or … Finally Understanding Transference … After Your Analyst is Dead
Daniel Jeremiah Nachman, PhD., ABPP, always said, “Nothing happens in here that hasn’t happened before.”
That’s true.
I always said, “Yeah, well, you miserable son of a—I never fell in love like a forking idiot the way I fell for you.”
That’s also true.
But yesterday I figured out what happened:
I was supposed to be able to Fall in Love with Daddy and let all that Anna Freud “the most seductive thing in the world is a three to five-year-old little girl” stuff gush all over my father. Except it didn’t on account of not one, but two serious blockades:
- Mommy wouldn’t stand for it. (In Wikipedia under “Dog in the Manger” they oughtta have a link “see Katy’s mother.”)
- Daddy wasn’t safe because he had no incest filter because he drank.
So this lovely, fragile Little Girl Love got shoved down and compressed into a popcorn kernel. That’s probably repression or something—or maybe a neurosis—except I’ll never know because Daniel’s dead and won’t be there on Thursday to answer the question.
Anyway, that damned “Doctor” Nachman dug out that little kernel—rather, he made me do it myself via the self-done laparoscopic surgery under the guise of psychoanalysis—put it into the hot air popper of his fancy board credential, and heated it up until it exploded into something “big enough to chew on.”
That is romantic-erotic transference: A nice, juicy, oversized popcorn kernel.
So then I was supposed to chew and chew and chew—under the lovely insulting label “transference neurosis”—until all I had left was that little skin thing that gets caught between your teeth.
Then I was supposed to take floss—that would be normal transference resolution, except with me it was a slightly dirty DIY fingernail—pry that little piece from between my teeth and spit it out into a Kleenex that Daniel, the ultimate gentleman, would hand to me while saying, “Good girl, Katy. You’re finally crying for yourself.”
That’s known as resolving the transference—when you realize that all those lovely “authentic” feelings you had for your analyst were nothing but a bunch of hot air.
Whatever is supposed to happen next, I’ll never know because not only will Daniel not be there to hand me the Kleenex. I didn’t know he was gonna croak on me so I didn’t swipe the box from his office, so I’d have an analytically psychic energy link to work with.
So what I’m supposed to do now with all these squeaky clean metaphorical teeth but one very dead analyst—I have no forking clue.
