LOVE IN THE DAYS OF TRANSFERENCE

GÁRATE-MARTÍNEZ Ignacio


The Psychoanalytical clinic is a clinic of equivocation and the structure of this equivocation is organised around transference.
What is transference ?
One can probably say that transference is a form of love where the loved object (the analyst in a moment of emergence during the course of treatment) shies away from the lover's demand (the analysand who addresses his demand to the Other) ; he does not respond. Why ? Perhaps he knows that to reply would consume the passion in an illusion of possession, the unique aim being the procrastination of death. But certainly also because he is aiming at another space, beyond the object, an emptiness where truth is born. Thus, transference, shows us its asymmetry as the fruit of two asynchronous de-selfisations.

JACOB AND MOSES
It is the encounter with Michel De Certeau in 1982 which, for me, inspired the following question : whatever can a demand without object be? It is, of course, a fundamental question if one is to understand more clearly the archaeology of love.
It is difficult to understand that man loves when he is woman without, for one second, turning our attention to the story of Jacob in Genesis : after the construction of his name and of the desire of it as a name, Jacob receives a limit ; the limping or the lack which accompanies the effect of nomination of its desire (Israël, that is to say the one who does not give in) is constructed in the same significant material as woman (isha) who, before, in the story of Genesis was carried against (kenegedo [2, 20]) man, to his limit ; we know how much the corruption of this divine "against" into a masculine "with" (imadi [3, 12]), from the very beginning, will deceptively reduce the difference that confers to sexual intercourse its quality of emptiness. It is about the Hebrew signifier which is pronounced (tsela [2, 21-22/ 32, 32] ) and which designates once the rib, now the side, now the limping.
Thus, to condescend to desire, Jacob-Israël must renounce his enjoyment (jouissance).

THE ANALYST'S SELF
It could be considered as surprising that a practice of chatting, where ethics consists of not responding to the analysand's demand, begins in the recognition of this demand as a demand of analysis. The analyst knows perfectly well that the signifiers which are addressed to him by the analysand are not destined for him; he knows it since December 6, 1896, and that is why he does not mistake the origin of the analysis for its beginning ; before he bases his practice on responding to a demand for analysis, this demand existed already addressed to the Other, lost for ever, whose loss was repeated by the subject through his objects of love, always unsatisfied, always in darkness.
The difference is situated on the side of the response : there, where the analysand expresses a demand for benefits, the analyst responds by an evasion which questions the desire. Love as mediator between enjoyment (jouissance) and desire therefore consists of this evasion, subverting the Good wished for the other in favour of Eros about which the other knows nothing.
The subject of the unconscious's ignorance can only act at the expense of the doctrine of the analyst's self : that is how we can understand the learned ignorance which supports the analytical act on the analyst's side. The analyst's person suffers in its essence for an act, the real consistence of which he ignores ; what he knows is how much his act passes through the dissolution of his Self : his de-selfisation (that is to say to strip the narcissistic image of the Self of all forms of desire wh s been formed).ere it ha

THE ANALYSAND'S SELF
It is not true that women are matched to man, no more than the analyst's self is matched to that of the analysand. The enjoyment (jouissance) to which the analyst renounces in favour of his act, is not to be poured, as a plus, into the analysand's ideal. This enjoyment (jouisssance) is a point where pleasure and suffering do not differ ; no more than they contradict each other, since they are unconscious (and Raymond Lulle understood it like this in the seventh chants of The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, before the year 1300) and in this enjoyment (jouissance) is neither fruition of the object nor orgasm.
The practice of psychoanalysis undermines the analysand's self ; it undermines deceit, ambiguity and error where its bad faith delights in it ; it undermines the subordination of his being to the law of recognition where the narcissistic mirage of an imaginary capture occurs. But the dissolution of this imaginary capture also comprises loss of his Self in favour of his existence : his de-selfisation (that is to say the subjectivation of his death in the analysis).

THE COUPLE IS NOT A PAIR
One day whilst with a friend, our attention was drawn by the whim of a shoe shop owner to the fact that if one accepts to wear different shoes, it is no longer a pair of shoes but a couple, even if the diversity in the fitting causes at times some limping… From that moment on, it is indeed the non complementary difference, this asynchronous inequality, this dissymmetry as to aims, which prohibits the conjugation of the "I" into "we" in order to teach the impossibility of the we around an emptiness of which each extremity of the couple constitutes the side, that is to say the limit : the arrangement, like the arch, is empty ; the object of desire is not something that can be shared ; only his absence is made present by the shadow of each side marking the place of this empty space, its outline, without which the absence of the object of desire would be confused with the pure world, with the impossible.
In the time of transference, love is a question put to existence, about the expected opening of the renunciation of saying "we", for do together starting from emptiness. It is from that emptiness that one expects the creative effect. That is what Maud Mannoni reminded us when she said : "two do not have to be stuck to each other to go together".

LOVE AFTER TRANSFERENCE
When each one is affected by death, when this solitude is incarnated in our body as a limit, when the analysis reaches its end, in what time zone do we find ourselves ? Is there a time for love after the experience of transference ?
The experience of transference is not an antidote against repression and the forces that work for repression stay as steadfast after the time of transference as before its alliance.
Neither the fusion of the bodies (porneia) nor the mixing of genus (moikhon), tells us anything about love after transference ; only evasion keeps trace thereof; evasion as disappearance or subtraction (Faithful to her pain and in the enclosed shadow, She even shied away from her fame, Racine. Brit. II, 2.) as a limit to sharing, evasion as a number, as workings of the letter, of the outline of the letter against the blending of glances and the illusion of sharing bodies. No sexual intercourse can constitute a relationship, even if we dedicate ourselves to making a great many gestures that look like love.
Love after transference depends on the recognition of this emptiness, this impossibility of alliance beyond death -death which cannot be represented-, except as the signifier. Love is an alliance around signifiers, a guerrilla without reproach who refuses capitulation of one to the other, who knows very well that losing one another is no longer possible, is soothed by a conch in the depth of the forest of fruits and perfumes.
Renouncing to the Self, because the other exists and his existence offers me an alternative, an alternative to the enslavement to the grey forces of the Superego, alternative through the letter, through the renewed joy of the letter, of the letter of love.