TRANSFERENCE AND COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE AS TRANSIENCE
"The idea of the transference and
countertransference is very productive, provoking and stimulating for growth. But like all
really good ideas, like everything that causes and encourages growth, it ages
rapidly" (Bion, 1983, p. 37).**
José Américo Junqueira de Mattos **
INTRODUCTION
This paper examines the relationship between analyst and analysand, commonly called
transference-countertransference, in the light of the concept of transience. I
begin from the pre-supposition** that we are born with patterns for potential fulfillment
during our human experience. This potential, that constitutes the human imagination and
that is never completed, can develop in almost infinite combinations. Seen from this point
of view, the analytic experience, as significant as it may be, is one among many, many
others that lead us a little ahead, and beyond.... Inversely, however, experiences can
become, here and there, stumbling blocks and apparent retreats, for setting up new stimuli
for new exploration and new achievements.... What I wish to underscore is that every
analytic session, every entire analytic experience, like so many others, is necessarily
transitory - it is different at each instant, and is never repeated! I intend to go back
to ideas on transference and counter-transference developed previously (1992, 1994, 1995a,
1995b), but now from a new angle, that is, in the light of the concept of transience.
Clinical material and references to literature, music, poetry and philosophy are brought
in to illustrate this concept.
EXPERIENCE AND TRANSIENCE
In "Elements of Psycho-Analysis" (p. 23) Bion defines pre-conception as
"a state of expectation. It is the state of mind adapted to receive a restricted
range of phenomena." Elsewhere in the same book (p. 25) he states that all the
elements of the Grid, from B through H, contain unsaturated elements that can be employed
as new pre-conceptions (p. 69-70). Bion starts off from the idea that all unsaturated
concepts can function like pre-conceptions, which, in contact with other unsaturated
concepts, become new concepts, where "the meaning of the whole may be said to be
greater than the meaning of the sum of its parts" (p. 24). We may thus suppose that
an analysand can produce a range of associations that contain A concepts, which will
stimulate associations or B concepts in a given analyst, that can lead to C
transformations or formulations that, in turn, might possibly be new for analysand and
analyst alike.
Thus, I am working with the supposition that there are two things that are indistinctly
named by Bion as pre-conceptions. 1) The first consists of the primitive pre-conceptions,
such as those whereby the baby matches the pre-conception of the breast with the breast
itself (Bion 1962a, 1967a p. 111). 2) The second category are those that serve as
unsaturated elements in a state of pre-conceptive expectation, awaiting contact with both
internal and external reality to give origin to new concepts (1963, Chap. 6, p. 25).
Described in another way, they are based on concepts already formulated, joined to new
concepts through an associative or intuitive process, resulting in what Bion called a deductive
scientific system. In terms of Bion's Grid (1989), this is the evolution from Category
B to Category H, or even to categories beyond H, not yet attained by the human spirit...
but already en-visioned by Bion when he de-vised the Grid. All creative formulations
should thus contain open, non-saturated elements, to allow concepts to expand and be
renewed and broadened... toward a truth ever re-newed and nurtured, but never attained,
directing our minds toward the formless infinite... that Milton speaks of in Paradise
Lost.... Or, to use yet another metaphor from Milton, this time quoted by Cassirer
(1972, Chap. 7):
"A dark illimitable ocean,
without bound, without dimension,
where length, breadth and height,
and Time and place are lost."
The human being, a wanderer in time and space, or, in the words of the Brazilian
19th-century poet Castro Alves, an eternal voyager of eternal ways,
endeavors in his experience to fulfill all potential, not only what has been genetically
endowed, but also, beyond his biological inheritance and through countless combinations,
to develop states of mind and explore out to borderlands never before ventured upon... and
in his internal dimension, toward the Socratic ideal of knowing oneself. Obviously,
for as much analysis, or as much experience in life, as one may have, this is an
unattainable ideal.... Thus, all human experience is transitory... all our ideas are ideas
in transit, toward the something else.... Thus also is transference comprised of feelings
and ideas in transit, transient feelings, transient ideas... that at one moment we place
in the person of the analyst, or in someone else, but that will not remain there forever.
Each experience is a crossing..., a moment along the road toward the beyond.... The most
beautiful and significant example we have is that of the Odyssey - that
extraordinary metaphor of the search for knowledge and for oneself - where Ulysses, after
twenty years, "re-turns" to Ithaca..., but to an Ithaca that is no longer the
same..., to a wife who is also no longer the same... and to himself who is no longer the
same.... At first he does not re-cognize himself, and is not re-cognized by her....
(Odyssey, Book XIII, verse 187 and following). Can there, in fact, be any return?
Heraclitus displays true wisdom when he says that "We can never enter the same
river twice because its waters are not the same, nor are we the same." (Brun, J.
1968, Fragments 91 and 12). This phrase, in the words of the Brazilian philosopher,
Marilena Chauí "expresses Heraclitus' central idea that the world is a flow or
permanent change of all things. An eternal becoming" (Chauí, 1994, p. 67).
As Shakespeare tells us, life is as ephemeral as a flickering candle:
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more" (Macbeth V, 5).
To be able to work, produce and be relatively happy, then, we have to accept and deal
with the ephemerality and transience of everything that we touch, everything that we feel
and everything that we love, and we must re-concile ourselves with the idea of our own
death. Freud, in his short but beautiful and significant work On Transience (1916),
analyses the feelings of a poet friend who was walking with him one radiant morning under
a beautiful springtime sky. The poet, contemplating the beauty of the scenery as it
unfurled before him, became very saddened. He said he could no longer bear the idea that
everything would disappear, be destroyed with the onset of winter. Freud shows that this
friend, by being unable to tolerate feelings of loss, of mourning, was also unable to
realize that at every winter life is re-newed, and that after each winter a new springtime
arrives and makes room for the seasons that follow, the other seasons, the four
seasons, that Vivaldi conveyed to us so beautifully in music. Although on that
occasion Freud had just finished his germinal work Mourning and Melancholy (Freud,
1917a), in On Transience he emphasized the difficulties in accepting the changes
that outside reality imposes on us. To my knowledge, Freud never elaborated on the idea of
the transference as a transient phenomenon. After 1976 Bion showed concern with the
transience of the transferential phenomenon and mentioned the subject in lectures and
clinical seminars or supervisions (Bion, 1978b, p. 36; 1980, p. 16, 45, 92; 1983, p.
37-38; 1987 and 1995). For example, below I am quoting part of a clinical seminar given by
Bion in São Paulo 1978 and published in 1995.
"Analyst: Her father died four years ago and her mother one year ago. The
patient lived with them for some years. Here, we need more information on that. Before
this, she lived a long time on her own. She had an independent life, a long way from her
parents. She was an only child. In the session before that one, from which we extracted
the text given below, she explained that she had kept her parent's bedroom intact since
her mother's death. She never moved anything, not even the clothes, the furniture, the
ornaments or the photographs.
Bion: The advantage of the fact is that, it's easier to say: `It's me’ and
`It's this photograph’ or whatever it is. It's easier to talk about the furniture of
the room, than to talk about the furniture of her mind or character; but, it's a step in
that direction; it's a sort of way of getting to know, in which the patient can get to
know who he or she herself is. It's a sort of transient relationship. It's a sort of
transference. (my underlines)When there is an actual analyst, then it can be, it can
become again transient, he can know who the analyst is and so on... who may be the father,
the mother, the brother, the sister, everybody... a crowd of people; but, it's on the way
to something else....
Participant: Would it mean that the objects mobilize less emotion than people?
Bion: No, I think it's a matter of feeling that it would be more bearable if, what
we would say, to know yourself and to be ignorant of yourself. Even the inscriptions at
Delphi says: `Know thyself.’ So, it's a very old story, which would somehow be useful
to know yourself. But, on the way to knowing yourself, it's easier to know the furniture
of your house; you might get to know the furniture of your mind in time... but, it's a
step on the way. Similarly, it's a step on the way if the analyst can say: `You feel that
I am like your father or mother’ or whatever it is: we don't mean that that is what
you think and that is what you'll think forever, but it's on the way, it's one of the
stepping stones on the way to knowing yourself. But, like the Ancient Greeks we still
think that it is helpful for patients and ourselves to know ourselves. Only the analytic
procedure is carrying that ambition, or that aspiration a step, we hope, further. We hope
that by these analytic conversations we shall get a bit closer to knowing who we are. Mind
you, I'm doubtful whether any of us will ever live long enough to know ourselves, but,
we're on the way.... We're one little bit of the story we started with Delphi and far
earlier than that."**
In an earlier paper (Junqueira Mattos, 1995a) in an attempt to expand on Bion's concept
of pre-conceptions, I postulated that the idea of pre-conceptions, when applied to the
analytic relationship, leads to the conclusion that the concept of transference should be
broadened, because we were all born with an innate pre-disposition to seek, in the object,
the object of our longing and expectations. I also stated that there was in the
transference an element that did not relate to a repetition of the past, in
the classic view set down by Freud. Given this characteristic and reaffirming what I said
before (Junqueira Mattos, 1995b), the human being is, in its essence, incomplete and
dependent on others, the object, for fulfillment. Thus, if we are born both dependent and
all alone, we can only approximate the attainment of a feeling of completeness in a
relationship with another, with the object. That is, the biological unit of the human
being is the couple, the pair (Bion, 1987 p. 4). We need two to be one. In addition, the
other is not only the object of love and of hate, but also of knowledge and curiosity....
If, as Freud said, we are born, with a Phylogenetic Oedipus Complex (1915, p.195
and 1917b, p. 371,1918, p. 97) or, as Bion put it, with a psychoanalytic function of
the personality derived from an innate pre-disposition for developing the
Oedipus Complex, this leads us to seek knowledge (1962b, Chap. 27, p. 89), and knowledge
can only take place, in its most primitive essence, through another, the object (in
analysis, with the person of the analyst). Thus I see psychoanalysis and transference as
transience, as a way of seeking the beyond.... Therefore, when we are born, we bring with
us as inheritance a pre-disposition for transference, what I call pre-conceptive transference
(1995a).
In previous texts (Junqueira Mattos, 1989, 1994) on counter-transference I stated that
in the transferential relationship the analyst may be stimulated to have
counter-transferential reactions that may lead him to experience aspects that either were
not analyzed or, if they were, were analyzed incompletely. That is, if we start from the
pre-supposition that we are all born with pre-conceptions that await an advent, an
epiphany, with experience, to become conceptions and from there pass on to the category of
concepts, it will be seen that the analytic relationship serves for achievements that cannot
be classified or categorized only as repetitions of earlier patterns from the past! This
holds true for both analyst and analysand.
THE MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM OF THE ANALYTIC SESSION
In my view there are two extremes that "touch" one another in our
unconscious, namely, the pre-conceptions on the one hand, and the "ultimate
reality" of the things that, by definition, cannot be known, on the other. I will try
to expand on what I have treated in earlier texts (1989, 1994, 1995a). If we consider the
unconscious, object of consciousness, as a sense-organ for the apprehension of psychic
qualities (Freud, 1900, p. 615), we see that, in itself - or in its deepest
nature (Freud, 1915, p. 171 and 1900, p. 613) or, as Bion stated, the absolute fact
of the session (1965, p. 17), the ultimate reality, the formless infinite -
it cannot be known. Thus, as much as we may advance we always have something farther
beyond.... For this reason the ultimate psychic reality is in itself unknowable,
like the horizon before our eyes.... We can never get to it.... It is always farther and
farther away... beyond, very far beyond, in the formless infinite....
In this regard, Ernest Cassirer (1972) recalled Kant's words that "concepts
without intuition are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind. This statement
portrays the fundamental duplicity of the fact that concepts and intuitions are conditions
for knowledge. But the idea is less abstract, more complete and better stated by Cassirer
when he says that the human intellect needs symbols to think with. "We cannot
think without images, nor intuit without concepts," he says. Then he continues:
"Instead of saying that the human intellect is in need of images we should rather say
that it is in need of symbols" (1972, Chap. 5, p. 56-57). For there to be
symbols, however, there must be the operation of the alpha function (Junqueira Mattos,
1989 and 1994). That is, a symbol results from a process of mourning, from the passage
from the schizo-paranoid position to the depressive position (Ps_D)** or, more
"microscopically," from the passage from beta elements to alpha elements, by
action of the alpha function (Bion 1962b). As part of a process of mourning, the symbol is
within the subject that symbolizes and not in the object, which is the object of the
symbolization process of the subject and in the subject. This
is in perfect accord with what Cassirer goes on to state: "A symbol has no actual
existence as part of the physical world; it has meaning." This leads to the
distinction that Cassirer makes between reality and possibility. In his words,
"... We find that under special conditions in which the function of symbolic
thought is impeded or obscured, the difference between actuality and possibility also
becomes uncertain. It can no longer be clearly perceived" (p. 57).
I believe that it is the psychotic or borderline states that create these special
conditions that Cassirer talks about, and that come up through either failure or
reversion of the alpha function (Bion, 1962b, p. 25), when there is no distinction
between symbol and symbolized object, leading to the "concrete thinking" of the
psychotic individual. In their delusions and hallucinations, psychotics omnipotently create
any reality they want. For them there is no waiting or frustration, no difference between
what is and what may come to be.... For them there is no
reality or possibility, symbol or object, wanting or being.... It is simply fiat lux,
and there is light.... **
If we consider that time is a dimension or form for our sensibility (Junqueira Mattos,
1995c) and if we have to cope with the feeling that all experience is transitory, we shall
have, always and at each moment, macro or microscopically, to cope with situations of loss
and of mourning - including within the analytic session, whether as analyst or as
analysand. If the analyst works with the discipline of avoiding memory and
desire during the analytic session, ##(End note) this corresponds to evolving from the
schizo-paranoid position to the depressive position, (Ps_D) or to the
passage from a state of "patience," related to tolerance to pain, to the
unknown, to frustration, to the new, and on to a state of "safety" (Bion, 1970
Chap. 12, p. 124). This is related to the emergence of the element that will give
coherence to the apparently disperse associations, that is, the selected fact
(Bion, 1962b, Chap. 23, p. 72-75).
Bion (1963, Chap. 9, p. 39), speaking of the relationship between container and
contained on the one hand, and the oscillations between the schizo-paranoid and depressive
positions (Ps_D) and the emergence of the "selected fact," on the other, states:
"I shall suppose the existence of a mixed state in which the patient is
persecuted by feelings of depression and depressed by feelings of persecution."
If the patient is subject to these feelings, so is the analyst, because both are in
search of the new, the un-known. The human animal, faced with the new, always reacts with
curiosity and fear.... If in every analytic session, therefore, analyst and analysand may
feel persecuted by feelings of depression and depressed by feelings of persecution,
this corresponds to prosecutory anxieties. We can use as a model for the analytic session,
the model of the baby, in its mother’s absence, able or not to tolerate her being
away. If it can tolerate, it will feel depressed by feelings of persecution because of its
mother's absence. But it will have been able to evolve from the schizo-paranoid to the
depressive position (Ps_D). If it is unable to tolerate the mother's absence, it will be
persecuted by feelings of depression and will not attain the depressive position because
it will use projective identification to evacuate the beta elements, which, through
pure intolerance to frustration, cannot become alpha elements. The creative interplay
between container and contained is thus prevented. The symbolization processes, with its
concomitant mourning, tolerance to loneliness, and responsibility for feelings of hate and
persecution, may be kept from being processed, as we saw above. In this case there may be,
in the analyst or in the analysand, or in both, a reversion of the alpha function,
leading the analysand to misconceptive transference and the analyst to misconceptive
counter-transference (Junqueira Mattos, 1994, 1995a). As I said above, these are
essentially dynamic states and may change or be reversed at every moment....
In this container-contents model 
, therefore, there
is always need for the other. If we start off with the supposition that the mental
apparatus is structured on pre-conceptions and, using the more primitive model proposed by
Bion, that a baby is born with the pre-conception that there is something that will
correspond to its need for food and love, this other corresponds to the breast. The
pre-conception is a content in search of a container, the breast. The breast, functioning
as a "filling" for this search, will be named when it makes contact
with the real experience of the breast. The baby then internalizes this container-content
relationship; this is the beginning of the structuring of the mental apparatus or (Ps_D,) and therefore of the capacity to symbolize. By this process
the child passes from the concrete (physical) to the abstract (mind).
In the analytic session something analogous happens, as there are two minds in constant
interplay: the analyst’s and analysand’s ().
Using a model that I mentioned in an earlier work (Junqueira Mattos, 1980) and
paraphrasing what I then heard from Dr. Bion, I would say that in the consulting room
there are three persons: 1) the patient who is talking, 2) the analyst who is listening to
the patient who is talking, and 3) the analyst who "hears" the meaning of the
patient's words inside himself and transforms them into an interpretation. That is, the
interpretation will be a transformation into verbal language (secondary process) of the
visual images, unconscious fantasies, experiences (probably due to the primary process)
caused in him by the analysand's associations. If there were not this introspective moment
in the analyst, this moment of the interpretative process, the analyst would be virtually
unable to interpret. His act is nothing more than the formulation, in verbal and conscious
language, of an experience initially perceptible only at the unconscious level.
Often this material that comes up may stay at the unconscious level (I am referring
here to the dynamic unconscious) or in categories of consciousness that hamper its being
"read." For example, if the beta elements can not be transformed into alpha
elements, because of the ego defense mechanisms operating at the unconscious level in the
analyst. That is, the analyst goes from the moment of grasping the experience to the
moment of working through, or transforming, and can then give an interpretation (Category
F on the Grid). These associations are then organized in the analyst's mind in narrative
form and the interpretation is therefore the final result of the transformations that have
taken place in the analyst's mind of the meaning that the analysand's discourse had for
him (Bion, 1965). In terms of the Grid, the passage in the analyst's mind is from Category
A to Category F or H (Bion, 1989).
So if we recall that all experience is transitory, that there are no two identical
analytic sessions, and that we never exactly repeat ourselves, we must then ask what gives
continuity to the experience and a sense of identity to us. Bion's theory about
transformations and invariants seems to be an attempt to answer this question. The
invariant is the element that remains from a set of transformations and that allows
one to recognize the original transformer in the final transformed product (Bion, 1965).
From the clinical material presented below of patients 2 and 3 among other aspects the
role of transformations and invariants will be exemplified and discussed. In that of
patient 1 the role of transference as a transient phenomenon will be emphasized.
CLINICAL MATERIAL
(omitted here)
COMMENTS ON THE CLINICAL MATERIAL
As I stated above, I start off with the supposition that we were born with an innate
potential to fulfill ourselves during our earthly sojourn, including our analytic
experience. This process is equivalent to Socrates's recommendation to Know thyself,
or the search for the ultimate reality of the session, the "o" (Bion,
1965, p. 17). But it never ends. This is expressed in this patient's final associations
when she talks about the function of the teacher, of the constant camping and pilgrimages
of the nomads. She also metaphorically says that the function of analysis is to provide
her with elements so she can make her own wings. That is, the function of analysis and the
analyst is to help her develop a mental apparatus that will enable her to think freely (). It is clear in the material that this can only be done
with the help of another, the analyst.
The analysand's pre-occupation can be seen to go back to the transferred piece of land
and the realization that she is only a temporary owner. There are another 50 meters, still
untouched, that are not yet officially a part of her property. I think she is saying that
there are areas and objects not yet assimilated into her self. Analysis has the function
of helping her understand what is going on inside her and, in this process of knowing, to
free herself, release herself. This means here, concretely, to return the land to its
rightful owner, since it doesn't really belong to her or, metaphorically, to work through
the infantile aspects of her personality.
What I mean is that each session has its own story, that is constructed jointly by
analyst and analysand and therefore cannot be repeated. If the analysand misses a session,
she may have others, but the one she misses cannot be re-placed.
Each analyst has to have a conviction of the validity of the theories he or she works
with. It is a conviction based on the emotional experience of his clinical practice. For
example, I had a teacher in my course at the Institute of Psychoanalysis who, when faced
with the erotic transference of a patient, said "This isn't about me, it's about
her father! I'm not the one she wants. She desires her father!" I think that even
though this may contain an element of truth, the important aspect is not "to
transfer not to remember," as Freud put it (1912), or the "past in the
present," as Malcon described (1986). What is important is the purpose of
the transference, the fact that transferring is a process of transience that aims at
knowledge. It is a step beyond.... In this sense, in the continuous process of becoming,
if we use the theory of the function and factors (Bion, 1962b), we will see that
transference is a factor of transience, and that transience is a function of
the personality. The word transference is used here in its common meaning, from whence it
was borrowed by psychoanalytic vocabulary. It is basically a change, a transfer, from one
place to another. It gives the idea of temporary lodgings, like a camp that is carried
from here to there in a never-ending nomadic pilgrimage toward a truth that is always out
ahead of us somewhere....
I said above that the element that gives continuity and identity to the experience is
the invariant. I also said that the analytic session can be useful to the analyst
as well, for him to become aware of certain ideas or feelings that he had never felt
before. Just as the analysand can become conscious of something that he or she never
experienced before, so can the analyst.
I will now present two sessions of different patients that I feel are pertinent to the
theories treated here.
(omitted here)
COMMENTS ON THE CLINICAL MATERIAL
I clearly remember that as Patient 2 described the painting my attention was suddenly
drawn to the basket... and through this I realized that my analysand was also four in
one.... That is, as she spoke a number of images were stirred up in me and underwent a
condensation process within me (the four and the basket) that enabled me to give the
patient the interpretation. Before this, however, she said, and I heard, that the aspects
she initially described were a "chaos of sensations", that is, beta elements,
worked by the alpha function. They were "alphabetized" (Grotstein, 1981, p. 7),
transformed into alpha elements, which were then organized inside me in a narrative
form, making it possible for the basket now to appear in my imagination and be
interpreted. In other words the interpretation was organized in a narrative form, using
the initial beta elements.
Something similar happened in the case of Patient 3. She was rocking her son and
singing the Brazilian version of Brahms’s lullaby "Berceuse." My
"inner ear" caught not the Brazilian version, but the version I used to hear on
the farm when I was small, that my mother played so often on the gramophone. So I was able
to transform the "music" into an interpretation.
Another fundamental point to be noted is the question of invariants, which are of
central importance, as is seen in the continent-content ()
relationship.
If the information that Patient 2 gave me about the painter is correct (and from other
sources I have concluded that it is), she, the painter, possibly without realizing it,
seems to have been describing her own internal world, her struggle, working for four...
her path... her basket.... She expressed all this in visual language: the painting. As my
analysand looked at the picture and "put herself into it," she reacted in a way
analogous to Freud when he saw Michelangelo’s Moses (Freud, 1914). In identifying
herself with the picture the patient was able to capture (or feel in herself) the
painter's internal world, and she bought the painting, because, unconsciously she
recognized her own path, her own fate: she also must be four. Unconsciously aware of this,
she brought the matter to analysis, and I, as I listened empathically, entered for a few
moments into contact with her internal world. At the moment the basket was brought to my
imagination I condensed and deciphered the material, through all the usual processes, but
in the opposite direction taken by the painter. The invariant elements were therefore the
four workers in their struggle, which appears not only in the painting, but also inside my
patient and in myself, the analyst. In Freud’s words, (quoting from his article The
Moses of Michelangelo, 1914, p. 212):
"... what he (artist) aims at is to awaken in us the same emotional attitude,
the same mental constellation as that which in him produced the impetus to create"
Patient 3 described the anguish of her son and the way she sang to him, but didn't
mention the song she sang. Something in her description awakened old, nostalgic memories
in me... bitter-sweet recollections... the same music... the farm... my mother. When
Brahms composed this extraordinary moment of music, he did so with such actuality and
truth that, like "Schumann's Reverie" (Seventh Variation of "Scenes from My
Childhood") and Dvorak’s ("The Song My Mother Taught Me" ), they made
a musical paradigm for the mother-infant relationship.
When I identified myself with the patient’s internal world, my intuition stirred
up "Scenes from my [own] childhood." I think therefore that the painfully
nostalgic invariants that Brahms transmitted were conserved in my patient's Brazilian
version, then captured by me in new transformations, that is, in its original version, and
transformed into interpretation. When something the patient says provokes, or evokes
conflicts in the analyst, if the analyst is able to contain them and work them through, he
or she will have done what Money-Kyrle (1956) called "post-graduation in [one's]
analysis."
This is very much in line with an interview with Bion (1978a) where, in answer to
questions about how he saw analysis, whether as a method of treatment or as a process of
investigation, he answered:
"I think Freud probably thought that it was a method of investigation. That is
true, but the point is that it is a method of investigation carried out by two people -
the analyst and the analysand. And the point about this is that you cannot find out more
about the human mind without also learning more about who you are. It may not be very
much, but it is something, so that by the time that the person has posed the problem and
this has been discussed, and by the time that the end of that discussion takes place, the
persons concerned are not the same people. They have both changed. So it is a dynamic
situation."
FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
In my 1989 paper I saw the interpretation as product of the analytic relationship. I
wrote:
"Interpretation is the essential factor that emerges from the analysand's
associations. These associations, seeking a deep, revealing meaning, find in the analyst's
evenly suspended attention a mental state propitious for apprehending them and revealing
them. From the dynamic interplay between associations and floating attention, the
interpretations come in to catalyze ideas and emotions, giving coherence to what was vague
and dispersed before. This is the unconscious becoming conscious..., it is the unknown
that frightens as it is transformed into what is known, and that frees, opening the road
to new expansions, to the farther beyond, to the unknowable.... New associations arise as
imprecise, anguishing. If intuition is freed from the opaque shackles of memory and
desire, the idea is grasped and another interpretation is glimpsed, communicated... Once
again everything is transformed in this dynamic forge of Container and Contained (). Then, from query to query, in this creative turbulence,
two minds, that of the analyst and that of the analysand, churn and prepare for new
quests, new discoveries and new unknowns.... This is the unceasing labor of analysis in
search of a unifying synthesis."
Today I would add that this synthesis is a hope, a project, a conviction that there is
an ultimate truth without ever knowing what it is, as a mere aspiration. It gives
us the assurance that we have a road. We don't know where it is, but it exists, and we
discover that the road opens up as we trudge along. I would like to stress that I
consider it very hard, even impossible, to work with our patients in analysis without
believing that there is a truth that has to be pursued. This is a bridge that, once
reached, sets us along new pathways....
When using words like transference or counter-transference, I think it is important to
underscore that all these aspects are states or moments that can be very fleeting and
dynamic and that, by their intrinsic nature, are essentially transitory. This is so
because at the very instant that the analyst provides an interpretation and the analysand
re-cognizes it as true, there is an immediate change in the analytic field that gives rise
to new states of expectation with patience, and these will be followed by new states of
comfort and security. In the dynamics of the analytic session there is no place for
fragmentation or dis-continuity. But when one begins talking of analysis or transference,
discontinuity is necessary. The words transference and countertransference
become important because they serve at least to name and label what we are talking about,
even if we are not aware of their full meaning.
As a consequence of what I have just said, I think that the very concept of
transference and counter-transference must be re-thought out, because, if the analysand's
transference can determine the analyst's counter-transference and if this latter in turn
modifies the analysand's transference and if this, once again, operates on the analyst's
counter-transference, and so forth, we are up against something that is a specific product
of that relationship () at that exact instant in time.
On another day, at some other time, some other minute or the next second, it might be
different.... In addition, if we believe that there is pre-conceptive transference and
counter-transference we can observe the un-veiling of something that is absolutely new for
analyst and analysand alike and that is not encompassed in the classical concept of
transference-countertransference!
Another consequence is in regard to the analytic technique. One frequently observes the
pre-occupation of some analysts in interpreting the analysand's transference very
often without realizing that it is always permeated with their own
countertransference, whether pre-conceptive or misconceptive (Junqueira
Mattos, 1994). Seen from this angle, a transferential interpretation can no longer be an
end in itself, but rather a means, and not the only means, to bring about insight
in the analytic relationship for the analysand and for the analyst as well.
ENDNOTE
The recommendation that the analyst should work to avoid "memory, desire and
understanding" in every session of analysis is one of Bion’s most ingenious
contributions to psychoanalytic technique (Bion, 1967b, 1970, Chap. 4 and 12). If we are
inserted in time that "passes" continuously, if an analyst is concerned about
what the analysand said fifteen minutes ago, half an hour ago, or yesterday, the day
before yesterday, last month, six months ago or last year, his or her attention will be
de-viated from what is going on now, at this exact instant.... Likewise, if
one tries to understand what the patient has just said, one will immediately stop hearing
what the patient is saying right now, and one will be interfering with what one
could "hear" of what the patient is saying, and is "creating", inside
him or her, the analyst.... I see this proposal of Bion's as having theoretical and
philosophical support in the following excerpt from St. Augustine:
"How does the future that does not yet exist, reduce and be consumed? And how
does the past, that is no longer, grow, except because, in the soul, there are three
things: the present, the past and the future? The soul in fact awaits, pays attention and
recalls, so that what it waits for, through what it pays attention to, enters the domain
of memory. No one denies that the future does not yet exist; but the expectation of the
future already exists in the soul. No one denies that the past no longer exists, but the
memory of things past still exists in the soul. And no one denies that the present lacks
duration, because it soon falls into the past; but attention lasts for what it is now and
fades toward the past" (Confessions XI, 28, 1). Saint Augustine himself condensed
this fundamental proposition in the statement that: "Strictly speaking, there are
not three times, the past, the present and the future, but only three presents: the
present of the past, the present of the present and the present of the future"
(Confessions, XI, 20, 1).
In other words, the analytic session, as everything else, takes place only in the
present. Thus when an analysand refers to the past, that does not really exist, or to a
future that does not exist yet, what this person is feeling is being felt at that exact
instant. Strictly speaking, therefore, it be neither re-lived nor anti-cipated!
SUMMARY
This article examines the analyst-analysand relationship, commonly known as
transference-countertransference, in the light of the concept of transience. The
author basis himself on the supposition that we are born with patterns, in the form of
pre-conceptions, to be fulfilled during all of our human experience. In this light, the
analytic experience is one among many others that help human beings to know themselves a
little better. The author emphasizes that the experience lived out in an analytic session,
like so many others, is necessarily transient. It changes at every instant and never
repeats itself!
The author maintains the position that Bion’s concept of pre-conceptions, when
applied to the analytic relationship, leads to the conclusion that the concept of
transference-countertransference must be re-thought and broadened. The author also posits
that, for both analysand and analyst, the analytic relationship lends itself to bringing
about experiences that do not represent repetition of patterns from the past, according to
the classical concepts of transference-countertransference.
Clinical material taken from three different sessions of the author’s patients and
part of some clinical material taken from a seminar presented by Bion, is brought to
exemplify the discussed concepts.
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