ABSTRACT
In effect, Freud is saying that much of an analysand’s behavior in the transference must be understood in a new way. But if his theory of transference needs to be revised, so does his account of therapy and cure. For, by this point in Freud’s career, psychoanalytic therapy consists in the proper handling of the transference. And yet the revision has to be carried out in the light of a fundamental force that Freud admits he doesn’t really understand. ‘If a compulsion to repeat does operate in the mind,’ Freud says, ‘we should be glad to know something about it, to learn what function it corresponds to, under what conditions it can emerge and what its relation is to the pleasure principle – to which, after all, we have hitherto ascribed dominance over the course of the processes of excitation in mental life.’20 This is tantamount to an admission that Freud does not yet understand the fundamental principles of psychoanalysis.
