already a putative attempt to reconcile the universalism of
theory, with the singularity of the unique clinical picture of each patient. As Freud famously comments, he attributed his failure with Dora to being unable to ‘master’ the specificity of her transference in time: in other words, the treatment with Dora failed as Freud was unable to manage the chiasmus of the clinic, to integrate the universalism of theory and the singularity of clinical practice in a way that was non-egological. One way of thinking of Freud's mistake with Dora, was that he tried to fashion her as the patient he believed she should be, based on his already formulated theories, rather than the patient she actually presented as.
No two patients in relation to any particular analyst will manifest exactly the same transference, as obviously no patient in relation to two different analysts will manifest the same transference. This is not to suggest that patients are solely responsible for the production of transference; clues given by the analyst, that are mostly unconscious (timbre of voice; gestures; timing and holding of silences; seating posture; consulting room décor) naturally have an effect on the character of the transference. However, as Freud argued apropos Dora, ‘psychoanalytic treatment does not create transferences, it merely brings them to light’ (S.E. 7: 117): i.e. the psychical material furnishing transference precedes beginning analysis. The analyst and their idiosyncrasies is merely a prop for the (re)emergence of already existing transference phenomenon whilst, of course, the inverse is equally true: each patient prompts a unique transference in the analyst, the material for which precedes work with the patient.
Of course, commonalities of transference exist; after all, one of the key formulations of transference for Freud is the (re)finding by the patient of their infantile loves in relation to the figure of the analyst. However, no two patients will have the same infantile sexual history, and so by definition cannot produce identical transference. Furthermore every analyst, not just the iconic analysts with their star patients, who we encountered before, will inevitably bring their unique ‘style’ to bear across the spectrum of patients they work with thereby, undoubtedly, producing similarities of transference phenomenon in their patients. The most obvious realm in which this manifests itself is how patients frequently follow and ape their analyst's intellectual and theoretical
interests, reporting archetype strewn dreams to their Jungian analyst or bringing examples of their destructive envy to their Kleinian analyst.
None of this should lead us to lose sight however, of the fact that transference as a universal has singularity built into it, according it the status of psychoanalysis's version of what is known in physics as a ‘universal variable’: it is an empty designator; a hollow sheaf; the hole at the centre of psychoanalytic theory indicating the non-place of psychoanalysis's failure to coincide with itself and the blank around which analytic theory-praxis is organised, mirroring the non-(self)-coincidence of the ego. The manifestation of transference is a singularity that participates only in its own singularity; in transference, what is universal is precisely the guarantee that every time it will be singular, that each instance of transference will be different. This, then, is one of the primary tasks of an analysis: to elucidate and dissolve these manifestations, unique to each treatment. But how is this to be done? Beginning to sketch an answer to this question will constitute the final part of this paper.
In the consulting room—all being well with the treatment, of course—transference enables the analyst to grasp the singular non-(self)-coincidence of the patient as universal and, qua universal, as a singular nothingness. The patient, however, experiences the inverse: they grasp themselves as complete inasmuch as, in their stoking of the transferential fires, they a(void) their void by discharging it onto the analyst or the analytic situation, leaving them with a comfort in their (illusory) sense of self-consistency. Now up to this point, we have been discussing the universal-singular as the non-(self)-coincidence of the ego. We have argued that the ego fails to correspond to itself provoking anxiety leading to transference, or the a(void)ance of incompleteness by the (re) location of egological gaps onto the figure of the analyst. In order for us to fully indicate the importance of non-(self)-coincidence however, we must now gesture towards the manner in which our discussion relates to the unconscious; since, as we have seen, the work of Freud
aims at delineating a savoir-faire within the non-place of the egological gap as such, reconstructing the excluded ‘other scene’ by engaging the challenge of landscaping a non-egological terrain of knowledge-praxis. Psychoanalysis aims, in other words, at being a discourse and treatment that operates in the domain of the unconscious.
It might be suggested that the positive phenomenological expression, in the clinic, of the existence of the unconscious, is found whenever the work knocks up against egological gaps – either the patient's or the analyst's – most recognisably in the well-known paraplexical forms but, also, in a slightly different register, in other obstacles in the work itself, frequently underpinned by fantasies regarding the analytic situation held by either the patient or the analyst. Now, the unconscious, from this point of view, just is the ego's non-coincidence with itself: this clarifies why transference takes place unbeknownst to the patient. The elucidation of the unconscious as subsisting in the spaces of the non-(self)-coincidence of the ego, the sites of failed egological attempts to sustain a seamless fabric of perception and understanding about itself and the world, points us to perhaps the most famous statement from Freud's key metapsychological paper on the unconscious, in which this is characterised by something entirely alien to the linear-logic of the ego: ‘exemption from mutual contradiction, primary process (mobility of cathexes), timelessness, and replacement of external by psychical reality’ (S.E. 14: 187). There is a negative theology in operation here; the unconscious is posited as functioning in accordance to a set of governing principles that are the obversion of egologic. This would suggest, then, a dialectical interaction between ego and unconscious. Where ego and unconscious are the inverse of one another, the conditions of each other's possibility, they also constitute each other's blind spots.
Thus, where the ego fails to correspond to itself, we speak of the unconscious; however, where the unconscious fails to meet itself, we speak of the ego. So, we can now see that if the ego misses itself by being universally-singular, the unconscious misses itself as singularly-universal, and these two terms stand in a non-reciprocal dialectical relation. In relation to neurotic suffering, this formulation permits a reading of the
famous Freudian maxim, ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden’. The aim of the treatment is not, as the trite reception of this statement would have it, for the ego to usurp the unconscious, superseding and supplanting it. On the contrary: the task of analysis is to enable the ego to perceive how the very conditions of its possibility consist in the non-place of its failure to coincidence with itself, i.e. in its nothingness, or lack. Or, to put it more succinctly: part of the analytic endeavour is for the ego to gradually grasp that, without the unconscious, there would be no ego at all and to learn to tolerate the anxiety this produces.
How, then, might we start conceiving of the unconscious or singular-universal better and, in relation to this, how might we begin tallying such a conception with therapeutic strategies? Answering such questions adequately is beyond the scope of this paper.3 All we can do here is propose that the analytic situation is one in which, given that the two parties involved always already fail to coincide with themselves, the possibility of mutual coincidence is ruled out in advance and any endeavour to try and establish a coincidence, for example by encouraging the patient's ego to identify with the analyst's ego, or aspects thereof, is misguided and ought to be resisted, as this would constitute the height of an egological treatment and the antithesis of the clinical spirit bequeathed by Freud. Analyst and patient will always, and by necessity, miss one another, remain as other to one another as to themselves.
Perhaps many analyses can be comprehended as floundering in either interminability or early termination on just this problem of appropriate distance and identification. Often an analyst, in their well intentioned desire to engage the singularity and specificity of the patient, will inadvertently annul too much of the alterity that arises from their location as a placeholder for the universal in the treatment, s(mother) ing the patient. Contrariwise, the variation of this error is made by those analysts who, overvaluing the importance of their designation as placeholder of the universal, establish too much distance and remove in the work, thereby failing to adequately contain the patient's singular sense of vanishing inaugurated by the dismantling of the transference during the treatment. It is the failure, or void, at the heart of the psychoanalytic
enterprise, which we suggest can be grasped as the motor force of the therapeutic work, and the drive behind continuing analytic research.
We can, finally then, see how these reflections permit a reorientation of the perennial debate between those who argue clinical work is an ‘art’ and those who maintain it is a ‘science’. Is it not now possible to grasp that this quarrel is a red herring? Rather than a debate over the ‘scientific status’ of psychoanalysis, is this not in fact a debate over whether one views psychoanalysis as primarily universal or singular? If one insists upon the singularity of the treatment, then one will be compelled to conclude that any attempt to make it a science is misplaced, given that no prescriptions can be given in advance for the unknown of an individual's psyche. In this vein, we saw how Sharpe underscores that it is the craft of each clinician to be able to adapt their practice to respond to the specificity of every case. However, if one insists upon the universality of the treatment, then one will similarly be impelled to insist that psychoanalysis can be formalised and characterised as scientific. It should, however, be clear that both these positions are misnomers, having arisen because of the failure to realise that transference is neither universal nor singular, but rather universally-singular. Contemporary psychoanalytic approaches frequently elide what was Freud's unique and radical innovation: the positioning of psychoanalysis on the dialectical pivot between universality and singularity, rationalism and empiricism, theory and praxis, in which all terms intersect one another as other, through a series of reversals and inversions. As such, they miss working with what we have here been calling the chiasmus of the clinic, the mirror fugue of analytic work, failing to situate psychoanalysis in the non-space opened up by the failure of (self)-coincidence.
That said however, the notion of transference has a significant part in the evolution of Freud's thought, already being employed by him in 1889 in his pre-psychoanalytic engagements with hypnotism, for instance in his Review of August Forel's Hypnotism, (S.E 1), as well as in the Project
where he speculated about ‘transference between neurons’.
A word of clarification is warranted here: according to Freud, universally found in clinical work with the so-called ‘transference-neuroses’, for instance obsessional neurosis and hysteria. In Freud's view, only the psychoneuroses capable of transference production were amenable to psychoanalytic treatment – a view thereby debarring the ‘actual-neuroses’ and the psychoses from the couch. For instance, in the penultimate of his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (S.E. 16: 497) from 1917, the lecture on ‘Transference’, Freud affirms the link between the ability to produce transference and to undertake psychoanalytic treatment.
Footnote added 2014: Since writing this paper half a decade ago, as a trainee, I have developed a fuller account of some of the clinical and technical implications of this argument drawing, in order to do so, upon the Freudian metapsychology of drive theory in relation to the intellectual and historical development of psychoanalysis, see Watt, B., 2012 and 2013.