THE BEGINNING OF TRANSFERENCE

MOSCOVITZ Jean-Jacques

Due to her suicidal behaviour, " her " psychoanalysis is her last chance. Her symptoms : homeless, although she isn't jobless, she puts up at her friends or sweethearts. She's a reference to her parents and friends and as a " precocious adult " she foresees in a phobic way her own position and short-circuits her Oedipus complex by-passing from pre-Oedipus to post-Oedipus ; she's nevertheless forced to go back to the suburbs of the Oedipus knot in order to let her cure exist. There she stands, a painting made of her utterings which evoke a speech weighted by her gaze.
Her self-destructive manners as well as her reactional toxicomania give in at the preliminary sessions. The text sent to me is a montage in symmetry , a mirror, a duplication of our face to face position. The scopic drive arranges her utterings juxtaposed without a link, in which memories and evocations mix up easily. " When you aren't there, you aren't " people ", you are me " she says. From gaze to the letter, thus she alters my name/ surname and, instead of any signifier, her speech on attributes , her father's profession, follows. It's then a montage in symmetry in which the psycho-analyst, is in a position which can only be supported if it is the " void position ", the splitting of the subject, the building up of the Other in relation with shifting/Enstellung, the origin of the " mishearing " inherent to the structure of the message and producing a metaphoric signifier together with its effects, a subject of the unconscious. But it also originates " mislooking ", inadequation between the subject and its image, as well as its fading away in order to come to life again.
Void, lack : the analyst is in the position of being the cause of transference , the psychoanalyst's transference and ethics, the one which identifies transference and what's at stake at the very moment of a session. Her narrative, the family house, memories of her story that she builds up in pictural strokes, is a web she weaves along for months into a motif, with words weighted by the scopic symmetry of different periods and places. There is a different distribution of space for the psycoanalyst a room without windows, with music and for her a painter's studio in the open with particular brightness in each room for her relatives. Scenes of words on her past and present life try to erotise the situation. This entails my intervention when she gives my name somehow distorted to her … teddy-bear !
Transference is then possible for this " homeless " through the room given to the teddy-bear that she takes along everywhere. The past joins the present : teddy-bear/transferencial object allowing her to evoke some hatred for me related to the loss of her teddy-bear that her mother didn't want to " protect ".The teddy bear was, in her childhood, a protective object against too much closeness between adults and children and against the fusional and irruptive power of her family. Her father had been caught with another woman : that's how the mother image appears : " an under-bitch ", an assassin in the masculine gender. Here are her associations at that time : " wanting bad for herself, having killed one part of herself because of the absence of her psycho-analist for the reason that she, herself isn't there. And because of my too quick intervention about the name of the teddy-bear, to the point of saying that the analyst " isn't people, doesn't exist ". There's also a dream in which comes up " the impossible sexual lust of a man in spite of what she does ". And she says " a woman isn't a mother ", immediately rectified by " my mother is very masculine, she isn't feminine ". What I then hear about her father is that his sexual lust object isn't feminity and for him a woman blocks his castration, or at best she's the man of man. The father's metaphor hasn't blocked feminity behind the mother, so that the analysand may muddle up daughter/mother/woman, which brings about the appeal for a father agency in order to attain feminity, an appeal for some gaze to give way as a symbol of lack. Shifting from glance to speech like a symbolic vacillation.

Those suburbs of the Freudian Oedipus complex are apparently exclusion of feminity, illegitimacy of woman as a woman, as the father maintains on a structural level at fair distance although assembled phallus, mother and child. Is feminity a pre-genital object passing straight into the post-Oedipus ? The teddy-bear and the speech of that woman appeal for a substitutive phallus, a lack in her structure, that's to say in her neurosis, her symptoms, in search of a possible subjectivation.
Her numerous absences at her sessions, tried my desire as an analyst as well as her symptoms which were unspeakable duplications of her self-destructive anxiety, without mentioning the hysterical competition for the " void position " assumed by the psychoanalyst.
Her absences : a duplication in reality of the holes and signs of the collapse of her discourse, which doesn't mean discontinuity that is a mark of the symbolic, punctuation, articulation of silence and words, of I and its uttering, its body, its memories. It is in fact the recognition of the failures of the primary Other, the primary place of language, proper to the Father's function named by Freud Einverleibung/ incorporation, the position of a subject before the question of the subject, the primary repression. It shows that the Other is missing : a void inherent to the uttering based on the very discontinuity in the symbolic.
I'll also say that lack is lack of knowledge on death, coextensive to giving up immmortality and structurally linked to the dead father's function that sets up the limit of desire. It's the function of obliteration, that leaves the riddle of the link to language open, which is the origin submitted to the interdict of incest and to the impossibility of the structure. The replay of my analysand's symptoms into absences has shown me the essential part of the father's function. Those absences were a manifestation of the very existence of the unconscious , that Lacan calls transference, the repetition of her neurosis elements in her transference. Through her absences the scopic simmetry appears to be equivalent to the collapsing of the father's function of which she is the subject. Her absences articulated the conditions of her cure transference, Oedipus knot , castration, display of her demand in her discourse. Her absences instead of " silence ", otherwise " all will be destroyed ", she would utter repeatedly before a long series of absences.
Beside her absences, her speech weaves two threads , Eros and Thanatos, that's to say two different ways in terms of time : 1) fromThanatos and her father linked to an object, death
2) from Eros, life, her painting.
Thanatos, or periods of anonimousness her father had committed because of his job, as it seems he had drowned and cancelled villages, houses in order to lay out roads and urbanization works in the places where she had lived in her childhood. Ungraved death, unexpressed death of her childhood. Thanatos : a dream, the one with two " i ", a paradigm of the scopic simmetry, an analogy from her name/surname to mine. She claims for reparation of my too quick stating, it's the imperative of her desire to describe the language able to convey the interpretation of her dream. She then tells what she has " seen " rather than " read ", in a newspaper, a report on the twin sisters called " Mingele's sisters ", from the Auschwitz murderer/doctor. She then expresses, by signifying analogy, the skipping of (dodge) the question of death in her family by the great skipping of contemporary History, of the Holocaust, the vanishing of the bodies with their mutilations. In this case, like in other numerous cures, appears once again the mortification of the unconscious in relation to mass death and to the massiveness of speech.
Her second trend is life and she says " if I die , where shall I put my books, and what I love most, my brushes, my canvasses ? " Eros, psychoanalysis and creation, psychoanalysis associated with art, as psychoanalysis is creation. ..
Let's conclude on her style of speech. She would speak with patches of words, reminding the act of painting, sediments over other sediments suggesting a supposedly primary sediment…Materiality of the signifier, corporeity of speech, allowing a less erratic gliding of those patches one over the other. An organizing gaze on her way of speaking. Like her dream in which those patches of words show up in " a show "of the analyst's desire : " you listen to me through them, that is the veil, the canvass, the dust, but I can't see it myself ". Is it the dimension of castration, of the unconscious as time and place where the speech, with an unknown knowledge, stops thinking ? Does the subject of the unconscious become the reflexion of that lack in knowledge ? Does the Id emerge from that negation where the judgement of attribution pre-exists to the judgement of existence ? The unconscious is first of all the location of a lack before existence.