ABSTRACT
Sigmund Freud conceived of transference as "a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom". Needing to name desire complicates our achieving the twinned goals of personal agency and free and open social discourse and assembly. Freud encountered the tendency to avoid naming and knowing early in his career. Free association is a means of both discovering and experimenting with revelation and retreat, exposure and hiding. The taboo on desire and forbidding of acknowledge result in repression and defensive solutions that compromise free association and free speech. The hints at the stakes of reconcile attachment theory with a psychological picture of the emergence of mutual recognition between freely associating subjects of desire. Through empirical studies attachment theory demonstrates the lasting effects of early attachment patterns on a host of lifelong developmental phenomena. Both semiotic agency and attachment security may be understood as requiring a space between—between separation and reunion, between proximity seeking and exploration.
