#janet malcolm

“I remember a seminar I once attended that was led by a brilliant and flamboyant Hungarian analyst named Robert Bak. The issue under debate was the nature of transference, and I raised my hand and asked rhetorically, ‘What would you call an interpersonal relationship where infantile wishes, and defences against those wishes, get expressed in such a way that the persons within that relationship don’t see each other for what they objectively are but, rather, view each other in terms of their infantile needs and their infantile conflicts. What would you call that?’ And Bak looked over at me ironically and said, ‘I’d call that life’.” ― Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

The phenomenon of transference—how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud's most original and radical discovery... the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities—personal relations—is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems... Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality. The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other.