Historia de la Iglesia Guadalupe del barrio Modelo

E. Ann Kaplan in her book Psychoanalysis & Cinema (1990) makes an observation that ‘transference has been much discussed by literary critics but not by film scholars’ (ibid.: 14) in which, as we saw, it was identification which became the primary tool of film theory. It is outside the scope of this chapter to offer an extensive review of transference in literary studies but it is interesting to reflect a little how the history of applied psychoanalysis takes curious turns, largely depending on individual thinkers and writers’ interests and their levels of

popularity. Kaplan agrees that structurally ‘there is a similarity between the task of the critic and the analyst (ibid.: 14). She says she is particularly appreciative of Peter Brooks’ suggestion that in both cases an exchange takes place in an

‘artificial space – a symbolic and semiotic medium’ (ibid.: 14).

She then goes on to challenge, she says, the rest of the sentence, namely that that space is ‘none the less the place of real investments of desire from both sides of the dialogue’ (ibid.: 14) ³² precisely because of the lack of an actual bodily setting that takes place in psychoanalysis: ‘there is an actual rather than metaphorical dialogue: words are passed back and forth in a manner that can never happen between text and reader’ (ibid.: 14). (Obviously the embodied dialogue takes place in the documentary encounter). Literary scholar Elizabeth Wright indeed suggests: ‘transference and countertransference might be regarded as “the reader theory” of psychoanalysis’. Wright stresses that in the non-clinical sense these phenomena are present to some degree in all our relationships: ‘transference is a mode of investing persons and objects with positive and negative qualities, according to our early memories of significant experience of familial figures and the expectations founded thereon’ (Wright 2003 [1984]: 15).

Wright reviews a variety of literary theories which employ the notion of transference in the relationship between the writer and reader. Apart from Peter Brooks she also mentions André Green (in Wright 2003: 99) who extensively explored the links between the analytic encounter and that of a writer and reader, his focus being on ‘two conscious and two unconscious minds’ at work in any such interaction (Green 1978: 180), just as there are in an encounter between the psychoanalyst and the analysand. Green sees the potential space in the reader/text encounter as similar to an encounter in the clinic in which the analyst and the analysand might also be utilising a space of illusions and desires in which the two subjects are engaged in the mutual production of a transitional object, the analytic

‘text’ and the literary text, both an illusion of agreement (ibid.: 1980). Elizabeth Wright comments also that in the literary context: ‘The reader begins as analyst and ends up as analysand, reactivating his past traumas’ (Wright 2003: 131). That thought appears very relevant to the documentary encounter and I explore it

32The text is originally from Brooks, P. (1989) in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (Ed.), Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, Methuen: London and New York, pp.1-19.

further in my chapter 5.

Sarah Cooper in her book Relating to Queer Theory (2000) takes the psychoanalytical terminology outside the clinic further and applies it to the issues of identifications and transferences on the part of the reader of queer texts. She makes an important point that these mechanisms might transcend the obvious gender definition and sexual orientation. She evokes the ideas of ‘identification’

as used in film theory but also takes the notion of the relationship of the reader to the text to have a chance of being a ‘transformative’ experience (Cooper 2000:

105). In this context, Cooper too reviews some additional literature pertaining to transference. This includes Kristeva’s in Histoires d’amour (1984) and Au commencement était l’amour (1985) in which Kristeva comments on transferential discourse of the psychoanalytic relation as a tale of love (‘The curative power of the analytic relationship is located in transference love’s power for renewal’) (in Cooper 2000: 106).

Cooper also moves to a discussion of transference in pedagogical situations quoting Marjorie Garber who in her text Vice Versa (1996) notes that

‘transference’ between teacher-pupil can be outside gender, can be bi-sexual ‘in the sense that it involves the participants in an erotic transference that does not necessarily correspond to their ordinary sexual identification’ (Garber in Cooper 2000: 106). This is an important point of relevance in a documentary encounter:

transference may well be occurring regardless of the gender and sexual orientation of those involved. Cooper mentions this in a context of gendered or un-gendered reading of literature; nonetheless her comments are taking us to another massive site of transference outside the clinic, namely transference in education, which I look at briefly forthwith. In education in particular of course the notion of ‘le sujet supposé savoir’ has powerful connotations.

Garber questions the division between transference love and the ‘real’ thing by affirming the bisexual structure of institutional relations but also the very nature of love itself. As previously mentioned, Lacan bases his discussion of transference love in his Seminar VIII on a (single sex) relationship between a master scholar and his student, Socrates and Alcibiades; the former insists on a platonic character of their relationship, despite Alcibiades’s despair.