The Denial of Death (21 page)

… we have to conclude that all the feelings of sympathy, friendship, trust and so forth which we expend in life are genetically connected with sexuality and have developed out of purely sexual desires by an enfeebling of their sexual aim, however pure and non-sensual they may appear in the forms they take on to our conscious self-perception. To begin with we knew none but sexual objects; psycho-analysis shows us that those persons whom in real life we merely respect or are fond of may be sexual objects to us in our unconscious minds still.
²⁷

We have already seen how this kind of reductionism to the sexual motive got psychoanalysis itself into trouble very early and how it has taken a succession of thinkers of great stature to extricate psycho-analysis from this obsession of Freud’s. But in his later work Freud himself was not too troubled by his obsession when it came to explaining some things more broadly; the same holds true for his narrow sexual emphasis on transference surrender. In 1912 he said that the fact that transference could lead to complete subjection was for him “unmistakable” proof of its “erotic character.”
²⁸
But in his later work, when he accented more and more the terror of the human condition, he talked of the child’s longing for a powerful father as a “protection against strange superior powers,” as a consequence of “human weakness” and “childish helplessness.”
²⁹
Yet, this phrasing doesn’t represent an absolute abandonment of his earlier explanations. For Freud, “eros” covered not only spe
cific sexual drives but also the child’s longing for omnipotence, for the oceanic feeling that comes with a merger with the parental powers. With this kind of generalization Freud could have both his broader and narrower views at the same time. This complicated mixture of specific error and correct generalization has made it a difficult and lengthy task for us to separate out what is true from what is false in psychoanalytic theory. But as we said earlier with Rank, it seems fairly conclusive that if you accent the terrors of external nature—as Freud did in his later work—then you are talking
about the general human condition and no longer about specific erotic drives. We might say that the child would then seek merger with the parental omnipotence not out of
desire
but out of
cowardice
. And now we are on a wholly new terrain. The fact that transference could lead to complete subjection proves not its “erotic character” but something quite different: its “truthful” character, we might say. As Adler saw with complete clarity long before Freud’s later work: transference is fundamentally a problem of
courage
.
³⁰
As we have learned conclusively from Rank and Brown, it is the
immortality motive and not the sexual one that must bear the larger burden of our explanation of human passion. What does this crucial shift of emphasis mean for our understanding of transference? A truly fascinating and comprehensive view of the human condition

Transference as Fetish Control

If transference relates to cowardice we can understand why it goes all the way back to childhood; it reflects the whole of the child’s attempts to create an environment that will give him safety and satisfaction; he learns to act and to perceive his environment in such a way that he banishes anxiety from it. But now the fatality of transference: when you set up your perception-action world to eliminate what is basic to it (anxiety), then you fundamentally falsify it. This is why psychoanalysts have always understood transference as a regressive phenomenon, uncritical, wishful
, a matter of automatic control of one’s world. Silverberg gives a classic psycho-analytic definition: Transference

indicates a need to exert complete control over external circumstances. … In all its variety and multiplicity of manifestation … transference may be regarded as the enduring monument of man’s profound rebellion against reality and his stubborn persistence in the ways of immaturity.
³¹

For Erich Fromm transference reflects man’s alienation:

In order to overcome his sense of inner emptiness and impotence, [man] … chooses an object onto whom he projects all his own human qualities: his love, intelligence, courage, etc. By submitting to this object, he feels in touch with his own qualities; he feels strong, wise, courageous, and secure. To lose the object means the danger of losing himself. This mechanism, idolatric worship of an object, based on the fact of the individual’s alienation, is the central dynamism of transference, that which gives transference its strength and intensity.
³²

Jung’s view was similar: fascination with someone is basically a matter of

… always trying to deliver us into the power of a partner who seems compounded of all the qualities we have failed to realize in ourselves.
³³

And so was the Adlerian view:

[transference] … is basically a maneuver or tactic by which the patient seeks to perpetuate his familiar mode of existence that depends on a continuing attempt to divest himself of power and place it in the hands of the “Other.”
³⁴

I am citing these several authorities at length for two reasons: to show the general truth of their insights and also to be able, later on, to bring up the immense problems that these truths raise. Already we can see that transference is not a matter of unusual cowardice but rather of the basic problems of an organismic life, problems of power and control: the strength to oppose reality and keep it ordered for our own organismic expansion and fulfillment.

What is more natural than choosing a person with whom to establish this dialogue with nature? Fromm uses the word “idol” which is another way of talking about what is nearest at hand. This is how we understand the function of even the “negative” or “
hate” transference: it helps us to fix ourselves in the world, to create a target for our own feelings even though those feelings are destructive. We can establish our basic organismic footing with hate as well as by submission. In fact, hate enlivens us more, which is why we see more intense hate in the weaker ego states. The only thing is that hate, too, blows the other person up larger than he deserves. As Jung put it, the “negative form of transference in the guise of resistance, dislike, or hate endows the other person with great importance from the start… .”
³⁵
We need a concrete o
bject for our control, and we get one in whatever way we can. In the absence of persons for our dialogue of control we can even use our own body as a transference object, as Szasz has shown.
³⁶
The pains we feel, the illnesses that are real or imaginary give us something to relate to, keep us from slipping out of the world, from bogging down in the desperation of complete loneliness and emptiness. In a word, illness is an object. We transfer to our own body as if it were a friend on whom we can lean for strength or an enemy who threatens us with danger. At least it makes us feel real and gives us a little
purchase on our fate.

From all this we can already draw one important conclusion: that transference is a form of fetishism, a form of narrow control that anchors our own problems. We take our helplessness, our guilt, our conflicts, and we fix them to a spot in the environment.
We
can create
any locus
at all for projecting our cares onto the world, even the locus of our own arms and legs. Our own cares are the thing; and if we look at the basic problems of human slavishness it is always them that we see. As Jung put it in some beautiful words: “… unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions,
we shall, by carefully analysing every fascination, extract from it a portion of our own personality, like a quintessence, and slowly come to recognize that we meet ourselves time and again in a thousand disguises on the path of life.”
³⁷

Transference as Fear of Life

But this discussion has led us even further away from a simple, clinical approach to the phenomenon of transference. The fact is that fascination is a reflex of the fatality of the human co
ndition; and as we saw in Part I of this book, the human condition is just too much for an animal to take; it is overwhelming. It is on this aspect of the problem of transference that I now want to dwell. Of all the thinkers who have understood it, none has written with greater breadth and depth on the meanings of the transference than Rank.

We have seen in several different contexts how Rank’s system of thought rests on the fact of human fear, the fear of life and death. Here I want to accent how global or total this fear is. As William James said, with his unfailing directness, fear is “fear of the universe.” It is the fear of childhood, the fear of emerging into the universe, of realizing one’s own independent individuality, one’s own living and experiencing. As Rank said, “The adult may have fear of death or fear of sex, the child has a fear of life itself.”
³⁸
This idea has been given wide currency by Fromm in several boo
ks, as the “fear of freedom.” Schachtel put it well in speaking of the fear of emerging out of “embeddedness.” This is how we understand the “incestuousness” of the symbiosis with the mother and the family: the person remains “tucked into” a protective womb, so to speak. It is what Rank meant when he talked about the “trauma of birth” as being the paradigm for all other traumas of emergence. It is logical: if the universe is fundamentally and globally terrifying to the natural perceptions of the young human animal, how can he dare to emerge into it with confidence? Only by relieving it of its terror.

This is how we can understand the essence of transference: as a
taming of terror
. Realistically the universe contains overwhelming power. Beyond ourselves we sense chaos. We can’t really do much about this unbelievable power, except for one thing: we can endow certain persons with it. The child takes natural awe and terror and focusses them on individual beings, which allows him to find the power and the horror all in one place instead of diffused throughout a chaotic universe.
Mirabile!
The transference object, being endowed with the transcendent powers of the universe, now has in himself
the power to control, order, and combat them.
³⁹
In Rank’s words the transference object comes to represent for the individual “the great biological forces of nature, to which the ego binds itself emotionally and which then form the essence of the human and his fate.”
⁴⁰
By this means, the child can control his
fate. As ultimately power means power over life and death, the child can now safely emerge in relation to the transference object. The object becomes his locus of safe operation. All he has to do is conform to it in the ways that he learns; conciliate it if it becomes terrible; use it serenely for automatic daily activities. For this reason Angyal could well say that transference is not an “emotional mistake” but the experience of the other as one’s
whole world
—just as the home actually is, for the child, his whole world.
⁴¹

This totality of the transference object also helps explain its ambivalence. In some complex ways the child has to fight against the power of the parents in their awesome miraculousness. They are just as overwhelming as the background of nature from which they emerge. The child learns to naturalize them by techniques of accommodation and manipulation. At the same time, however, he has to focus on them the whole problem of terror and power, making them the center of it in order to cut down and naturalize the world around them. Now we see why the transference object poses so many pro
blems. The child does partly control his larger fate by it, but it becomes his new fate. He binds himself to one person to automatically control terror, to mediate wonder, and to defeat death by that person’s strength. But then he experiences “transference terror”; the terror of losing the object, of displeasing it, of not being able to live without it. The terror of his own finitude and impotence still haunts him, but now in the precise form of the transference object. How implacably ironic is human life. The transference object always looms larger than life size because it represents all of
life and hence all of one’s fate. The transference object becomes the focus of the problem of one’s freedom because one is compulsively dependent on it it sums up all other natural dependencies and emotions.
⁴²
This quality is true of either positive or negative transference objects. In the negative transference the object becomes the focalization of terror, but now experienced as evil and constraint. It is the source, too, of much of the bitter memories of childhood and of our accusations of our parents. We try to make them the sole repositories of our own unhappiness in a fundamentally demonic world.
We seem to be pretending that the world does not contain terror and evil but only our parents. In the negative transference, too, then, we see an attempt to control our fate in an automatic way.

No wonder Freud could say that transference was a “universal phenomenon of the human mind” that “dominates the whole of each person’s relation to his human environment.”
⁴³
Or that Ferenczi could talk about the “neurotic passion for transference,” the “stimulus-hungry affects of neurotics.”
⁴⁴
We don’t have to talk only about neurotics but about the hunger and passion of everyone for a
localized stimulus
that takes the place of the whole world. We might better say that transference proves that everyone is neurotic, as it is a universal distortion of reality by the artificial fixation of it
. It follows, of course, that the less ego power one has and the more fear, the stronger the transference. This explains the peculiar intensity of schizophrenic transference: the total and desperate focalization of horror and wonder in one person, and the abject surrender to him and complete worship of him in a kind of dazed, hypnotic way. Only to hear his voice or touch a piece of his clothing or be granted the privilege of kissing and licking his feet—that would be heaven itself. This is a logical fate for the utterly helpless person: the more you fear death and the emptier you are, the more you
people your world with omnipotent father-figures, extra-magical helpers.
⁴⁵
The schizophrenic transference helps us to understand how naturally we remain glued to the object even in “normal” transference: all the power to cure the diseases of life, the ills of the world, are present in the transference object. How can we not be under its spell?