BISSERIER Luis Maria

INHERETED TRANSFERENCE

"Setting straight all that would be the most lucrative
task of psychological investigation." S. Freud

Even considering the complexities we all recognize in it, the psychoanalytic concept of transference is firmly established and is efficient. Structurally articulated with others such as that of the Unconscious, drive (as long as it includes the recognition of the death drive) and repetition, it permits to recognize several practices and theories as psychoanalytical.

Save rare exceptions we generally do not doubt to accept there are psychoanalysts in each and all the psychoanalytic groups and even outside them. We can criticize and discuss the conception and handling of the transference that predominates in the IPA or in the AMP, or in such and such other institution, but nobody can assert the absence of psychoanalysts within them.

For the same reason we do not doubt to qualify as not analytic any practice or institution that does not recognize in its proceeding the existence of the Unconscious, the transference, etc...It’s clear this last point is unworthy of the dignity of a problem.

Indeed proven to be a problem worthy of the dignity of being treated for the psychoanalytic movement, is the existence of a growing and increasingly disperse population of numerous institutional and doctrinal frames, and even several jargons that gather and produce analysts within institutional bodies that seem to suffer cyclic metastasis. As distant as it may seem from its origin, each new group seems to carry unnoticed the same disease.

Love, hate and segregation are recognized as inevitable effects of a mass psychology in which those concepts considered fundamental beforehand can no longer operate. Eros and Thanatos, love and hate, showing up outside the frame of the transference cease to be the engine of a possible analysis to become the unquenchable source of a mass politic that can only be practiced through negotiation or war, giving this vel of alienation the lethal weight we all know. Love negotiated in trifle wars within the frame of a tragic epoch. Let us remember the recent attempt of dialog between the IPA and the AMP.

Confronted with this problem, the psychoanalytic movement, since 1912-1913 on, has given different answers, that turn on the same axis : the analysis and the end of the analysis of each analyst, in a repeatedly failed attempt to govern and educate the forces that Freud named as primordial, reconducting them to the analytic task that hence became infinite, posing a new problem. Let us observe, however, that the psychoanalyst that fulfilled so ambitious a goal should offer the testimony of the result of his experience to others, singularly qualified to verify it, and that simultaneously he himself and those others are inserted in a situation of masses.

Now then, there is transference and inherited transference. Maybe it’s not possible to operate with and on this last as efficiently as with the first. This does not prevent it from existing and it’s possible to expect a first benefit if we manage to reopen the problem reestablishing its name as differential.

Freud pointed it out firmly but was unable to establish it as a tool for the psychoanalyst. It figures as such in "Finishable and Unfinishable analysis" but blurred by the expression "archaic heritage" thus including it in its biomythological constitutional problem and this in spite of the freudian warning. Let’s see: "When we speak of archaic heritage we are in the habit of thinking only in the Id and apparently we suppose that an Ego is not yet present at the beginning of the singular life. But let us not disregard that Ego and Id are originally one, and it’s no mystic overstatement of the heritage considering likely that the not yet existing Ego, could have already established the orientations of development, the tendencies and reactions that it will bring to light later on. The psychological particularities of families, races and nations, even of conduct towards the analysis, do not admit any other explanation. Furthermore: the analytic experience has imposed on us the conviction that even certain psychic contents such as symbolism have no source other than the inherited transference."

Two years later, in 1939, in his text "Moses and the monotheistic religion", in the heading he will call "Difficulties", he makes his most extensive commentary on the "archaic heritage", losing the term of transference on behalf of the archaic, that Freud needs to underline the argumentation that proves as a historical fact that the most remote murder of the primitive father indeed took place. In that text he discusses the biological objection and underlines that it’s all about mnemonic traces of outside impressions, and he says: "If we suppose the persistence of such mnemonic traces in the archaic heritage, we will have built a bridge over the abyss between individual psychology and that of masses."

In the Proposition of 9 October 1967, Jaques Lacan does not settle for the extraordinary rectification he himself proposes on didactic analysis and warns strongly and in several ways: "Today I don’t foresee more than a construction of organs for an immediate functioning. This perhaps does not exempt me from indicating at least, as a previous condition of a critic on the level of the extension, three points of reference that must be produced as essential", and after defining them rigorously he concludes bluntly: "Here we want to mark the complex horizon, in the very sense of the term, without which the situation of psychoanalysis could not be shaped. The solidarity of the three capital functions we have just traced find their point of reunion in the existence of the Jews"......"For this reason especially the religion of the Jews should be questioned in our field."

Let us remember with dispatch the three reference points without letting this keep us from rereading them. Lacan points as noticeable the "specified attachment of analysis to the coordinates of the family" that seems to him "intertwined to a manner of interrogation of the sexuality that runs the great risk of letting go a conversion of the sexual function that is taking place before our eyes." Thus, the first of the points he proposes is "The participation of analytic knowledge in that privileged myth that is the Oedipus", without which.. "all the normative thought of psychoanalysis appears to be an equivalent in its structure to Schreber’s delirium." In that point he places the passage into action of the psychoanalysts that came to prevent his seminar on the Name-of-the-Father. The second point of reference is the function of the identification in the theory, that must be "studied in function of what is in the Church and in the Army, taken here as models, the Subject Supposed Knowing" and points out that the identification to the Ideal Father is "a defense against the questioning of the Oedipus." Let us point out that this questioning does not propose the elimination of the oedipal problem (we believe it is more a question of articulation between Myth and Logic) but rather on the contrary "the relegation of the oedipal dialectic that this produces is increasingly stressed in the theory and in the practice" and "this exclusion possesses a coordinate in the Real" that for Lacan is the third point of reference which is described with terms that evoke a diagnosis of psychosis : "it is about the advent, (...), of the fundamental phenomenon whose eruption was made evident by the concentration fields."

An attentive rereading of " Moses and the monotheistic religion" places us before a key idea that asserts the existence of a non biological archaic heritage, a constitutional predisposition founded on mnemonic traces, of facts and timeless fantasies, that in their turn ground the religious compulsion, bond of union, war and segregation. The Jewish religious tradition is monotheistic and is sustained in the reading that fixes (thus opposed to psychoanalitic reading) the writing as existential support of the One that subordinates the Unarious in benefit of the Unian. Paradoxically, the One Father without body and without image, made of pure letters, that each reading makes unquestionable, shows in fact to be the best guarantee of union for the survival of archaic family structures that perhaps lean on the sacrifice of the son, as the passage into christianism seems to show.

I propose then, as a need for investigation, the following work hypothesis:

There is inherited transference

This transference is transacted on the axis of the Ego Ideal-Ideal Ego whose study could be reopened in stance of a reconsideration of the notion of sign, in its double value of image and signal Lacan takes from its reading on the sign in Husserl, for his generalization of the theory of the mirror stage, along with Pierce’s studies on the signs, to which Lacan alludes in his introduction of referential knowledge; these seem to offer the promise of unexplored land to the psychoanalysts.

This Ego Ideal preserves and transmits the desire of the Other as long as it’s primal, that is to say founder of subjectivity.

This makes of the Founder figure ( i (a) ) something inseparable from its desire, eternalized source of something that can neither be analyzed nor castrated.

The openings and closings of the possibility to investigate this problem seem to extend and be determined by cycles connected to the subjectivity of the epoch, as long as this throttles or facilitates the rituals of mourning.

The end of analysis of the analyst and what we call desire of the analyst should be thought on this premise.

The passage promoted from transference with the analyst to transference of work could be an impasse that overloads the end of analysis in a way that’s analogous to the modern overload suffered by the figure of the father. In other words: in our times we perceive a symbolic wearing out of the functions called paternal, that in past times were not mixed-up with the person of the father. Before which, nowadays, the defense, carried out by an identification with the Ideal Father, overloads the incarnated father, the Imaginary father, that can then only appear as lacking, humiliated or in its counterpart, dictatorial and terrible. In the same way it’s believed that the institutional difficulties of all order will be remedied with the end of analysis effectuated in the Pass.

Since the father required by the situation here described, can only be One, that structure exacerbates the war among them all. In that identification each one could finally be the One. The pushing without remedy into a fraternal rivalry with no way out would have, as correlation, the envy and the plugging of femininity since all this pushes a woman to the place of the daughter that can make of someone a Father consistent and guaranted. Just as it seems to be repeated in the history of the analytic movement.

Probably Melanie Klein, F. Dolto and before them perhaps Groddek bring back what gets lost concerning knowledge of the Unconscious in that war. But to the cost of making it ineffable.

The clinic each analyst practices is the axis that would permit each one to recognize the common unarious traces, in the facts of history, of theory, of politics, of the institution, and that upon being read reanimate the discourse that permits us to be gathered in a Convergencia that, not segregating itself from the world, supports its facts without yielding in its desire.