Transmission

Abstract

Discussing transference, which is principally a phenomenon occurring in the clinic between a patient and an analyst, Eliza Slavet notes that it demonstrates how the present becomes filled up with the remnants of the past. These remnants are alive and active, giving them haunting power, the function, once again, of ghosts:

There is a sense that transference is the key to psychoanalysis, to the invocations of the past which overwhelm the present. The individual herself becomes a sort of test tube where the present and the past, the living and the ghosts, are mixed together, creating potentially explosive reactions… Freud attempted to name these invisible forces — they were ghostly transmissions from the past that took up residence in the individual’s psyche and found a home in the unconscious. But in naming these forces, psychoanalysis might also heighten their effects. (Slavet, 2009: 131)