Transference or, When Discourses Shift: Toward a Theory of Psychopedagogical Technique

Psychoanalysis is a special kind of learning. Rather than simply being told of the knowledge stored in the unconscious, psychoanalysis insists that one must learn for oneself by overcoming the resistances one puts up to it. Freud explains psychoanalysis’s unique status in perhaps the most important of the Papers on Technique , “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.” 1 Freud begins the paper by reviewing the history of psychoanalysis’s development. Early in its development, psychoanalysis simply wanted to bypass what Freud described as an overactive critical faculty. As psychoanalysis comes into its own, the analyst “employs the art of interpretation mainly for the purpose of recognizing the resistances which appear there, and making them conscious” ( SE 12:147). “The aim of the different techniques,” Freud insists, “has, of course, remained the same” (147–48): “Descriptively speaking, it is to fill in gaps in memory; dynamically speaking, it is to overcome resistances due to repression” (148). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.