Chapter 19. Perversion of the Transference

Present investigations of this area are very incomplete indeed and in a sense we can hope to do little more here than to call the problem to the attention of other analysts. It is the problem that arises in all patients in whom perversion or addiction plays a significant role in their psycho-pathology. They will be seen to make a concerted effort at certain stages in the psycho-analytical process to dislodge the analyst from his accustomed role and to convert the entire procedure into one which has the structure of their perverse or addictive trend. As the subtlety with which this transformation is undertaken by the unconscious of the patient is of a very high order, its manifestations and resultant counter-transference are likely to escape the notice of the analyst until it is too late. That is, by the time he becomes aware that the government of the analysis has been subverted, this will already have become an accomplished and perhaps irretrievable, or rather irreversible, fact.

Since forewarned is forearmed, even the limited delineation of the problem that we can undertake at present may be clinically useful. In order to accomplish this I plan to discuss gambling, partly because it has not as yet in this work been given the attention it deserves in the field of perversion and addiction, but also because it affords a useful paradigm for investigation of the alterations in the transference relationship. Perhaps it would be permissible to use the outline of Dostoievsky's classic investigation of the problem, his own, described in “The Gambler”, as a jumping-off place, since like so many of his works it lays out the anatomy and geography of personality with brilliant clarity. It was written, you may recall, in his later years, during the period when he had left his wife to run off with Paulina Suslova, was heavily in debt, subject to epileptic seizures and frantically repairing his fortunes by serially writing “The Idiot” for a newspaper, only to sink further into deb