Freud - Complete Works (425 page)

Observations On Transference-Love

2515

   I have already let it be
understood that analytic technique requires of the physician that
he should deny to the patient who is craving for love the
satisfaction she demands. The treatment must be carried out in
abstinence. By this I do not mean physical abstinence alone, nor
yet the deprivation of everything that the patient desires, for
perhaps no sick person could tolerate this. Instead, I shall state
it as a fundamental principle that the patient’s need and
longing should be allowed to persist in her, in order that they may
serve as forces impelling her to do work and to make changes, and
that we must beware of appeasing those forces by means of
surrogates. And what we could offer would never be anything else
than a surrogate, for the patient’s condition is such that,
until her repressions are removed, she is incapable of getting real
satisfaction.

   Let us admit that this
fundamental principle of the treatment being carried out in
abstinence extends far beyond the single case we are considering
here, and that it needs to be thoroughly discussed in order that we
may define the limits of its possible application. We will not
enter into this now, however, but will keep as close as possible to
the situation from which we started out. What would happen if the
doctor were to behave differently and, supposing both parties were
free, if he were to avail himself of that freedom in order to
return the patient’s love and to still her need for
affection?

   If he has been guided by the
calculation that this compliance on his part will ensure his
domination over his patient and thus enable him to influence her to
perform the tasks required by the treatment, and in this way to
liberate herself permanently from her neurosis - then experience
would inevitably show him that his calculation was wrong. The
patient would achieve
her
aim, but he would never achieve
his
. What would happen to the doctor and the patient would
only be what happened, according to the amusing anecdote, to the
pastor and the insurance agent. The insurance agent, a
free-thinker, lay at the point of death and his relatives insisted
on bringing in a man of God to convert him before he died. The
interview lasted so long that those who were waiting outside began
to have hopes. At last the door of the sick-chamber opened. The
free-thinker had not been converted; but the pastor went away
insured.

Observations On Transference-Love

2516

   If the patient’s advances
were returned it would be a great triumph for her, but a complete
defeat for the treatment. She would have succeeded in what all
patients strive for in analysis - she would have succeeded in
acting out, in repeating in real life, what she ought only to have
remembered, to have reproduced as psychical material and to have
kept within the sphere of psychical events.¹ In the further
course of the love-relationship she would bring out all the
inhibitions and pathological reactions of her erotic life, without
there being any possibility of correcting them; and the distressing
episode would end in remorse and a great strengthening of her
propensity to repression. The love-relationship in fact destroys
the patient’s susceptibility to influence from analytic
treatment. A combination of the two would be an impossibility.

   It is, therefore, just as
disastrous for the analysis if the patient’s craving for love
is gratified as if it is suppressed. The course the analyst must
pursue is neither of these; it is one for which there is no model
in real life. He must take care not to steer away from the
transference-love, or to repulse it or to make it distasteful to
the patient; but he must just as resolutely withhold any response
to it. He must keep firm hold of the transference-love, but treat
it as something unreal, as a situation which has to be gone through
in the treatment and traced back to its unconscious origins and
which must assist in bringing all that is most deeply hidden in the
patient’s erotic life into her consciousness and therefore
under her control. The more plainly the analyst lets it be seen
that he is proof against every temptation, the more readily will he
be able to extract from the situation its analytic content. The
patient, whose sexual repression is of course not yet removed but
merely pushed into the background, will then feel safe enough to
allow all her preconditions for loving, all the phantasies
springing from her sexual desires, all the detailed characteristics
of her state of being in love, to come to light; and from these she
will herself open the way to the infantile roots of her love.

   There is, it is true, one class
of women with whom this attempt to preserve the erotic transference
for the purposes of analytic work without satisfying it will not
succeed. These are women of elemental passionateness who tolerate
no surrogates. They are children of nature who refuse to accept the
psychical in place of the material, who, in the poet’s words,
are accessible only to ‘the logic of soup, with dumplings for
arguments’. With such people one has the choice between
returning their love or else bringing down upon oneself the full
enmity of a woman scorned. In neither case can one safeguard the
interests of the treatment. One has to withdraw, unsuccessful; and
all one can do is to turn the problem over in one’s mind of
how it is that a capacity for neurosis is joined with such an
intractable need for love.

  
¹
See the preceding paper.

Observations On Transference-Love

2517

   Many analysts will no doubt be
agreed on the method by which other women, who are less violent in
their love, can be gradually made to adopt the analytic attitude.
What we do, above all, is to stress to the patient the unmistakable
element of resistance in this ‘love’. Genuine love, we
say, would make her docile and intensify her readiness to solve the
problems of her case, simply because the man she was in love with
expected it of her. In such a case she would gladly choose the road
to completion of the treatment, in order to acquire value in the
doctor’s eyes and to prepare herself for real life, where
this feeling of love could find a proper place. Instead of this, we
point out, she is showing a stubborn and rebellious spirit, she has
thrown up all interest in her treatment, and clearly feels no
respect for the doctor’s well-founded convictions. She is
thus bringing out a resistance under the guise of being in love
with him; and in addition to this she has no compunction in placing
him in a cleft stick. For if he refuses her love, as his duty and
his understanding compel him to do, she can play the part of a
woman scorned, and then withdraw from his therapeutic efforts out
of revenge and resentment, exactly as she is now doing out of her
ostensible love.

   As a second argument against the
genuineness of this love we advance the fact that it exhibits not a
single new feature arising from the present situation, but is
entirely composed of repetitions and copies of earlier reactions,
including infantile ones. We undertake to prove this by a detailed
analysis of the patient’s behaviour in love.

   If the necessary amount of
patience is added to these arguments, it is usually possible to
overcome the difficult situation and to continue the work with a
love which has been moderated or transformed; the work then aims at
uncovering the patient’s infantile object-choice and the
phantasies woven round it.

Observations On Transference-Love

2518

   I should now like, however, to
examine these arguments with a critical eye and to raise the
question whether, in putting them forward to the patient, we are
really telling the truth, of whether we are not resorting in our
desperation to concealments and misrepresentations. In other words:
can we truly say that the state of being in love which becomes
manifest in analytic treatment is not a real one?

   I think we have told the patient
the truth, but not the whole truth regardless of the consequences.
Of our two arguments the first is the stronger. The part played by
resistance in transference-love is unquestionable and very
considerable. Nevertheless the resistance did not, after all,
create
this love; it finds it ready to hand, makes use of it
and aggravates its manifestations. Nor is the genuineness of the
phenomenon disproved by the resistance. The second argument is far
weaker. It is true that the love consists of new editions of old
traits and that it repeats infantile reactions. But this is the
essential character of every state of being in love. There is no
such state which does not reproduce infantile prototypes. It is
precisely from this infantile determination that it receives its
compulsive character, verging as it does on the pathological.
Transference-love has perhaps a degree less of freedom than the
love which appears in ordinary life and is called normal; it
displays its dependence on the infantile pattern more clearly and
is less adaptable and capable of modification; but that is all, and
not what is essential.

   By what other signs can the
genuineness of a love be recognized? By its efficacy, its
serviceability in achieving the aim of love? In this respect
transference-love seems to be second to none; one has the
impression that one could obtain anything from it.

   Let us sum up, therefore. We have
no right to dispute that the state of being in love which makes its
appearance in the course of analytic treatment has the character of
a ‘genuine’ love. If it seems so lacking in normality,
this is sufficiently explained by the fact that being in love in
ordinary life, outside analysis, is also more similar to abnormal
than to normal mental phenomena. Nevertheless, transference-love is
characterized by certain features which ensure it a special
position. In the first place, it is provoked by the analytic
situation; secondly, it is greatly intensified by the resistance,
which dominates the situation; and thirdly, it is lacking to a high
degree in a regard for reality, is less sensible, less concerned
about consequences and more blind in its valuation of the loved
person than we are prepared to admit in the case of normal love. We
should not forget, however, that these departures from the norm
constitute precisely what is essential about being in love.

Observations On Transference-Love

2519

   As regards the analyst’s
line of action, it is the first of these three features of
transference-love which is the decisive factor. He has evoked this
love by instituting analytic treatment in order to cure the
neurosis. For him, it is an unavoidable consequence of a medical
situation, like the exposure of a patient’s body or the
imparting of a vital secret. It is therefore plain to him that he
must not derive any personal advantage from it. The patient’s
willingness makes no difference; it merely throws the whole
responsibility on the analyst himself. Indeed, as he must know, the
patient had been prepared for no other mechanism of cure. After all
the difficulties have been successfully overcome, she will often
confess to having had an anticipatory phantasy at the time when she
entered the treatment, to the effect that if she behaved well she
would be rewarded at the end by the doctor’s affection.

   For the doctor, ethical motives
unite with the technical ones to restrain him from giving the
patient his love. The aim he has to keep in view is that this
woman, whose capacity for love is impaired by infantile fixations,
should gain free command over a function which is of such
inestimable importance to her; that she should not, however,
dissipate it in the treatment, but keep it ready for the time when,
after her treatment, the demands of real life make themselves felt.
He must not stage the scene of a dog-race in which the prize was to
be a garland of sausages but which some humorist spoilt by throwing
a single sausage on to the track. The result was, of course, that
the dogs threw themselves upon it and forgot all about the race and
about the garland that was luring them to victory in the far
distance. I do not mean to say that it is always easy for the
doctor to keep within the limits prescribed by ethics and
technique. Those who are still youngish and not yet bound by strong
ties may in particular find it a hard task. Sexual love is
undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of
mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of
its culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the
world knows this and conducts its life accordingly; science alone
is too delicate to admit it. Again, when a woman sues for love, to
reject and refuse is a distressing part for a man to play; and, in
spite of neurosis and resistance, there is an incomparable
fascination in a woman of high principles who confesses her
passion. It is not a patient’s crudely sensual desires which
constitute the temptation. These are more likely to repel, and it
will call for all the doctor’s tolerance if he is to regard
them as natural phenomenon. It is rather, perhaps, a woman’s
subtler and aim-inhibited wishes which bring with them the danger
of making a man forget his technique and his medical task for the
sake of a fine experience.

Observations On Transference-Love

2520

   And yet it is quite out of the
question for the analyst to give way. However highly he may prize
love he must prize even more highly the opportunity for helping his
patient over a decisive stage in her life. She has to learn from
him to overcome the pleasure principle, to give up a satisfaction
which lies to hand but is socially not acceptable, in favour of a
more distant one, which is perhaps altogether uncertain, but which
is both psychologically and socially unimpeachable. To achieve this
overcoming, she has to be led through the primal period of her
mental development and on that path she has to acquire the extra
piece of mental freedom which distinguishes conscious mental
activity - in the systematic sense - from unconscious.