The Analysis of the Transference
We have already seen that the transference brings about difficulties, because the personality of the physician is assimilated with the image of the patient’s parents. The first part of the analysis, the investigation of the patient’s complexes, is rather easy, chiefly because a man is relieved by ridding himself of his secrets, difficulties and pains. In the second place, he experiences a peculiar satisfaction from at last finding some one who shows interest in all those things to which nobody hitherto would listen. It is very agreeable to find a person, who tries to understand him, and does not shrink back. In the third place, the expressed intention of the physician, to understand him and to follow him through all his erring ways, pathetically affects the patient. The feeling of being understood is especially sweet to the solitary souls who are forever longing for “understanding.” In this they are insatiable. The beginning of the analysis is for these reasons fairly easy and simple. The improvement so easily gained, and the sometimes striking change in the patient’s condition of health are a great temptation to the psychoanalytic beginner to slip into a therapeutic optimism and an analytical superficiality, neither of which would correspond to the seriousness and the difficulties of the situation. The trumpeting of therapeutic successes is nowhere more contemptible than in psychoanalysis, for no one is better able to understand than a psychoanalyst how the so-called result of the therapy depends on the coöperation of nature and the patient himself. The psychoanalyst may rest content with possessing an advanced scientific insight. The prevailing psychoanalytic literature cannot be spared reproach that some of its works do give a false impression as to its real nature. There are therapeutical publications from which the uninitiated receive the impression that psychoanalysis is more or less a clever trick, with astonishing effects. The first part of analysis, where we try to understand, and which, as we have seen before, offers much relief to the patient’s feelings, is responsible for these illusions. These incidental benefits help the phenomenon of transference. The patient has long felt the need of help to free him from his inward isolation and his lack of self-understanding. So he gives way to his transference, after first struggling against it. For a neurotic person, the transference is an ideal situation. He himself makes no effort, and nevertheless another person meets him halfway, with an apparent affectionate understanding; does not even get annoyed or leave off his patient endeavors, although he himself is sometimes stubborn and makes childish resistances. By this means the strongest resistances are melted away, for the interest of the physician meets the need of a better adaptation to extra-familial reality. The patient obtains, through the transference, not only his parents, who used to bestow great attention upon him, but in addition he gets a relationship outside the family, and thus fulfils a necessary duty of life. The therapeutical success so often to be seen at the same time fortifies the patient’s belief that this new-gained situation is an excellent one. Here we can easily understand that the patient is not in the least inclined to abandon this newly-found advantage. If it depended upon him, he would be forever associated with his physician. In consequence, he begins to produce all kinds of phantasies, in order to find possible ways of maintaining the association with his physician. He makes the greatest resistances towards his physician, when the latter tries to dissolve the transference. At the same time, we must not forget that for our patients the acquisition of a relationship outside the family is one of the most important duties of life, and one, moreover, which up to this moment they had failed or but very imperfectly succeeded in accomplishing. I must oppose myself energetically to the view that we always mean by this relationship outside the family, a sexual relation in its popular sense. This is the misunderstanding fallen into by so many neurotic people, who believe that a right attitude toward reality is only to be found by way of concrete sexuality. There are even physicians, not psychoanalysts, who are of the same conviction. But this is the primitive adaptation which we find among uncivilized people under primitive conditions. If we lend uncritical support to this tendency of neurotic people to adapt themselves in an infantile way, we just encourage them in the infantilism from which they are suffering. The neurotic patient has to learn that higher adaptation which is demanded by life from civilized and grown-up people. Whoever has a tendency to sink lower, will proceed to do so; for this end he does not need psychoanalysis. But we must be careful not to fall into the opposite extreme and believe that we can create by analysis great personalities. Psychoanalysis stands above traditional morality. It follows no arbitrary moral standard. It is only a means to bring to light the individual trends, and to develop and harmonize them as perfectly as possible.
Analysis must be a biological method, that is, a method which tries to connect the highest subjective well-being with the most valuable biological activity. The best result for a person who passes through analysis, is that he becomes at the end what he really is, in harmony with himself, neither bad nor good, but an ordinary human being. Psychoanalysis cannot be considered a method of education, if by education is understood the possibility of shaping a tree to a highly artificial form. But whoever has the higher conception of education will most prize that educational method which can cultivate a tree so that it shall fulfil to perfection its own natural conditions of growth. We yield too much to the ridiculous fear that we are at bottom quite impossible beings, and that if everyone were to appear as he really is a dreadful social catastrophe would result. The individualistic thinkers of our day insist on understanding by “people as they really are,” only the discontented, anarchistic and egotistic element in humanity; they quite forget that this same humanity has created those well-established forms of our civilization which possess greater strength and solidity than all the anarchistic under-currents.
When we try to dissolve the transference we have to fight against powers which have not only neurotic value, but also universal normal significance. When we try to bring the patient to the dissolution of his transference, we are asking more from him than is generally asked of the average man; we ask that he should subdue himself wholly. Only certain religions have made such a claim on humanity, and it is this demand which makes the second part of analysis so difficult.
The technique that we have to employ for the analysis of the transference is exactly the same as that before described. Naturally the problem as to what the patient must do with the libido which is now withdrawn from the physician comes to the fore. Here again, there is great danger for the beginner, as he will be inclined to suggest, or to give suggestive advice. This would be extremely pleasant for the patient in every respect, and therefore fatal.