UNCONSCIOUS AND TRANSFERENCE, IN PSYCHOANALYSIS WITH CHILDREN
THE TRANSFERENCE AS STAGING OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

GURMAN Isidoro

It was Freud’s desire which opened the possibility for a father to address him in order to consult him about the anguish and ulterior phobia of his five year old son. We can state then, that a child never comes "alone", his anguishes, inhibitions and symptoms raise an issue. With what ignorance does he confront the parents? How can we place the Unconscious and the transference in these clinic conditions?

The ailment of a child punctuates the familiar text or provides a new letter, that as Freud says in the "Moses and the monotheistic religion" dislocates the text, originating an insistence that disarranges it.

Let us say that the child, with his ailment, introduces a difference, in the sense that he manifests a truth that until a determined moment could be ignored.

I take the model of the "Moses..." as long as Freud, recognizing himself as part of the Jewish people, questions the consecrated text, showing that in the false links, the dislocations, there are stitches, that attempt to consolidate the image of the idealized father, operating.

Freud questions the text as an analyst and, perforating it, generates a question that is not without consequences for the place the "Great man" occupies in the very text that consecrates him as such.

Freud as a son of the Jewish people questions the history, and pitches an interrogation: "¿What if Moses was an Egyptian?"

Actualization of the trauma, veiled by history, which is, in the stance of Freud, likely but not necessarily truthful.

In "Introduction to Narcissism" Freud points out the consequences it may have for the child that, from what he represents to narcissist love, any reference to illness, death or suffering could be canceled.

Paraphrasing Freud in his work over the "Unconscious", we can say that in the "alter" the child impersonates, the Unconscious may be read as something ignored in relation to fatherhood, motherhood, being a man, being a woman, sexual difference, death. In the 5^th. chapter of the aforementioned work we may read: "in the manner of a synthesis it must be said the UCC, is prolonged in the so-called "sprouts" , is accessible to the vicissitudes of life, influences continuously over the "Prec", and is in its turn submitted to influences from it." "The study of sprouts of the Unconscious affords a radical disappointment to our expectations of obtaining a schematically clean separation between the two psychic systems... To this we will reply we proposed nothing but to transpose the results of an observation into a theory."

Giving the word to a child in the interview with the parents is gravid in consequences, he knows better than anybody their value, he intervenes as a sort of "wild analyst" towards the parents, with whom he’s in a transference that bids him to silence.

If the consult begins with the "we are speaking about a child", the analytic device, that includes the analyst, offers the frame in which a "child that says" can advent, by taking the word, which includes drawings, displacements in the space, gestures. The mute transference the child sustains with the parents, is mobilized by the presence of the analyst, that does not know how he is implicated in that tripod configured by remembering, repeating, elaborating.

In the case of the consultation for a child "That" (here taken as a possible name for the "Id"), which is said about him, calls for not only the parents, but also educators, pediatricians, social workers, etc., who always have something to "inform".

It’s in "Inhibition, Symptom and Anguish" that Freud locates the infantile about three issues:

A)- Prematuration.

B)- Punctual dependence on an unique object.

C)- Evolution of the sexuality in two periods.

The punctual dependence on an unique object, is the condition Freud works on the chapter "Love attachment and hypnosis" of "Masses Psychology and the analysis of the Ego". It’s in these conditions that the intervention of an analyst can open to possibility the granting, from the parents to the child, of those words that may permit his integration to the symbolic world, through their family history.

In this way we may retake the Freudian recommendation to little John’s father: "tell the kid in the proper occasion". This is a transference that makes it possible for the father to give the word to the child, delimiting the imaginary side of the fantasies constructed starting from the infantile sexual theories. It is clear that these last, do not come only from the children, since little John’s mother, confronted with the child’s question, if she indeed had what he assumed should be as big as a horse’s, answers: "But of course, what did you think?"

Freud will call this "the bed of rock" in "Finishable and Unfinishable Analysis", a matter that must be taken into account when the child’s words question the parents.

It’s in terms of transference that the father addresses Freud, commenting him the difficulty he finds in the fact that, whenever he absents himself, the mother receives the child in her bed.

Freud’s comment, that the mother meets in this way the inexorable destiny that is assigned to her, opens the matter of what can be carried through in children analysis.

The Freudian punctuation that the child is isolated, and lacking in playmates and that his only possibility for exogamy consists in a glance in which he sees a girl, brings me back the memory of an intense phobia in a boy that lived alone with his divorced mother, intensely depressed, to whom he reclaimed that he be taken to the park. When he could resort to the mother of a friend, who agreed to take him to the park when she took her own child, his symptoms gave in. The analysis allowed him to build that social bond through which the maternal jouissance could be delimited.

Which is the way the analyst has to participate, in the time in which the child is committing himself in the way of becoming realized as a Subject?

Perhaps what Freud comments about the observation of his grandson in the so renown game of the reel, can provide an idea of the way in which the presence of an analyst accounts for a constitutive time.

If the reel is the object, the absence of the mother, the traumatic experience, the game, the representative of the representation, it’s upon this last one that the repression properly speaking may be bestowed.

To allow the staging, accompanying the child, is perhaps the operation through which he may be included, by means of the game, in that place in which the equivocations in the discourses that have him as object, operate.

If the dream of the "Injection to Irma" evidences how the subject who is being constituted deals with all the discourses that refer to him, and also if the matter of guilt, that the debt between father and son implies, constitutes the matter of the dream: "Father can’t you see I’m burning?", among these two dreams, that which inaugurates the interpretation of dreams and that which opens the chapter destined to theoretical synthesis, we find the precise threads of what we can consider the labyrinthine practice of psychoanalysis with children.