THE ANALYST'S TRANSFERENCE ON THE PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY AND INSTITUTION

Giampaolo Kluzer [Psychoanalyst, Italian Psychoanalytic Society]

Training and non training analysis In this paper I will try to underline some peculiar situations that the candidate, in his so called 'Training Analysis', has to handle, when he meets some difficulties that analysands, with no training projects, usually do not meet. I will further point out some other difficulties that also trained analysts have to face in their psychoanalytic (this term, from here on in the text, will be replaced by the Greek symbol ) activity. I would like to investigate how these situations, peculiar and problematic both for the candidates and the analysts, are strictly connected with the particular 'status' of the theory and of the training system, as well as with the relationship that they, candidates and analysts, may develop towards such 'status'. I will start by taking into consideration the pre-analytic, analytic and post-analytic attitudes that candidates may possibly assume towards the situation, compared with the attitudes assumed by the analysands who are not involved in training programs. Which differences may we find in the motivations to begin a treatment in those who have and in those who do not have a project of training ? In which way may this particular project influence the beginning of the experience, its ending and the whole in between process ? Which will be the characteristics of the post-analytic ties with their own analysts and with the internalized function that may be found in the two groups of analysands? We could try to face these questions by keeping in mind, as an inevitably reductive landmark, the role of the transference that analysands may develop towards the different 'interlocutors' met in their treatment: psychoanalysis as an abstract entity, as a theoretic construction and as a clinical practice; the psychoanalyst, the institution, the future patients of the candidate, all acting as presences both concrete and fantasized. In the pre-analytic phase we have already met a transference (could we better say a pretransference?) attitude, present in the motivations and expectations towards the project, which may appear to be quite different in persons who plan to become themselves analysts compared to other persons, in whom such project is completely absent. If, according to a generally accepted theory, we think that, in starting analysis, a condition of great personal discontent and suffering, close to despair, and the acceptance of the risk of possible dramatic changes must be present in the applicant, which differences may be seen in the motivations of those who imagine that their journey may sooner or later, lead them to also realize, their wish to become analysts? It seems clear to me that, in this case, the expectation and the strong affective and fantasized investment in a future therapeutic activity, which implies a good psychic equilibrium, may appear as contrasting with and prevailing over the described situations of 'almost intolerable despair' and of acceptance of the risk of unforeseeable changes. We know how Bion indicated the theme of the 'catastrophic change' as being responsible for some major difficulties that the analytic couple has to face in its analytic work. The explicit project of the candidate: 'I want to become an analyst' may be understood and

treated as any other explicit project, brought into the discourse at the beginning of the treatment and subject to all kind of subsequent modifications during the process? I would give an affirmative answer to this question. The main difference resides in this: while generally the analyst may remind the analysand that no assurance can be given to him, either at the beginning of the analysis or in subsequent times, that his desired project will be realized by the treatment, in the case of training analysis it happens, inevitably, that an authority exterior to the analytic couple, the Training Institution, intervenes to sanction the realization (perhaps only partial) of the desired project. The problem of the possible interference of the Institution in the analysis of the candidate is well present in the mind of many training analysts, but up to now no solution has been found whatsoever, as completely satisfactory from all points of view. Some training analysts believe that only a selection of candidates, made at the end of their analysis, could eliminate such risk of interference. Other training analysts believe, with reasons as good as the previous ones, that in this case the supervision work of the candidate would develop in a context in which he could not be supported, by his analysis, in the difficult task of elaborating the personal consequences of the transference-counter-transference vicissitudes of his starting activity. The above-mentioned problem of the 'good timing' in the selection of candidates is strictly connected to the other one, also much discussed and controversial, of the particular nature of the training analysis. Is it an analysis quite comparable to all other analyses or is it a 'special' analysis since the couple involved in it (or at least the analyst) possesses a 'special status? It seems, anyhow, that a kind of conflict of interests is present in this situation: on one side the Institution would like to assure the good quality of its descendants, on the other the analytic couple's good functioning should be assured only by a complete freedom of reciprocal choice. Such conflict is absent in the therapeutic or 'normal' analysis. At the beginning of 'normal' analysis analysands tend to assign to their analysts, due to their transference attitude, strong, omnipotent therapeutic and cognitive capacities that only the progression and conclusion of the analysis will be able to modify and reduce. Lacan, referring to this situation, uses the term: 'analyste suppos savoir' to indicate the special power attributed by the patient to his analyst. Only the reduction of these omnipotent expectations from the analyst will allow the analysand to start and accomplish a mourning process of the situation and lead him to internalize an auto-analytic function, which will become an indispensable tool for the interpretation and elaboration of the vicissitudes of his post analytic existence. From this mourning experience the analysand will learn that no one, not even the analyst, can be the depositary of an unlimited knowing power, that no one can aspire to be completely accepted and recognized by another person without having to accept, from the latter, also a certain degree of incomprehension and limited recognition of his own requests. We could say that the analysand becomes able to foresee the ending of his analysis only when he is able to experience and to accept the ignorance (at least a relative one) of his analyst, faced to his own discourse. It is as if he could say, at a certain point of his analysis: 'I no longer need to imagine to be understood by an omnipotent and omniscient Other. The only valid recognition and acceptance must derive mainly, even if not only, from myself'. This process of progressive disillusion can take place only if the analysand can live an experience of separation and mourning for his analyst. The process of separation and mourning encounters more difficulties in the training analysis. Since the beginning of the analysis, the analyst is inevitably seen by the analysand as 'contaminated' by his participation to the

Knowledge and Power of the training institution. He is endowed with a qualification that makes him different from other analysts belonging to the same institutional group, but who are not authorized to generate future analysts. He belongs to the same group of analysts, chosen to select candidates and to evaluate them in their subsequent training career. As such he is the representative of a power, which appears to be real and not only fantasized. The possible overlapping and confusion of the figure of the training analyst with the training institution, that will be shared, in the future, by both members of the couple, complicates the transference processes of identification-imitation of the analysand with his analyst. In 'normal' analysis the analysand's task is to proceed, certainly with some difficulty, towards a progressive differentiation between the fantasized transference image of the omnipotent analyst 'suppos savoir' and that of an analyst, limited in his capacities of listening and understanding his discourse, uncertain about the answers that he will be able to formulate and that will be, anyhow, always less numerous than the new questions that his attitude will raise in the mind of the analysand. The differentiation from his own analyst is sanctioned, for the analysand, by the end of his analysis, when the end of the reciprocal frequentation creates a real loss and mourn and the analytic couple sets out for different existential paths. This task of differentiation appears to be more complicated for the candidate. Since the beginning of his analysis, his project, both rational and 'neurotic', is to acquire a identity, like his analyst. It is clear that such a project also contains fantasies of merging and non-conflict imitation that could make it difficult, and sometimes even impossible, a progressive differentiation, towards the final goal of separation at the end of the analysis. The analysand may live the overcoming of the different stages of his training as a concrete realization of his fantasies of personal and professional fusion with his analyst: when he starts to analyse patients under supervision; when he begins to attend the same institutional spaces as his analyst and so on. The transference could easily shift from the analyst to the Institution and to the theory. The analyst 'suppos savoir' could become the analyst that really knows, inasmuch as he represents also the official Knowledge that is taught to the candidates. On the other side, in a situation characterized by negative transference feelings, the analysand could see the analyst as an ignorant and impotent figure, in a contrasting position with other more powerful colleagues within the group of training analysts. Clinical vignette A female patient, psychologist, whose severe depressive structure, masked by a faux self behaviour, evident both in her everyday life and in her analytic relationship, appeared to me, since the preliminary sessions, as a possibly very difficult obstacle to a good analytic work; after one and a half years of analysis she spoke to me about her intention of applying for candidate of my Institute. Being aware, probably, that this communication could raise some perplexity in me (she had never mentioned anything of the kind before) she told me that she had carefully concealed this project since our first encounters, in order not to repeat a negative experience that she had lived with the lady training analyst, a colleague of mine, that she had consulted before coming to me. She said that she had expressed immediately to this analyst her desire to become an analyst but my colleague had reacted in a negative way, judging that this 'confession' proved that her motivation for analysis was not a very valid one. My patient decided that she could not trust this analyst for a work and left her after the first preliminary session. My patient passed the first degree of evaluation, which does not coincide with admission to the training program and has to be confirmed by a second positive evaluation, and soon afterwards

she experienced a short period of great self satisfaction, judged by me as clearly hypo-maniac, which was soon interrupted by the appearance of a severe somatic affection, that required a surgical intervention, and by the death of her old father. The patient had lived these two painful events as a 'punishment' for her successful overcoming of the evaluating interviews for the training. A year and a half later, when she received a negative response to her request to start the training program, the patient reacted very badly, attacking her analyst who, according to her, had not worked well in analysis and had not 'prepared' her correctly for the interviews. Such negative transference lasted quite a long time, even after the candidate was finally accepted as a candidate a couple of years later. At that time it was clear to me that a split was taking place on the analytic scene: the 'bad' analyst, responsible for the unbearable narcissistic wound of her first failure, and the 'good' group of the analysts working in the training program, who would furnish her with the necessary tools to understand herself better and to become a good analyst. The interpretative work, aimed at reevaluating the analytic experience of the candidate that was continuously attacked and disparaged by her, was a long and extenuating one. Fortunately, it progressively allowed the candidate to better accept both her own and her analyst's imperfections and limits which, at the same time, also appeared to be the imperfections and limits of her present boy friend with whom, for the first time in her life, she began to experience feelings 'probably connected with being in love', as she commented once. Resolution of the transference? With the brief description of this clinical situation I want mainly to underline how these dynamics, between the candidate's transference on the analyst and on the Institution and theory, may often develop in many training analysis, even if in a more subtle and less dramatic way, compared to the one that I have just described. In many cases, the candidate tries to avoid the painful elaboration of the mourning for the omnipotent figure of the analyst 'suppos savoir' feeling that he may still maintain an illusory contact with such an image in his relationship with the Institution and theory that he will share with his analyst, even after the end of his analysis. The term: 'resolution of the transference' is a complex one and would deserve to be specifically discussed. Anyhow, we can usefully refer to it here to indicate a task which becomes difficult, or impossible, whenever a third presence, exterior to the dual relationship, appears on the scene and becomes the support for the projection of transference material, originally born within the dual relationship itself. Detailed clinical material Anna, psychologist and psychotherapist, who had already finished, a few years before, her first analytic treatment, decides, when she is 46 years old, to try a career. She is accepted at the first selection interviews, notwithstanding her relatively advanced age. At the beginning of her analysis the patient shows good insight capacities and a good use of the setting. The vicissitudes of her daily life, both family and professional, brought in the sessions, seem to confirm some character and behaviour related aspects of her personal history. Born in a family of modest social condition, settled in a small village in central Italy, Anna has showed, since her infancy, an exceptionally bright intelligence and musical skills that brought her, at the age of 13, to attend with success the musical school of a great city, in a condition, of early separation from the family. At 17 she marries, pregnant, a young man 7 years older than her, with whom she moves to a city in northern Italy. By doing this she has to put an end to her studies and her musical career. At 20 she becomes the mother of two twin children, and at 24,

with no serious reason, she separates from her husband. She then begins a new life and till the age of 33 she lives by herself, with the three children, very much helped by a political party, which she actively supports and by which she feels, somehow, adopted. She works very hard as a nurse and at this age she marries, a second time, a man 10 years older than her, with whom she has two more children. At 35, after finishing the secondary school interrupted in adolescence, she begins University and graduates very quickly as psychologist, starting to work, right afterwards, as a psychotherapist in the same hospital, where she had worked as a nurse. The attitude of strong and determined confrontation with her life vicissitudes showed out, in the patient, also in the choice of her training analyst. Even if she could choose an analyst living in her own town she preferred a more challenging solution, that implied a three hour train trip every time: the beginning of her adventure had to take place in a geographic space that had nothing to do with people or places already known by her. This rather detailed account of the long journey that brings the candidate closer and closer to the realization of her project of training is necessary, in my opinion, to better understand the sudden change that appeared in Anna's behavior right after she was accepted as a candidate. She, who had always been very regular in attending the sessions, began to be often absent. Sometimes she phoned, excusing herself, sometimes she did not even do that, disappearing from sight for several sessions in a row. In this period she began an extra marital love affair with an old family friend, fifteen years older than her, the exact age of her analyst. He is married with a chronically ill woman, completely dependent on him, from whom he declares that he will never separate, and has an intense family life (two married children and several grand children). This man, even if very affectionate and kind to her and apparently very involved in their relationship, will however prove to be not completely reliable, since he still secretly entertains a 10 year old relationship with another woman. The frequent absences in the sessions, the irregular payment of the fees (she has practically broken it off with her husband, with whom however she still lives, and she cannot count anymore on his financial support) are explained by the candidate as being the sudden, direct consequence of a serious disorganization of her entire life system. She practically interrupts all her private psychotherapeutic activity because she now feels to be professionally inadequate for it; she has lost any interest in running the house and in keeping contact with her two adolescent children; she is entirely absorbed in the relationship with her lover, characterized by moments of intense reciprocal passion and moments of jealousy and disappointment, with sudden ruptures and reconciliations. Together with new somatic affections that produce great fatigue in the candidate an important loss in weight takes place (she was quite over weight at the beginning of treatment) and her physical aspect looks younger, even if a little bit harder and more aggressive. In this period of great change and turmoil the candidate, even if, mostly, only in an allusive and implicit way, accuses the analysis (she protests if I suggest that the analyst too is perhaps involved in these accusations) to be somehow responsible for what is happening to her. She says that she feels like being 'blocked' and impeded in continuing to attend the sessions, even if, when she is present, she is not particularly inhibited or silent. She would like to better understand better the presence of possible ties between the recent death of her father and the subsequent beginning of her extra marital love affair with a man of the same age as her analyst. When I suggest that the beginning of her training program may also have been involved in determining the changes that she is complaining about, the candidate refuses this hypothesis, affirming that, on the contrary, the particular atmosphere of the institute, its premises, the group of the colleagues and of the teachers that she has known there, the discussions in the seminars,

represent for her a kind of oasis of peace and well being that compensate her for all for all tensions, anxieties and conflicts that she continuously has to face in her daily life: 'When I am in the Institute I feel myself very well accepted, as if I were in a cosy home, I forget all outside difficulties. I know that the Institute provides some space for candidates who can see their patients there. I plan to apply for this program.' As I have already mentioned before, the beginning of the candidate's training coincided with the interruption of her private activity as psychotherapist. According to the candidate, her initiation to the training had made her realize that she was approximate and superficial in her professional activity. Only inside the hospital her work continued to be satisfactory for her. My interpretations took different directions, without proving effective. I tried to underline to the candidate the possible destructive aspect of her behaviour towards the realization of her professional project that had a very long history behind, made of many costly strains. The implications of the presence of possible guilt feelings, connected with this project, for a long time considered as being too ambitious and probably also competitive with the figure of her analyst, were taken into consideration. Her acceptance into the institutional family seemed to have made emerge in her, with much emotional echo and in a regressive atmosphere, the theme of a possible warm and gratifying acceptance. Such a theme had often been evoked in her analysis, connected to her early separation from her family home during adolescence and to the long lasting experience of coping both with a cold, frustrating mother, seldom interested in her and anxiously, constantly absorbed in caring for the poor health conditions of a younger sister, and with a father absent from home for long periods of time, year after year, for professional reasons. The particularly infantile and regressive gratification finally found by Anna when she was accepted in the Institute, seemed to have proved more important to her than the possible accession to a new and more mature therapeutic identity. From this probably came her difficulty to continue her analytic engagement and her private professional activity. Another line of interpretation put emphasis on the possible role, in the genesis of the important behavioral changes appeared inside and outside analysis, of the presence of fantasies of fusion and confusion with the analyst, starting from the moment that the candidate's newly acquired identity had rendered her more 'similar' to him. It is almost as if Anna could fear the loss of her previous identity, menaced by the acquisition of another one, imposed to her by the training project that could transform her into 'a double' of her analyst. This hypothesis seemed to acquire more weight at the occasion of an event that was dramatically lived by Anna and that induced her, after a few weeks, to interrupt, at least temporarily, both her analytic treatment and her training program. In one session at the beginning of the week Anna told me that during the weekend she attended a scientific meeting of the Society. During a plenary session she entered the room where I was already seated and, for strange mirrors effects, she saw my image and hers laid one upon the other. She understood (correctly) that I had not noticed her, but she had, nevertheless, a panic reaction and left the room hastily. During her session, the theme of her possible transformation into a double of her analyst was resumed once more, and this time Anna seemed to accept and to elaborate this suggestion with more attention than on former occasions. Then her decision to interrupt analysis and training was announced. Transference vicissitudes in candidates and trained analysts The description of these clinical events is aimed to underline how transference vicissitudes, which in non training analysis remain mostly concentrated on the figure of the analyst, extend

themselves, in training analysis, also to institutional spaces and figures shared by the couple, and may create conflicting situations, sometimes highly dramatic and requiring difficult solutions. In the transference situation that I have just described the hypothesis may be that the candidate's former fantasies of fusion and confusion with her training analyst suddenly became more concrete, dangerous and difficult for her to control when she was accepted in the institutional space, shared with the analyst, and found a form of compensation in the acted out extra marital passionate relationship. As if, in a split situation, the fantasized desire of fusion with the analyst and the fear of being incorporated and annulled in him could be compensated by a desire, of the same nature, of fusion with her lover and of devouring him, which could be put into action. Even if in a less extended way, I will now try to explore how already trained analysts have to face some difficulties, connected to their professional identity, dealing with their relationship to the theory and to their membership Institution. I think that it is important to keep in mind some peculiarities connected with the training and with the practice of psychoanalysis. The theoretical building and the therapeutic practice of psychoanalysis are interdependent, both of them mutually enrich each other and are generated by their common interest in unconscious phenomena that can be put under observation only in a precise artificial setting which is ruled by transference-counter transference dynamics. Even if based on and influenced by preexistent theoretical and technical principles, transmitted from generations to generations of analysts, the therapeutic practice aims to investigate and transform an object of observation whose existence does not precede the couple but is created by the couple itself. Such practice aims to establish correlations between conscious and unconscious functioning levels of the mind. Feelings, emotions, dreams, free associations of ideas that animate the space of the sessions are taken into consideration as derivatives of unconscious somatic-psychic processes. The interpreting work of the analyst deals with the verbal transformation of these derivatives. However, in contrast with a pure hermeneutic practice, the analytic work is not limited to deconstructing a text: it also invests and deconstructs the identity of the couple that creates the text. Therefore, the practice, based on a specific theoretical edifice, is supposed to remodel and to enrich it continuously. It is clear that this functioning model, which implies a reciprocal influence between the theory and the practice, necessitates a difficult and painful mourning work towards inherited or formerly created theoretic schemes that have to be abandoned in favour of newer and more fecund ones. The theory, strictly connected with the therapeutic practice, is born and renewed in the dialogue of the couple, characterised by the presence of mutual transference irrational contents that make it void of apparent meaning, completely unique to the couple, accustomed to speak and to listen on the specific basis of the principle of free associations and of free floating attention. The paradox The psychoanalyst who has a practice and who invests, emotionally and intellectually, in the theory that justifies it, is faced with the difficult task to coexist with a paradox, without demanding, according to Winnicott's teaching, neither to reject it nor to resolve it. The paradox consists in this: to try to formulate universally valid concepts, deriving them from the irrational dialogue of the couple, which is, on the contrary, private, unique, void of common sense and still incessantly in search of new sense. Freud showed us that the conscious discourse, and consequently the scientific discourse that derives from it, is indissoluble with the unconscious one. The theory, like all other theoretic constructions, includes the irreducible irrational aspect

of the unconscious discourse, which emerges in the therapeutic situation and in its subsequent theoretic elaboration. The theory could be defined as the impossible, though essential, attempt to rationalize the fantasized contents that emerge in the encounter of the couple. Some situations, characterized either by a prevailing rigid theoretic attitude or by an absence of theoretic attention, are bound to block the reciprocal transference dynamics and the theoretic creative capacities of the couple. A theory that chooses to remain a rigid scientific construction is bound to become sterile, unable of new creativity. But if it refuses the project of becoming a transmissible science it is also bound to develop an individual delusional system. We can, once more, go back to Winnicott: a theory, like a mother, which cannot be attacked in a 'merciless way', is not apt to have a useful containing and creative function. In order to act properly in his daily therapeutic activity, which is mainly solitary and socially isolated, the analyst needs to refer to a reliable theory and to an institutional group that shares it. At the same time, and here the paradox continues, the analyst must know that the theories are as many as the theorists interested in creating them, a group to whom he also belongs. In each therapeutic encounter the analyst knows that all preexisting theories at his disposal can be crossed, transformed and distorted by the irruption of an irrational 'otherness' which may bring him, like in the construction process of interpretation, described by Freud in 1937 (Constructions in Analysis), to create a new theoretic narrative, which had remained absent to him and impossible to reach up to that moment. The analyst, in his transference investment of the theory and of the institutional group, will once more live the paradox already experienced in his personal analysis. As it had already happened to him in the past, when he had to face the image of his analyst 'suppos savoir', he will now be asked, in his relationship to the theory, to keep together the belief in its soundness, shared with other colleagues, and an attitude of freedom towards the expression of possible attacks and criticism of its contents. If in the final phase of his analysis, the candidatefuture analyst fails to satisfactorily elaborate his mourning of the separation, thus producing a non analyzed shift of his transference from the analyst to the theory and Institution, he risks developing a rigid and idealized attachment both to the theory, received during the training, and to the institutional group with whom he shares it. Such attachment would appear to have some negative characteristics very similar to those described by Freud as typical of other Institutions like the Church and the Army (1921, Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego). Some comments, contained in Freud's Constructions in Analysis, can lead us to relate the interpretative work of construction, made in the therapeutic situation, and the endless work of construction of the theory. Both these situations occupy a position of instable equilibrium between two polarities: on one side the delusional reconstruction, in which prevails the exasperate research of a hypothetical absolute historical or scientific truth; on the other side the narrative construction, due to become illogical and arbitrary if it limits itself only to endlessly developing a play of reciprocal launching and rebounding, of the discourses of the couple, without any historical anchorage and reference. All these things considered, I think that it could be useful to remind everyone of a sentence, whose author I do not remember: 'If delusion can be thought of as a piece of theory that belongs to a single individual and that cannot be shared with others, a complex theory may often appear to be a form of collective and largely shared delusion'.
References FREUD, S., (1921) Ego Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Standard Ed. 18, 67.

FREUD, S., (1937) Constructions in Analysis. Standard Ed. 23. RIOLO F., (1999) Il paradigma della cura. Riv. Psicoanal. 45, 7-27.