Transference

In Freud's psychoanalysis, "transference" is the name given to the process by which a past relation is created in the present between the analysand and the analyst. Interestingly, this "identification" also happens with 'part objects', as in the famous "Dora" case, where Dora identifies Freud with a family figure because, at least according to Freud, they both smoke cigars. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, transference also allows us to see how the Other/Gaze is constituted. When we address the analyst, we are addressing what we think is the analyst's desire, which reveals basically how the Other's desire is structuring our own. Realizing that we are this 'blind spot' that blocks our desire from flowing, from circulating (to use some D&G rhetoric) allows for an epiphany. As Greg Ulmer has pointed out several times in our course, this epiphantic moment where the present and past merge is figure not only in psychoanalytic transference, but also in Benjamin's "dialectical image" and Joyce's "epiphany."

Lacan writes,

"If it is merely at the level of the desire of the Other, is there not something here that must appear to him to be an obstacle to his fading, which is a point at which his desire can never be recognized? This obstacle is never lifted, nor ever to be lifted, for analytic experience shows us that it is in seeing a whole chain come into play at the level of the desire of the Other that the subject's desire is constituted"

That is, in analytic experience, and at least if we reduce the possible engagement to the Symbolic register (signifiers) we cannot structure our desire except in the Other's terms (in its significations). The power of the image, at least according to Ulmer, is that photography can allow us to "write with the world" to "write with partial objects." That is, whereas last time we used google image (which is in some sense still in the "symbolic") if we take our own picture, we should be able to write with the world, to create a punctum which goes "beyond" the studium (Barthes).

It is not enough just to recognize one's interpellation. We don't have to use the other's signifiers. We are not "subject to" the wide image in the same way that we are subjected to the signifiers of analytic speech. Photography may open us to another way to structure our desire: a desire that is particular to ourselves. A way to write with the objet @. The objet @ are potentially infinite, no longer merely corresponding to the ones identified by Lacan.

The instruction is to Create a transferential relation to the world, that is, find a way to Felt present/past. Take a picture that involuntarily reminds you of something in your past. 

Lacan writes that the transference "closure of the unconscious" but paradoxically, it is only this moment of closure (this recognition, this identification, this affective tie, this punctum) that allows "interpretation" (which we must remember is not oriented toward "meaning" but toward the knot, toward the stain, toward the spot -- the irreducible signifier, the objet @) to begin to take place. Lacan writes,

"The contraction of [the transference's] function, which causes it to be apprehended as the point of impact of the force of interpretation by the very fact that, in relation to the unconscious, it is a moment of closure--this is why we must treat it is as what it is, namely, a knot [. . .] it is a knot and it prompts us to account for it" (131).

It is the "tie" that allows for interpretation and punctuation of the signifier that gathers, that we are "subjected" to. It is not to be "dissolved" through pointing out the transference's "illusory" character because, like ideology, it doesn't really help to point out that it is "imaginary." As Althusser understands ideology: it is an imaginary relation to a real condition of existence. It has an effect on the subject. The Other's gaze has force.