CARL PLETSCH
111
Freud said little enough about the transference in these two case
studies published in 1909, but that may be precisely because these
cases were written for psychoanalysts. There is evidence in remarks
he made for nonpsychoanalysts on the subject of transference in the
same year, that he believed experience in analysis was a prerequisite
for the appreciation of the validity of insights derived from
psychoanalysis.
In
his
Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis
given at Clark
University in 1909, Freud stressed that the experience of
transference
plays a decisive part in bringing conviction not only to the patient
but also to the physician. I know it to be true of all my followers
that they were only convinced of the correctness of my assertions
on the pathogenesis of the neuroses by their experiences with
transference; and I can very well understand that such certainty
of judgment cannot be attained before one has carried out
psychoanalyses and has oneself observed the workings of
transference.
This conviction that his followers had verified the value of his
insights by their own experience with the transferences of their own
patients must be seen as an important part of the basis of his new at–
titudes about case studies .
It
is especially interesting that this experience with the transfer–
ence in the analytic situation, as prescribed by Freud, might be the
complement of the case studies in defining the peculiar nature of
psychoanalytic knowledge . For whereas initially psychoanalytic
knowledge was not located in case studies or derived from the trans–
ference, in the evolution of Freud's thinking, experience with the
transference became a prerequisite to understanding his cases - a
"personal knowledge" required of every psychoanalyst. But unlike
the many examples of personal knowledge given by Polanyi in his
book by that name, the transference is only useful when the psycho–
analyst is acutely conscious of it. Thus it is a kind of knowledge that
depends upon the psychoanalyst's ability to articulate it; and it is
more thoroughly "personal knowledge" than the skills that other
scientists learn by empathy and imitation from their teachers.
Transference seems to constitute a form of intersubjectivity that can
only be defined as "articulated implicity," or, in psychoanalytic
terms, the unconscious made conscious .
In
this it is both highly
subjective and yet the shared medium of communication that con–
stitutes the basis of psychoanalysis.
