#transferences

As a specular mirage, love is essentially deception. It is situated in the field established at the level of the pleasure reference, of that sole signifier necessary to introduce a perspective centred on the Ideal point, capital I, placed somewhere in the Other, from which the Other sees me, in the form I like to be seen.

Now, in this very convergence to which analysis is called by the element of deception that there is in the transference, something is encountered that is paradoxical--the discovery of the analyst. This discovery is understandable only at the other level, the level at which we have situated the relation of alienation.

This paradoxical, unique, specified object we call the objet a. I have no wish to rehash the whole thing again, but I will present it for you in a more syncopated way, stressing that the analysand says to his partner, to the analyst, what amounts to this--I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you--the object petit a--I mutilate you.

This is the meaning of that breast-complex, that mammal-complex, whose relation to the oral drive Bergler saw so clearly, except that the orality in question has nothing to do with food, and that the whole stress is placed on this effect of mutilation.

I give myself to you, the patient says again, but this gift of my person--as they say--Oh, mystery! is changed inexplicably into a gift of shit--a term that is also essential to our experience.

When this swerve is achieved, at the conclusion of the interpretative elucidation, we are able to understand retroactively that vertigo, for example, of the white page, which, for a particular character, who is gifted but stuck at the limits of the psychotic, is like the centre of the symptomatic barrage which blocks off for him every access to the Other. If, quite literally, he cannot touch this white page at which his ineffable intellectual effusions come to a stop, it is because he apprehends it only as a piece of lavatory paper.

However, we must move on to what is our main topic, namely, the transference. How can we take up the thread again? The transference is unthinkable unless one sets out from the subject who is supposed to know.

You will now have a better idea of what he is supposed to know. He is supposed to know that from which no one can escape, as soon as he formulates it--quite simply, signification.

Signification implies, of course--and this is why I first brought out the dimension of his desire--that he cannot refuse it.

This privileged point is the only one by which we can recognize the character of an absolute point with no knowledge. It is absolute precisely by virtue of being in no way knowledge, but the point of attachment that links his very desire to the resolution of that which is to be revealed.

The subject comes into play on the basis of this fundamental support--the subject is supposed to know, simply by virtue of being a subject of desire. Now what actually happens? What happens is what is called in its most common appearance the transference effect. This effect is love. It is clear that, like all love, it can be mapped, as Freud shows, only in the field of narcissism. To love is, essentially, to wish to be loved.

What emerges in the transference effect is opposed to revelation. Love intervenes in its function, revealed here as essential, in its function as deception. Love, no doubt, is a transference effect, but it is its resistance side. We are linked together in awaiting this transference effect in order to be able to interpret, and at the same time, we know that it closes the subject off from the effect of our interpretation. The alienation effect, in which is articulated, in the relation of the subject to the Other, the effect that we are, is here absolutely manifest.

We should point out here, then, something that is always avoided, which Freud articulates, and which is not an excuse, but the reason of the transference, namely, that nothing can be attained in absentia, in effigie. This means that the transference is not, of its nature, the shadow of something that was once alive. On the contrary, the subject, in so far as he is subjected to the desire of the analyst, desires to betray him for this subjection, by making the analyst love him, by offering of himself that essential duplicity that is love. The transference effect is that effect of deception in so far as it is repeated in the present here and now.

It is repetition of that which passed for such only because it possesses the same form. It is not ectopia. It is not a shadow of the former deceptions of love. It is isolation in the actuality of its pure functioning as deception.