Suggestion

Love is an education in and of itself, as Eleanor Roosevelt once said. Hence, at the heart of both communication and therapy, we have what is known as “transference” or “transference-love” to borrow from Freud. In a sense, Freud equated “transference” to therapy. And the goal of therapy, as Freud argued, is to help the individual find “some intermediate course between unrestrained sexuality and asceticism” by “translating the unconscious into the conscious.” To borrow from Freud:

“By projecting the unconscious into the conscious, we do away with suppressions, we remove conditions of symptom formation and transform a pathogenic into a normal conflict which can be decided in some way or other. This is the only psychic change we produce in our patients; its extent is the extent of our helpfulness. Wherever no suppression and no analogous psychic process can be undone, there is no place for our therapy.” 

Therapy of a psychoanalytic fashion is also a “laborious” process which few have the time and money to undertake. Career and love are automatically put off until the process is complete for certain individuals who have the time and money. The effort and the pain required for just a slight psychic change – namely, finding a right balance between asceticism and sensuality – is simply too great. A very precise and narrow operation, namely, the removal of a resistance or suppression over an unconscious idea or thought and rendering that unconscious idea or thought into consciousness, ends up becoming quite burdensome and unwieldy. At one point in time, or at an earlier point in time, the psychic conflict would lead to no other outcome except for suppression of the unconscious thought. But at a later point in time, and as a result of transference or therapy, a better outcome can perhaps be attained. 

But as Freud noted, right before the cure is attained, the patient ends up preoccupying himself or herself more with the therapist rather than with the therapy itself. And this preoccupation with the therapist on the part of the patient rather than on the therapy itself ends up becoming a hindrance or an obstacle to the cure and especially at a point in time when the patient has gotten very close to the cure. This preoccupation with the therapist rather than the therapy is in fact the subtle difference between therapy on one hand and transference on the other hand. Nevertheless, transference is in fact the very essence of therapy, as Freud hinted. Transference, in most cases, consists of an ambivalence between affectionate and hostile impulses towards the therapist. Transference is a “recollection” of a past instance on the part of the patient, as Freud sought to argue. By insisting that the transference is a recollection of a past instance on the part of the patient, the therapist then creates the necessary degrees of separation between himself and the patient which would then enable the course of the therapy to continue unhindered and uninterrupted towards its near conclusion. 

Arguably, transference is in fact the cure. Transference transforms the neurosis into a relationship between patient and therapist which then drops the patient into a condition or a state of having overcome the neurosis. The patient is then to be left in that condition or state by the therapist. The influence of the therapist upon the patient then has to be removed from the patient by the therapist in order to leave the patient in that condition or state whereby the neurosis has been transformed by the relationship. But at the heart of the cure is the libidinous relationship between patient and therapist, not the issues which are discussed between them. To borrow from Freud:

“If the patient is to fight the normal conflict that our analysis has revealed against the suppressions, he requires a tremendous impetus to influence the desirable decision which will lead him back to health. Otherwise he might decide for a repetition of the former issue and allow those factors which have been admitted to consciousness to slip back again into suppression. The deciding vote in this conflict is not given by his intellectual penetration – which is neither strong nor free enough for such an achievement – but only by his relation to the physician. Inasmuch as his transference carries a positive sign, it invests the physician with authority and is converted into faith for his communications and conceptions. Without transference of this sort, or without a negative transfer, he would not even listen to the physician and to his arguments. Faith repeats the history of its own origin; it is a derivative of love and at first requires no arguments. When they are offered by a beloved person, arguments may later be admitted and subjected to critical reflection. Arguments without such support avail nothing, and never mean anything in life to most persons. Man’s intellect is accessible only in so far as he is capable of libidinous occupation with an object, and accordingly we have good ground to recognize and to fear the limit of the patient’s capacity for being influenced by even the best analytical technique, namely, the extent of his narcism.” 

It follows that the strongest resistance to therapy on the part of a patient is narcissism, with narcissism amounting to the withdrawal or the withholding of suggestion. The cure, as we said before, emanates from transference. But behind transference stands a suggestion of a sexual nature and its mysterious origins. To deny this “fundamental fact” of reality – namely, that behind the cure rests what is none other than a suggestion of a sexual nature – amounts to narcissism, and only narcissism can stand as the roadblock or obstacle to the overall healing process. In sum, the narcissist is incapable of transference, and is thus incapable of being cured or healed or influenced by any doctor or therapist.