Toward an intellectual history of transference. 1888-1900

Freud's concept of transference was not the discovery of a solitary genius, but was an inspired, creative synthesis deeply rooted in the prevailing discourses of his time. In the nineteenth century, transference started out as a neurologic term; Freud used that concept of displaceable energies in his neurologic writings as early as 1888. Then in Studies in Hysteria, Freud explicated the basis by which ideas dissociated and made for a mésalliance with the physician. False connections such as transference were conceptualized along lines drawn by Charcot's school, and the concept of auto-suggestion that they used to explain the inherent suggestibility of a hysteric. In developing this 1895 model of transference, Freud strove to tame disquieting concerns about the epistemologic status of hysteria and hypnosis. It is the epistemologic anxiety created by accusations of iatrogenic suggestion as much as the sexual anxiety Szasz pointed to that prodded Freud to focus exclusively on the intrapsychic. It also may be the legacy of this epistemologic anxiety that accounts for the fact that until recently, psychoanalytic theoreticians have been hesitant to explore the effect that the real person of the analyst might have on the manifestations of transference. In the last years of the nineteenth century, Freud modified his theory of transference and built a place for it in his topographic model of mind. In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud integrated the biologic and psychologic possibilities inherent in prior usages of übertragung. By 1900, transference could theoretically refer to both a hypothesized displacement of quantifiable neuronal energies as well as the psychological phenomena Freud observed occurring between him and his patients. Perceptual theories of illusion like Helmholtz's provided Freud with a model that by analogy helped re-define transference as a central facet of irrational inner life. Transference in 1900 accounted for a patient's possible distortion of the person of the physician, but it also postulated a more general subjectification of consciousness and perception. In transference, a conscious perception could be as distorted by unconscious wishes as a day residue was in dreams. When Ida Bauer (a.k.a "Dora") stalked out of Freud's office, this newly empowered theory was in the metapsychological wings waiting to make meaning of her failed treatment. No longer was transference an unimportant mishap, a nuisance, or a theoretical aside. By 1900, transference was ready to stand, as it does today, at the core of psychoanalytic theory.