Psychoanalytic transference already rehearses the reflex conformity it claims to cure

Evidence

The therapeutically much-lauded transference, the breaking of which is not for nothing the crux of analytic treatment, the artificially contrived situation where the subject performs, voluntarily and calamitously, the annulment of the self which was once brought about involuntarily and beneficially by erotic self-abandonment, is already the pattern of the reflex-dominated, follow-my-leader behaviour which liquidates, together with all intellect, the analysts who have betrayed it. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 75

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The remarkable claim that the therapeutic relationship’s controlled self-annulment is itself the template of administered submission — transference as the pattern, not the cure, of domination.
• QUESTION: Is this a fair account of transference as clinical technique, or a deliberately hyperbolic diagnostic provocation? Worth testing against clinical-practice accounts.
• XREF: connects to: Psychoanalysis is undone by the external super-ego it identified; The Freudian unconscious reintroduces a deceiver-deceived duality rather than explaining bad faith — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 282

Broader Connections

• Psychoanalysis is undone by the external super-ego it identified #complicates (0.85)
• The Freudian unconscious reintroduces a deceiver-deceived duality rather than explaining bad faith #expands (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 282