Transference: From Agalma to Palea

Abstract

Lacan choose to re-examine transference in Seminar VIII in order to write “a new chapter on analytic action.” Setting out from Freud’s contention according to which “transference, which seems ordained to be the greatest obstacle to psychoanalysis, becomes its most powerful ally,” Lacan goes on to show how the position of the analyst is decisive in the handling of the transference. This commentary explicates why transference could be considered as compass that signals not only the analyst’s orientation, but also his blundering. If Lacan is constantly interrogating the concept of transference, this is because the question of transference is not only a theoretical one, but also a technical one, that of its handling in the cure. And, though transference is to be considered as that which “directs the way in which patients are treated,” for Lacan, it is not the analysand who is to be guided, rather, as Lacan goes on, “the way in which” [the analysands] are treated governs the concept.