Daniel Smith

"It would mean that a life shared with unlimited others is possible. There may well be ‘no such thing as a sexual relation’, but love is the impossible premise of collective life. If there is collective life, there exists at least love."

"‘Transference is love’ is a radical claim not because transference is a moral threat to social relations, as Freud feared it could be, but because transference shows us how bonds are made: if we could fall in love with anyone under the right conditions of repetition, then what?"

From here, the paper explores a puzzle: Love resists normativity not because sexual desire has no truck with norms, but because unconscious desire shows how bonds of love are made: it finds expression in One, but is unlimited in its scope. The social bond of love resists logic.

Transference-love mirrors how we fall in love in modernity: with the same person, over and over again, for the first time, again. We are all fragments not only of ourselves, but of our relations to one-another. Social relations are not-all in modernity.

Thus, we could say transference is a social relation that stages, at a higher level of abstraction, the profoundly fragmentary character of modernity: of how the individual is both born of, and yet distinct from, life’s continual transformations..."

"Transference is, in this regard, a social relation which does not conform very well to doctor-patient, nor husband-wife, nor any other, seemingly."

While Gellner's idea has some truth to it, it is only partial: what the paper proposes is that opacity of roles, identity markers and ways of making sense of each other is not unique to transference, but what Simmel called modern life's fragmentary character.

To Ernest Gellner, psychoanalysis produces a Pirandello Effect: stripped of their roles and the usual means of social interaction, the anxiety provoked by the clinical setting, and the protracted means of coming round to an identity induces belief in the treatment's efficacy.

Nevertheless, 'transference is love'. But this is a problem, both to Freud and his critics. To Freud, this means there is no equivalent social model for such a love phenomenon, and to his critics, those taken with this idea have been initiated into a cult.

Freud's answer is that transference-love owes itself completely to the psychoanalytic setting: only here does one witness love as the repetition of one's history of being loved acted out upon the analyst; in the form of resistances, and expressed in fantasy.

Here I situate 'transference-love' as first outlined by Freud in his papers on technique: to fall in love with one's doctor, or patients, undoes the moral foundations of medicine, marriage and social morality outright. Yet, transference love is closer to 'real love'... how?

The predicament explored here is one found in the sociology of romantic love: either the couple-form is unable to sustain erotic desire, or the couple-form is unable to sustain a meaningful framework of mutuality and belonging beyond itself.

In 'Transference is love', I continue to think through a project I set myself some years ago: seek out in Freud's thought, analogue sociological and social theory concepts which assist with making sense of the predicaments of modernity.

🚨NEW ARTICLE 🚨

‘Transference is love’: Love and the logical impossibility of collective life in Lacan and Simmel

link.springer.com/article/10.1...