ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some individual manifestations of the transference. The stirred-up landscape in the new group requires that the author looks at both intrapsychic aspects and cultural phenomena. The chapter shows some of Jacques Lacan’s methods of talking about the unconscious quite useful in understanding the communications in this new group. The partial change in the frame of the two groups, as they became a new group, brought up powerful repressed aspects of the unconscious. The force of the repetition compulsion comes out in a number of the previous examples and points out the patients’ attempts at maintaining endless possibilities at the expense of defining necessities. In other words, what the patient is trying to avoid through repetition is a simple truth. To point out the unconscious is to take a step that stops contingency, to give way to what at times might appear as an “ordinary” realisation, one that, however, might have far-reaching effects for the person.
