Duelar

Isolda Arango-Alvarez

Usually, we refer to transference in terms of love, but we know that hate can also be part of it—what is commonly called negative transference. However, I believe transference can be understood as a form of painful love. At the end of analysis, there is a major break-up, seemingly with the analyst, but at a deeper level, the break-up is with oneself (or whatever remains of it). When the analytic experience is taken to its ultimate consequences, whatever object the analyst has occupied during the treatment, mourning and separation become central experiences that must be navigated.

“I wanted to finish analysis, but I did not want to let go of the analyst.” This is an expression often found in testimonies of the pass. Thus, transference as an experience can be seen as a painful love. While the establishment of transference implies a novel experience of love—a new type of bond formed with the analyst—there is a tendency to reinstate previous, familiar ways of forming attachments. Throughout the treatment, this new love opens up a space for the analyst’s presence in the unconscious, allowing for interventions that touch and eventually transform the massive state of jouissance. Once identifications fall apart and the fundamental fantasy is traversed, another form of satisfaction still persists.

This is the space in which I situate the painful love of transference. What is mourned here? What is the break-up truly about? How can you lose something you never really had?

Eric Laurent made an intervention on this topic during a Congress in Barcelona, Spain, where he referred to this process as duelar. Duelar is a combination of duelo (mourning) and dolor (pain). I quote him:

“After having been confronted [the analysand] without the mediation of his fundamental fantasy with the desire of the analyst, then for a certain time, the analyst persists—and this word persists is fundamental because it implies that desire has already evaporated… The charms of desire, incarnated in the fundamental fantasy, have evaporated, but the persistence that causes desire remains. […] This doesn’t last a lifetime; it lasts the time of the intense desire to grieve for the object. If you allow me the neologism, the hard desire to duelar. To grieve for this object that was the miracle of the fundamental fantasy.”[1]

This is the moment I define as the face of painful love in transference. What is the turning point of this duelar at the end of an analysis? Even though we know it is contingent and that exits from analysis are singular and unique, I propose that this duelar marks a turning point in transference— that is never reduced to zero but instead shifts and becomes attached to the institution, to the School. This creates a new type of bond, a new love, which will inevitably include painful moments. However, in this new love, the desire of the analyst is sustained without a veil—naked and All-Alone.

References

[1] My translation of a comment given by Dr, Eric Laurent at the XI Congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis entitled “The Ordinary Psychoses and the Others, Under transference”, Barcelona, 2018.