Transference and Termination – Freud, Winnicott, Lacan
Over the past several weeks, I have experienced an unusual bout of turnover in my practice. Not unusual in the sense that I think some strange environmental influence or something about the way in which my practice is constituted is driving people away, but simply unusual in as much as I think the rate of departure for my practice has not historically been to see so many go quite so suddenly. But, given that I have generally had the good fortune of retaining many of the clients on my case load for a matter of years, I can appreciate that a fair number of them have recently either felt it was time for a break or that they had accomplished what they had hoped to accomplish over the course of therapy (and more). Coupled with a series of seminars I have recently been attending that have been centered around themes of change, grief, and loss, I find myself wanting to reflect a bit on termination and some general ideas about what it is we could be striving for in the work that we do.
Though, to reflect on termination, by any definition, means as much thinking about the beginning and middle as it does about the end. Philosophically speaking, the beginning of any round of therapy immediately implies its eventual termination. As Heidegger informed us in his Being and Time, all Being is a Being-towards-death, and the processes of therapy are no different. In our first session, clients are often telling us what it is they are hoping to leave us with (and for the perceptive reader my languaging there is deliberately ambiguous). If done well, the duration and course of the therapy will reveal to us the process by which we are to “get there” and the degree to which the client’s understanding of how they “want to change” was even understood at the start. To be sure, the client’s thoughts about what this process is and may look like are often probably clearer at the outset then they are at termination, and my experience has been that those who don’t last terribly long in therapy, at least with me, are often those whose rigidity around their initial suppositions are resistant to grieving the safety, surety, and familiarity of those impressions.
Which in someways signals one of the elements that often determines (to a considerable degree) what the course of therapy is to look like and what we might hope to achieve through and prior to termination, and that is the transference. My looking at this topic is by no means to be exhaustive here, and perhaps I will later revisit the topic through the framework of a separate set of theorists; as it were, the three thinkers whose ideas about transference/termination I am most keen on playing with at the moment are Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, and Jacques Lacan. Though not intended to be sloppily executed, I will say at the onset there is no precise direction I want to go in formulating a connection between these three. In fact, much has been made about the lack of compatibility between Lacan and Winnicott, despite both their thinking of themselves as strict Freudians. However, if we can follow Eugene Gendlin’s lead in allowing the felt sense of the subjective truth of what these thinkers have offered us to find implicit connection and bridge experiential and conceptual gaps, I think there is something to be played with in the context of what each of these thinkers can bring to this discussion. Indeed, though there are some obvious divergences in their work, and particularly in the language they use to communicate their thoughts, I think there are some basic philosophical coincidences in the work of the latter two thinkers that can help us understand why both resonate so deeply.
So, as is oftentimes the case in thinking about the work of therapy, we start with Freud. In his essay, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable”, Freud outlines some thoughts about what it means for a psychoanalysis to come to an end. Simply stated, his belief was that through the course of therapy there are two distinct elements we are wrestling with which inform the possible direction of and expectations for the therapy: the anatomical and biological potency of the instincts/drives for any one individual (the id) and the integration of the developmental traumas which inform the expression of the particular neurosis (the ego). To state it in more phenomenological—rather than psychoanalytic—terms, as the analysis progresses, it is not that we get rid of the id or its various impulses, or find a way to overtake it through the strengthening of the ego (that came with the later ego psychology folks), but that in their being disclosed to us via the therapeutic relationship, we construct a new being with the various instincts, impulses, and the relational traumatic precursors which influence and structure our overall way of being.
From the perspective of transferential phenomena, for Freud this played out via the recapitulation of the Oedipal situation. This, besides the Darwinian evolutionary biology of it all, is why Freud understood so much through the lens of sex and aggression. Conflict emerges out of the internalized representations of the love we had for our mother and the embattled relationship we had with our father in trying to win over that love. The process of therapy is about rendering these tensions explicit and out of the unconscious, so that we can experience them unfolding anew via the analysis of the transferential phenomena in the various relationships that get explored in the therapeutic space, including (and sometimes especially) that of the relationship with the therapist. Later, Hans Loewald would much more succinctly identify the process as being akin to a kind of mourning or grief, but we can already see the groundwork for this kind of thinking in the way Freud approaches the problem of the terminability of an analysis. With this, something about our question begins to be answered by bringing into focus issues of sublimation and grieving the psychological structures to which we’ve been condemned.
Interestingly, a search filtering Winnicott as the author in the pep-web database for the key word “termination” does not yield any results. I can’t say I was terribly surprised, as I’ve read a fair amount of Winnicott and, as I’ve been beginning this entry, was struggling to recall any papers that felt like they tackled this subject directly. It also makes sense that an analyst who was in his own analyses for a combined 15 years might not be so preoccupied with the idea of how or when an analysis must end.
With Winnicott, when thinking about termination, I find it most helpful to consider this through the lens of his ideas about object-usage and transitional objects. Winnicott’s interpretations of what is going on in the analytic process blur the lines between reality and fantasy perhaps more than most other theorists. Winnicott is particularly interested in how clients can use the analyst as an instrument for facilitating the negotiation between reality and fantasy, learning through a reenactment of the developmental process how to “use” objects in the world (that is navigate the vague liminality between who people are in our mind as objects vs who/what they may be in reality) rather than “relate” to them purely as (intrapsychic) objects. This occurs through interactions with the analyst/therapist, who becomes a vessel for these processes and must find a way to “survive” this “destruction”, which I have always read as some combination of finding a way to be consistent while also allowing oneself to change as a consequence of these interactions, which would connect to some of what Winnicott writes about when he writes about subjectivity and the self. It’s as though the pinnacle of healthy development, is not just in one’s capacity to bear the ambiguity of the transitional objects they’ve assigned for themselves out in the world, but to also bear the paradoxical position of understanding oneself as being a transitional object for others. These are themes which play out, especially in Winnicott’s late work, and I think signal something about what he may have chosen to write about had he covered the topic of termination more directly.
Lastly, he's not someone whom I’ve written much about in other posts, but Lacan is showing up for me here as well. The two dimensions of his work I would like to introduce to complement some of what we have already looked at is his idea of the “Subject Supposed to Know” as transferential object and some of his ideas about signification. As pertains the Subject Supposed to Know (SSK), this was one of the concepts Lacan developed as a means for understanding the transference relationship in therapy. Essentially, the idea is that the analysand places the analyst or some other authority into the position of an all-knowing entity. The SSK then must be appealed to in some manner to relinquish that knowledge and grant us a similar sort of omniscience over our own life and well-being. Lacan’s belief was that one facet of the analytic process should be to undermine and routinely frustrate this tension, directing the client instead towards an understanding of the unconscious processes at play, as well as what these mean for the client’s relationship to desire, their position in the symbolic register, etc. And so, the possibility of what a successful therapy means is in some way undermining and extinguishing this tendency so that the client can come to realize there is no such thing as omnipotence, and therefore no definitive structure to meaning, in the differentiated symbolic matrixes in which we exist. That there is no real ultimate signifier and therefore no necessary structure to the signified or symbolic order. This then brings about the other important outcome in the Lacanian approach, which is the disruption in the signifying chain that comes with the dismantling of the SSK structure, opening the client up to a possibility of transforming their interpretation and understanding of “who” they are by the process of freeing them from a chain of interpretation and signification they had taken for granted as being fundamentally given.
To take account of what we’ve seemingly discovered here, it would seem the process of a successful therapy should have as its intended outcomes: cultivation of new ways of being; mourning of internalized objects; ability to tolerate the paradoxes of authentic human relations; recognition of the lack of any absolute authority over our own life; disruption of how we understand ourselves in the context of some linguistic or symbolic order. Or, to simplify further: change, grief, ambiguity, responsibility, and meaning.
As is so often the case, I find myself being drawn back to the notions of grief and play with characterize so much of the therapeutic process. Though Lacan does not speak quite as plainly about play as the child analyst Winnicott does, I don’t think we can be talking about anything else when we talk about navigating dialectics between meaning and meaninglessness; freedom and responsibility; authority and autonomy. Most of the individuals who recently left found themselves acknowledging the sadness of their departure and expressing gratitude for a kind of freedom of expression they had found around previously challenging stimuli. This may not always be the right approach at the right time for everyone who seeks out therapy, but for those receptive to this approach, I think we begin to find in these three thinkers a way of organizing and understanding therapy that can help inform novel and important ways of bringing about subtle, and yet profound, relationships to change.
