Both Freud and Lacan distance themselves from any use of suggestion in analysis. Nevertheless, Lacan remarks in “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power” both that there is a connection between suggestion and transference and that Freud was aware of that connection; namely that transference is itself an analysis of suggestion. Lacan will argue that transference is itself an analysis of suggestion in a very specific sense, namely to the extent that there is a kind of suggestion that directly supports the symbolic work intrinsic to analysis. The confusion is cleared up when one properly connects the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis with its origin in Freud’s experiments with suggestion and with the efficacy of working with signifiers.
Related articles
Lacan, Alcibiades and Freud: On Love and TransferenceThis essay examines why Socrates uses the Symposium of Plato to better understand transference in psychoanalytic treatment. The reason is found in Freud's argument that transference is true love and that Eros is the subject of the Symposium. Can Socrates be seen as a precursor to Freud? Lacan's answer is no. The knowledge of Socrates is not the knowledge of Freud. According to Socrates, love is oriented to what is good and the love for the individual is sublimated into…
Transference and Constellation as Institutional Psychotherapy Reflecting on the past seventeen years, the author describes the vicissitudes of the notions of transference and constellation in the history of La Traversière. He does so on the basis of a consideration of the history of psychoanalytical theory on the work, via transference, with psychotic patients. In this sense, his story forms a plea for the recreation and safeguarding of the conditions under which we can work with dissociated transference by means of the constellation meeting, as introduced by…
DeemoedHet begrip deemoed is moeilijk te definiëren en wordt hier als volgt benaderd: Eerst is er de beschrijving van Victor Turner in The Ritual Process over het ritueel van de Kumukyndyila bij de aanstelling van het nieuwe dorpshoofd bij de Mbende in Zambia, waarbij het dorpshoofd het schelden van zijn dorpsgenoten in deemoedige houding moet doorstaan. Dit leert het dorpshoofd te verdragen dat hij niet door iedereen geliefd zal worden. Dit sluit aan bij het vraagstuk van de “zuivere liefde”…