THIBIERGE Stéphane

I wish to base myself on the definition of transference which Lacan gave in his seminar entitled The four fundamental concepts of Psycho-analysis, which is a sort of introduction to psycho-analysis : more precisely, it reopens a field which - in Lacan's own words - "by essence loses itself". In 1964, Lacan was addressing a new audience - mostly philosophers or people who had studied philosophie - and he had good reasons to believe that the field that had been opened by Freud had been closed after him (one of those reasons being that he had just been forbidden to teach).
Such is the context in which transference is defines as "actualizing the reality of the inconscious". And Lacan adds : the reality of the freudien unconscious requires what is consubstantial with it - sexuality - to be taken into consideration. The reality of the unconscious necessarily reflects the sexual reality. Note that this premise cannot be bypassed if one is to distinguish between the handling of transference in psycho-analysis, and suggestion as is often applied to questionable purposes in the fields of politics, teaching or medecine.
To some people, Lacan's definition came like a bomb-shell because he saw both the concept of transference and the reality it actualizes in an entirely new light.
Let us first consider transference as an "actualization". Any act implies responsability, hence taking risks, since no action can be completely guaranteed. Then, what is actualized? The reality of the unconscious, that is of the very thing that totally alters our perception of reality.
In our tradition, reality is seen as liable to become objective, conceptualized knowledge, which the subject, believing in such a thing as completeness of knowledge and self-completeness, may imagine to be his own.
Transference is an act that questions such reality. What new light is here shed by psychoanalysis? Psycho-analysis shows the unconscious and its productions, their repetition and insistence, but it mainly shows that such repetition, such productions are directed. The knowledge involved is not self-contained because it is directed to another place - the place of the Other, as Lacan puts it. What is more, the subject does not pre-exist the process : on the contrary, the process is what brings him into existence. The subject is represented, so insists Lacan, by a signifier to another signifier, and what represents the subject originates in the place of the Other. This theory, though well-known, is still accepted with great difficulty. Although it is indeed the very foundation of both the concept and practice of transference in psychoanalysis, it is regularly distorted, and the subject is believed to pre-exist transference when, in very deed, he is direct consequence of it.
The split within knowledge, which is a constituent of the subject, the fact that knowledge can never be universal, the fact that any recognition of sameness is a lure, the necessary reference to the Other, all those represent what the analyst maintains open by virtue of his actual presence.
That is where sexuality is referred to, because the sexual reality is indeed what gives the psycho-analytical concepts of the unconscious and transference their objective basis. It is precisely because Lacan took the sexual reality into consideration that he was able to maintain that in transference the function of desire is primarily to be located by the analyst, who opens it and keeps it open.
The split within knowledge which appears in transference carries with it some irretrievable loss which is in very deed actualized by transference : there appears a hole within knowledge, the very hole in which speech originates. What is that lack a sign of ? It shows that it is both logically and actually impossible to consider knowledge as a finite whole, to guarantee an identity with sameness. What one faces is an irreductible difference, an otherness that is ultimately connected with the lack inherent in sex and desire.
It is impossible, says Lacan, to know everything about sex, while sex and the enigma it gives rise to are precisely the origin of any knowledge man may have. The fact that it is impossble to know everything about sex creates the hole in reality : because it is sexual reality, it then becomes unbearable - which means that no knowledge in the classic sense of the term, no knowledge that could ne recognized by conscience can account for it.
The loss that sex necessarily binds up with knowledge is precisely what the Freudian unconscious reveals as the object of the drive : though an object which cannot be grasped and which is devoid of meaning, it is spoken and acted, and Lacan terms it "objet petit a". But, says Lacan, though psycho-analysis may give reprsentation to that loss which is inherent in sexual reality, it does not follow that it is taken into account : on the contrary, it is a source of obscurantism in official knowledge.
That is precisely what is at stake with tranference and the opening it creates : any knowledge which is going on, including psycho-analytical knowledge, has a tendency to throw out everything which is the spring of a possible truth. In psycho-analytical practice, such a spring is the acknowledgement of the consequences of objet petit a. That is what allows knowledge to be split, at the cost of a loss. We are aware of the fact that, when knowledge and transference are dissociated, such loss can easily be exorcised by recourse to a form of behaviour involving exclusion - and there lies our responsability.