31
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XL | Number 1 | 2019 | 31–64
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy
Jelica Šumič Riha*
Transference: From Agalma to Palea
1
The power of the ego and the powerlessness of psychoanalysis
1
The triumph of narcissism that we have been witnessing of late is the emblem-
atic pathology of our time and it is not an accident that this contemporary pa-
thology is coincidental with the rise in the power of images. Our world is a world 
swarming with images to such a degree that one is tempted to state that we are 
living in an “empire of images”. The world we are living in today is a world that 
itself has been transformed into an image or, rather, into “a wall of screens,” 
to borrow a term introduced by Géreard Wajcman, a mosaic of myriad images 
that constitute “a single yet unlimited image.”
2
 An image inevitably refers to the 
gaze that stands for the gaze of the Other. If the omnipresence of images signals 
a momentous shift in the history of civilisation this is because, as Wajcman has 
rightly remarked, “the desire to See All” that dominates and animates every hu-
man activity announces the emergence of a new figure of the gaze: the gaze that 
sees all at once, breaking thereby with the structuring role of the frame which 
could be summarised as “seeing is framing”. From this perspective, the empire 
of images, insofar as it implies that “the visible world has been entirely seen and 
has become all-seeing,” is only possible as “a creation of the civilization of the 
gaze.”
3
 Our world, as Wajcman’s argument goes, is global not only because it is 
the reign of the single market, but also because it is under the dominance of the 
gaze that has become one as it knows no perspective and therefore no limita-
tion or obstacle. What characterises the new regime of the gaze is precisely the 
absence of such a frame that would constitute a window looking out onto the 
world. In the new regime of the gaze, the point from which the subject is looked 
1
 This article is a result of the research programme P6–0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy” and the research project J6–9392 “The problem of objectivity 
and fiction in contemporary philosophy”, which are funded by the Slovenian Research 
Agency.
2
 Gérard Wajcman, “Wall of Screens,” lacanian ink, no. 40, p. 99.
3
 Ibid., p. 107.

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jelica šumič riha
on, is not simply hidden, but radically unlocatable. Omnipresent, yet nowhere 
to be found, the gaze is incarnate in the visible itself. With the elimination of 
the frame, the limit separating the subject from the scene of the world in which 
s/he could appear likewise disappears. Thus, according to Wajcman, in a world 
in which there is no preconceived distribution of places, a world without places, 
the place of the subject is also erased. Therefore, a theory of the hypermodern 
gaze, as Wajcman conceives of it, is a theory of “the placeless subject” in a 
“placeless world”
4
. Seen from this perspective, the current ubiquity of images 
clearly indicates that the gripping power of the image cannot be simply reduced 
to the imaginary, one of the three realms that, according to Lacan, constitute 
human experience. Rather, the spreading empire of images renders all the more 
obvious the distinction, indeed, the disparity, of reality (constituted through 
the imaginary and the symbolic) and the real that is excluded from reality. 
The pervasiveness of the image, but even more so the grip that the image has 
on us, has never been so manifest and intensified as today. It can be viewed as 
a clear sign of a modification in the dialectic that determines the relationship 
between the agency of the imaginary (the ego) and the agencies of the sym-
bolic (the subject of the unconscious and the Other) in which psychoanalysis 
is grounded: the rise of the image is accompanied by the rise of the ego and the 
corresponding declines of the subject and the Other, of precisely that function 
which is constitutive of the formation of the ego. It is then hardly surprising that 
in the era of the empire of images, which is in fact the empire of the gaze, an 
era characterised by what Joyce designated as “the ineluctable modality of the 
visible,”
5
 psychoanalysis seems to be strangely out of sync with the zeitgeist. 
This is hardly surprising insofar as in psychoanalysis, in which the symbolic 
prevails over the imaginary, “the ineluctable modality” is rather the modality 
of the sayable rather than that of the visible. But the current powerlessness of 
psychoanalysis also results from the “weakness of words” themselves. Due to 
the inconsistency of the Other, words are increasingly becoming vague, floating, 
and thus ineffective for responding to the deregulation of the speaking bodies. 
The widespread practice of submitting bodies to what Éric Laurent has termed 
“surplus excess” or “surplus deficit,”
6
 a kind of oscillation between bulimia (as 
4
 Ibid., p. 102.
5
 James Joyce, Ulysses, Folio Edition, London 1988, p. 37.
6
 Éric Laurent, “The Reverse of the Hysterical Symptom,” lacanian ink, no. 40, p. 86.

33
transference: from agalma to palea
seen in “the exacerbation of sight,” with the omnipresence of screens and im-
ages) and anorexia (as exemplified in the asceticism of modern art, of which 
Malevich’s white square could be an illustration) is manifest in all forms of hu-
man activity. 
While the prospect of the non-contemporaneity of psychoanalysis was the focus 
of much of Lacan’s teaching, its present apparent non-contemporaneity has yet 
to receive sustained attention in psychoanalysis itself. Some of the key elements 
of a possible response to this question can be found in Lacan’s theory of the four 
discourses. According to that theory, psychoanalysis is not possible if its other 
side, the master’s discourse, is inoperative as it is precisely that discourse which 
allows the speaking being to attain his/her symbolic existence by being repre-
sented by the master signifier. Once the master’s discourse is replaced by the 
capitalist’s discourse, the subject is no longer represented by the master signi-
fier, which has marked the subject with an irreducible singularity. Rather, in the 
capitalist’s discourse the subject is pinned down by a swarm of signifiers that, 
because they are countable, indifferent, and therefore replaceable, erase the 
subject’s singularity. Thus, what characterises the dominant social experience 
today is the installation of the inexistence of the Other through the combined 
efforts of the discourses of science and capitalism that strive to foreclose the un-
conscious by transforming subjects into ones-all-alone. We are now confronted 
with the tyranny of the surplus jouissance governed by the logic of the market. 
As testified by the variety of modalities of addictive behaviour proliferating to-
day, contemporary subjects, caught in the autistic, repetitious jouissance of the 
One (exemplified by bulimia, anorexia, toxicomania, etc.), appear to be inca-
pable of changing the mode of their enjoyment and thus of breaking with their 
deadly solitude.
If the role of psychoanalysis, as Freud and Lacan conceived it, remains that of 
guiding the subject through the evolution of the semblants of civilisation to the 
extent precisely that the mutation of the Other of civilisation leads to a mod-
ification of the mode and usages of jouissance, one cannot help but wonder 
about the curious powerlessness of psychoanalysis in guiding the subjectivity of 
our time once the latter is enslaved by the power of the image. Could it then be 
claimed that the main goal of psychoanalysis today is none other than to undo 
this irrepressible power of the image? In order to address this problem it is there-
fore necessary to start by taking into account that there is a certain correlation 

34
jelica šumič riha
between the installation of the empire of the image and what Lacan called “the 
rise to the zenith of the object a.” 
The object a that is in question here is the object surplus jouissance that im-
plies an approach to the question of jouissance beyond the relation to the Other. 
Within the new paradigm, the paradigm of the object surplus jouissance, the ob-
ject a becomes something that can be calculated, evaluated. This also explains 
why mass-produced objects, a variety of gadgets that have become indispen-
sible in our life, rather than a part of the body, could become a model for the 
object surplus jouissance. And to the extent that the object surplus jouissance 
is governed by the logic of the capitalist market, which means that it is consid-
ered from the point of its value on the market of jouissance, the object surplus 
jouissance can only bring about an autistic, asexual jouissance that no longer 
involves the Other. As a result, the jouissance that such an object brings about 
is no longer marked by a lack and the demand for love. Rather, jouissance de-
signated as the satisfaction of the drive gives rise only to the demand for more, 
for Encore!, to borrow Lacan’s proper term, for Again! to be taken in the sense 
of “more and always more”, outside any relation to the Other. What the installa-
tion of the inconsistent Other thus signals is that the object a no longer functions 
as the cause of the Other’s desire destined to fill in the subject’s lack of being. 
Worse, it is the subject’s lack of being that seems to be inoperative today: with 
the mass-production of the object surplus jouissance, the lack of being only ap-
pears as a “being-in-excess” with respect to what is wanted. As a consequence, 
if the subject’s lack of being is not articulated to the Other’s response, the sub-
ject him-/herself turns into an object a of a special kind: waste to be eliminated. 
Clearly, the current fascination for the image, in particular for that of one’s own 
body, stems from the dominance of one particular figure of the object a: the gaze, 
its main function being that of incarnating the point of view attributed by the 
subject to the Other, the perspective that allows the subject to be “seen in a satis-
factory light.”
7
 In giving rise to a frenetic quest for jouissance, the current fasci-
nation for the image cuts the link between words and bodies, thereby rendering 
contemporary subjectivity particularly unresponsive to the analytic treatment 
whose main tool remains speech. In the culture of the image, what brings words 
7
 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of 
Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, Penguin, London 1977, p. 268. 

35
transference: from agalma to palea
and bodies together, despite their current disjunction, is paradoxically the gen-
eralised narcissism. The latter promotes the regulation of the relationship be-
tween bodies and words through spectacle, thereby giving rise to the industry of 
narcissism in a variety of modalities, an industry that thrives on what Laurent 
designates as “the paradoxes of the uniformizing tyranny of the narcissism of 
increasingly small differences,”
8
 a veritable mass reproduction of narcissised 
bodies that occupies the vacated place of the Other. For psychoanalysis, in con-
trast, what brings bodies and words together is the symptom. Defined as a mark 
of the Other on the body, the symptom manifests itself in the disturbance of the 
body, indicating thereby the emergence of an always contingently fixated mode 
of jouissance to which the subject will remain enslaved. 
It is no doubt true that psychoanalysis is today no longer the same as it was in 
Lacan’s time, and still less in Freud’s time, because the status of the Other has 
changed to the point that we can even speak of its inexistence. It nevertheless 
remains the case that the necessity of addressing the question of the regula-
tion of bodies and words via the symptom results today, as in the past, from an 
impasse, indeed, from what could best be termed the unresponsiveness of the 
subject of the unconscious to the psychoanalytic treatment. An illuminating 
example of such interrogation can be found in Seminar II, in which the Freudian 
notion of the ego in psychoanalysis is re-examined. On this reading, the second 
topography was introduced as a response to what Lacan termed “the 1920 turn-
ing point,” a time of a “real crisis,” because “this new I, with whom one was 
meant to enter into dialogue, after a while refused to answer.”
9
 However, for 
psychoanalysis to account for this strange unresponsiveness of the subject of 
the unconscious to the analytic treatment, this amounts to taking into account 
the effect that the analytic discourse itself has on the discourse of the uncon-
scious. And conversely, the neglecting of the effects of the analytic discourse 
on the unconscious, as Lacan clearly notes, “necessarily leads to a new crystal-
lization of unconscious effects that renders the latter discourse more opaque.”
10
 
Paradoxically, it is because of the impact of the analytic discourse on the  
8
 Laurent, “The Reverse of the Hysterical Symptom,” p. 87.
9
 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in 
the Technique of Psychoanalysis, trans. S. Tomaselli, W. W. Norton, New York, London 
1991, p. 10.
10
 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VIII: Transference, trans. B. Fink, Pol-
ity, Cambridge 2015, p. 334.

36
jelica šumič riha
discourse of the unconscious that the unconscious closes again and the analytic 
treatment “no longer has the same effects as it did before.” Worse, “these effects 
make the subject beat a retreat; they immunize or inoculate him with respect to 
a certain discourse. They impede us from leading the subject […] to his desire.”
11
 
Following Lacan, it could then be argued that the issue of the ego is put on 
the agenda of psychoanalysis whenever analysands appear to be immune to the 
cure, which is to say, whenever the effects of speech in analysis wear off. As 
a consequence, this inevitably ends up in confusing the subject of the uncon-
scious with the individual, while the task of psychoanalysis is rather to “wipe 
away the subjective from this subject.”
12
 Taking up the Freudian notion of the 
ego, designated as an organ outside of the body, yet invested with libido, Lacan –  
for whom the function of the ego is to ensure the consistency of the speaking 
being – recognises in the Freudian notion of the ego the matrix of the mirror 
stage. Ultimately, as Lacan would state later, if there is something that puts into 
relief the fact that “the relation of man, or what goes under this name, to his 
body is imaginary, it is the importance taken on by his image.”
13
 Lacan could 
then conclude that, to the extent that the longed-for unity of the ego comes from 
the image of the body, “the body is what is most imaginary.”
14
 This also explains 
why the speaking being remains enslaved to the (narcissised, libidinised) im-
age. Once “the body enters the economy of jouissance through the image of the 
body,”
15
 as Lacan insists, the body of the mirror stage would remain the matrix 
of the ego. And Lacan could thus claim that the ego is the idea of oneself as a 
body: “The idea of the self, the idea of the body, carries weight. This is what is 
called the Ego.”
16
 
Yet what is at stake in the mirror stage is not simply that the nullity that the 
subject appears to be at this stage cannot see him-/herself anywhere except, as 
11
 Ibid.
12
 Jacques, Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 of the Psychoanalyst of the School”, Analy-
sis, no. 6, p. 4.
13
 Jacques Lacan, “La troisième,” La cause freudienne, no. 79, p. 22.
14
 Jacques Lacan, “Conférences et entretiens dans des universités nord-américaines,” Scili-
cet, nos. 6–7, p. 54. 
15
 Lacan, “La troisième,” p. 22.
16 
Jacques Lacan, The Sinthome, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XXIII, Polity, Cambridge 
2016, p. 129.

37
transference: from agalma to palea
Lacan clearly points out, in seeing “his form materialised, whole, the mirage of 
himself, outside of himself”
17
 as an image in the mirror, that is to say, an other. 
Lacan’s point is, rather, that to attain some kind of consistency, to see him-/her-
self as something, the intervention of the Other is necessary as the purely specu-
lar image cannot ensure the unity of the ego. On the other hand, however, it is 
“on the basis of the Other’s gaze” that the ego “presents itself and sustains itself 
qua problematic.”
18
 Confronted with his/her mirror image, the subject turns to 
the Other in order to receive from him/her “some sort of agreement or attesting,” 
as Lacan notes. However, all that comes from this Other is a splitting of that very 
image insofar as it is “both desirable and destructive.”
19
 And it is due to a split 
that occurs at the level of the Other that the ego finds itself divided: desired or 
not by the Other. 
This splitting is particularly relevant when in comes to dealing with one’s fel-
lowman, the small other, because one’s mirror image is precisely what leads 
one to hate one’s fellowman. Thus, “when faced with what is both himself and 
another,” the subject seems to have no other solution than an either/or: “Either 
he has to tolerate the other as an unbearable image that steals him from him-
self, or he must immediately break him, knock him over, or annul the position 
across from him, in order to preserve what is at that moment the center and 
drive of his being.”
20
 It is precisely because, in the mirror, “I see myself as an-
other,” endowed with the longed-for completion, that the possibility of either 
self-fracturing or squashing the small other, Lacan notes, is always open to the 
subject: “he cannot see one of his counterparts without thinking that this coun-
terpart is taking his place, and so, naturally, he loathes him.”
21
 At the same time, 
the very fact that the specular relationship is structured by the paranoid logic, 
indicates that for the mirror image to constitute the object with which the sub-
ject identifies in the scopic field, an object eternalised insofar as it transcends all 
movements and change, there must be room for a non-specular, non-reciprocal 
relation in which the Other occupies a position of “the third party” between the 
ego and the other. Because the image the subject sees in the mirror is “lacking in 
17
 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, trans. 
J. Forrester, Norton, London & New York 1988, p. 140.
18
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VIII: Transference, p. 354. 
19
 Ibid., p. 353. 
20
 Ibid., p. 352.
21
 Lacan, “La troisième,” p. 22.

38
jelica šumič riha
consistency, incomplete,”
22
 Lacan insists, it follows that no truly effective imagi-
nary regulation can be set up without the intervention of the symbolic relation 
that determines “the position of the subject as seeing.”
23
 The guiding instance 
that allows the subject to determine his/her position in the imaginary can only 
be situated at a transcendent point, beyond the imaginary, outside the specular 
relationship, i.e., as the place of the ego-ideal. Thus, for the gaze of the Other to 
be internalised, the unary trait is enough to the extent precisely that the unary 
trait stands for the capital I and is as such considered as a “sign of the Other’s 
assent.”
24
 Strictly speaking, the identification via the unary trait is not specular; 
it is rather its support inasmuch as “it supports the perspective chosen by the 
subject in the field of the Other, from which specular identification may be seen 
in a satisfactory light.”
25
Considered from the point of view of the mirror stage, narcissism could then be 
viewed as an attempt to regulate the gaze. Inasmuch as the mirror image allows 
the speaking being to “give himself some measure of consistency,” it involves a 
libidinal as well as a defensive aim as it prevents the fusion that threatens the 
subject with dissolution. As the subject today remains in thrall to his/her im-
age, it could be argued that the pre-eminence of the image of one’s own body 
is reaffirmed in what is called a “culture of narcissism”. But the question then 
becomes: to what extent does contemporary narcissism succeed in regulating 
the gaze if to attain jouissance by the ceaseless projection of the self-image nec-
essarily involves the supposition of the gaze of the Other? Indeed, the depen-
dence of the image returned from the Other is one of the essential traits of the 
ego of our time. Paradoxically, it is the exaltation of the image of the ego, a kind 
of “imaginary bulimia,” that prevents the subject from separating him/-herself 
from the gaze of the Other. From this perspective, the exaltation of the image of 
the ego could then be seen as a sign of the weakness of one’s own ego: in his/
her attempt to satisfy the demands of an ideal Other that the social imaginary 
conveys, the contemporary subject is forced to “succeed” and enjoy in order to 
satisfy the greediness of the economic machine that instrumentalises the gaze 
22
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, p. 267.
23
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, p. 140.
24
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VIII: Transference, p. 355. 
25
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, p. 268.

39
transference: from agalma to palea
of the Other. The price to be paid for the ego’s unstoppable quest for jouissance 
is therefore a desperate quest for the approval to be found in the Other’s gaze, a 
quest that as such indicates the inability of the contemporary subject to control 
the excess of the gaze. 
Regarding psychoanalysis, it is important to note that the rise of the object a to 
a social zenith implies the social reinforcement of this attachment of the subject 
to his/her image exactly to the extent that the symbolic order is inoperative. 
But this is precisely why contemporary narcissism could also be considered, 
from a different perspective certainly, as both a problem but also as a solution, 
as a sinthomatic solution, to be precise, a solution that each subject has to find 
out for him-/herself in order to counteract the failure of the symbolic Other to 
regulate jouissance. Thus, the ego, in contemporary narcissism, is not to be 
confused with the ego of the mirror stage. The ego of contemporary narcissism, 
as elaborated in Lacan’s Seminar XXIII, relates namely to the subject’s speaking 
position as an attempt to make up for the deficiency of the Name-of-the-Father, 
that agency whose principle function is to regulate jouissance. The case of Joyce 
is particularly instructive in this respect. The topology of knots allows Lacan 
to reintroduce the ego as the imaginary function in the Borromean knot as a 
suppletory device equivalent to the sinthomatic supplementation. As a result, 
the function of the ego radically changes: from being a veil of castration and 
of the subject’s desire, to a supplement to the paternal lack. The new, “Joycean 
ego” thus takes up the function of a fourth ring to repair the Borromean knot 
as it is only through such a sinthomatic knotting provided by the ego that the 
imaginary (of the body’s image), the symbolic (of the signifying inscription in 
the field of the Other), and the real (of the subject’s singular mode of enjoyment) 
hold together. 
Under the current dominance of the gaze and the resulting prevalence of the 
image, insofar as it is contaminated with jouissance, the new ego is no lon-
ger representable by the signifier. This is because the function of the image of 
the body is essentially articulated to some fundamental absence or lack situ-
ated either on the side of the subject (the lack of unity or the lack of being of 
the subject of the signifier), or on the side of the Other, whose principle func-
tion is to provide a guarantee of consistency in the imaginary and symbolic 
realms by regulating jouissance, the drive satisfaction, belonging to the realm 
of the real. The function of the image of the body, insofar as it is linked to some  

40
jelica šumič riha
fundamental lack, is therefore to fill it in or to cover it up. The speaking being 
in the era of the empire of images remains therefore submitted to his/her im-
age, yet its function has changed: confronted with the lack in the Other and, 
consequently, its inability to regulate jouissance, the image of the body becomes 
the site of an utmost narcissistic jouissance. Hence, it is through images that 
the speaking being nowadays strives, paradoxically, to contain the excess of the 
jouissance that inundates the body and, in so doing, to cover up the lack in the 
Other. It is clear, however, that Lacan’s highlighting of the function of the gaze 
implies that not all of the image is reducible to the mirror image of the body-one. 
As Lacan already points out in Seminar X, the imaginary function of the body 
image may well result from its being libidinised, but “[n]ot all of the libidinal 
investment passes by way of the specular image. There’s a remainder.”
26
But to clarify this point it is necessary to bring into play the distinction between 
two incompatible bodies. On the one hand, there is the body of the mirror stage, 
i.e. the body reduced to its image, that is to say, to a “good” form, that provides 
the longed-for completion. On the other hand, however, there is the libidinal 
body, i.e., the body of drives that in some sense consists only of erogenous 
zones, the body that is in some radical sense formless. To account for this dis-
tinction, it is essential to bring into focus the ways in which the signifier and the 
drive affect the body. While the signifier cadaverises the body by cutting up its 
jouissance into parts that Lacan terms objects a that have a parasitical relation 
to the body as they appear to be shared by the subject and the Other, the drives 
in contrast turn the body into their battleground, an organism with indefinable 
limits. That the libidinal body should be considered as an organism, as Lacan 
suggests, rather than as a body, this is then due to the drives that take “the or-
ganism’s being to its true limit, which goes further than the body’s limit.”
27
 What 
the libidinal body, the body of drives, thus interrogates is the body as One, the 
evidence of its corporeal individuality, the evidence of the unity of the body.
At the same time, the change in the way in which the image of the ego is ren-
dered operational in the current culture of narcissism calls attention to the sta-
26
 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X: Anxiety, trans. A. R. Price, Polity, 
Cambridge 2014, p. 38.
27
 Jacques Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious,” Écrits, trans. B. Fink, Norton & Company, 
New York & London 2006, p. 719.

41
transference: from agalma to palea
tus of that object a that is structurally correlated to the image: the gaze. Defined 
as (an always failed) attempt to inscribe the drive in the scopic field, the gaze 
can only appear in the visible field due to some surplus jouissance contained in 
the perceptual image. As a libidinal object that cannot be seen in the mirror, as 
a kind of invisible agalma, the gaze could best be designated as a material incar-
nation of the object a. There is a clear distinction, namely, between the object a 
considered as a part of the body (the breast, the faeces, the phallus, the voice, 
and the gaze), and the object a considered as a logical function. Taking the 
libidinally invested parts of the body as a model for the object a, the function 
of these “natural” objects in their variety and multiplicity would seem to be to 
fill, with their “stuff”, their substance, the emptiness of the subject, the subject 
being the lack of being. Considered, however, as a logical function, the object 
a is nothing but a semblant of being that does not exist; in fact, the object a, as 
defined by Lacan in Seminar XI, is nothing but a hole, a void, around which the 
drive circles. 
The gaze can thus emerge as a perfect model for the object a, since, being a 
hole, the gaze itself, rather than being identified with the mirror, is precisely 
what cannot be captured in the mirror: by being extracted from the picture, 
the gaze constitutes the invisible frame or, rather, to use Lacan’s own term, the 
“window onto the real,”
28
 in order for something in the scopic field, the percep-
tual reality, to become visible. The end of an analysis would then mark a mo-
ment of seeing the window as such a frame in order to recognize oneself to be 
subject to the drive. In rendering visible the invisible frame the end of analysis 
would allow the analysand to situate him-/herself at the level of the object a, 
the hole around which the drive, this acephalic, headless agency, circles, while 
drawing an unaccounted for jouissance from this repetitive circling around a 
hole in a perpetual failure. 
In the new regime of the gaze, it is precisely this extraction of the gaze as the ob-
ject a enabling the re-installation of the “window onto the real” that has become 
problematic. As a result, the subject is left defenceless against the invasion of 
the surplus jouissance. It then follows that for the contemporary subject, the 
only way for him/her to regulate the invading jouissance is to “resurrect” the 
28
 Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 of the Psychoanalyst of the School”, p. 9.

42
jelica šumič riha
gaze of the Other.
29
 This perspective indicates what is at stake in psychoanalysis 
today, i.e. in the era of the one-all-alone: to lead analysands, one by one, to find 
the particular way to exit from the trap of narcissism and, thus, to break with the 
deadly solitude by establishing an impossible link with the Other, albeit only 
as fiction. The main difficulty today consists precisely in making possible the 
“resurrection” of the figure of the (inexistent) Other that would then allow the 
subject to wrench him-/herself from the repetitious, autoerotic jouissance of the 
One, that repeats his/her mode of jouissance ad infinitum, without any varia-
tion or change, and in so doing, allow for the emergence or rather creation of 
something new.
Thus, for psychoanalysis the taking into account of the profound transforma-
tion of the function of the ego today, i.e, in the era of the inexistent Other, inevi-
tably raises the question of that leverage which makes psychoanalysis possible, 
that is to say, the question of transference. It is certainly not enough to simply 
stubbornly insist on its necessity for transference to remain the condition for 
the possibility of psychoanalysis. What is needed instead is a re-examination of 
the working of transference in analysis in the context of the current “culture of 
narcissism” and the effects obtained through its handling that would enable the 
modification of the jouissance of the subject. 
Knowledge between love and jouissance 
Lacan sets out to re-examine transference in his Seminar VIII in order to be able 
to write, as he puts it, “a new chapter on analytic action.”
30
 The question Lacan 
raises in this seminar is that of the analyst’s place in transference, in particu-
lar as the analytic relationship itself is based on a misunderstanding since, as 
Lacan insists, there is no overlap between the place where the analysand situ-
ates the analyst and the place where the analyst must be “in order to suitably 
respond to him.”
31
 There is then an issue here, which is the unclarity over the 
29
 While for Freud only virtue or modesty is able to preserve the Other’s gaze, for Lacan, what 
brings the judging Other to life, as J.-A. Miller clearly points out, is “the Other’s gaze as the 
bearer of shame.” Jacques-Alain Miller, “On Shame,” Reflections on Seminar XVII. Jacques 
Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, J. Clemens and R. Grigg (eds.), Sic 6, Duke 
University Press, Durham and London 2006, p. 15.
30
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VIII: Transference, p. 334.
31
 Ibid., p. 329.

43
transference: from agalma to palea
analyst’s function in the cure. If Lacan never stops interrogating the concept of 
transference, this is because the question of transference is not only a theoreti-
cal one, but also a technical one, that of its handling in the cure. It should be 
noted that, for Lacan, transference is to be considered as that which “directs the 
way in which patients are treated,” since, Lacan continues, “the way in which 
[the analysands] are treated governs the concept.”
 32
 This is why transference 
could be considered as a compass that signals not only the analyst’s orientation, 
but also his/her blundering. 
Setting out from Freud’s contention according to which “[t]transference, which 
seems ordained to be the greatest obstacle to psychoanalysis, becomes its most 
powerful ally,”
33
 Lacan goes on to show in what way the position of the analyst is 
decisive in how transference is handled. For Lacan, it is clear that this handling 
of transference does not consist in appealing “to some healthy part of the sub-
ject thought to be there in the real,”
34
 as the ego is “precisely this part that is con-
cerned in transference, […] this part that closes the door.”
35
 As a consequence of 
this confusing of the subject of the unconscious, the symbolic function, with the 
ego, the imaginary function, the main question for the post-Freudian orienta-
tion in psychoanalysis became the question of the ego-ideal. For Lacan, in con-
trast, the clarification of the role of the ego-ideal in transference has particular 
bearing upon the possibility of the subject to exit from the narcissistic sphere, 
or, in Lacan’s words, “to leave behind his narcissistic self-envelopment”
36
. The 
ego-ideal is for Lacan “the pivotal point of the kind of identification whose im-
pact is fundamental in the production of transference,”
37
 on the condition that 
psychoanalysis sets out from the Freudian distinction between the Ichideal and 
the Idealich, which allows the analyst “to make sense of what happens in analy-
sis on the imaginary plane, which we call transference.”
38
32
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, p. 124.
33
 Sigmund Freud, “A Fragment of a Case of Hysteria”, SE VII, p. 117. 
34
 Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School,” p. 9.
35
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, p. 131.
36
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VIII: Transference, p. 348.
37
 Ibid., p. 346.
38
 Ibid., p. 141.

44
jelica šumič riha
For there is a theoretical point here that is worth highlighting for discussion. 
Insofar as transference presents itself as a paradox – on the one hand, its emer-
gence is a necessary condition for interpretation, and on the other, transfer-
ence, as love, being always narcissistic, which means deceptive, inasmuch as 
the analysand expects to receive love in return for his/her love for the analyst, 
closes the door to the unconscious – it remains the site of a “permanent concep-
tual crisis […] in analysis,”
39
 a crisis that puts into question the very possibility 
of psychoanalysis. While Lacan himself may well designate the “initial infatu-
ation” that inevitably emerges at the beginning of the treatment as “a pivotal 
role in the transference,”
40
 this love-transference is nevertheless situated at the 
level of the imaginary. Thus, transference is viewed as love because it starts as 
a “narcissistic relation by which the subject becomes an object worthy of love. 
From his reference to him who must love him, he tries to induce the Other into 
a mirage relation in which he convinces him of being worthy of love.”
41
 Indeed, 
the function of this love is “[n]othing but to fill the emptiness of this standstill 
with a lure. But […] this lure serves a purpose by setting the whole process in 
motion anew.”
42
 Hence, what is at stake, for Lacan, especially in Seminar VIII, 
in which he develops at length the issue of love, is to establish what place love 
has in the analytic treatment. While transference love is “triggered off almost 
automatically in the analysand/analyst relation,” and moreover, “arises, one 
can say even before the analysis has started,”
43
 but precisely as such, transfer-
ence serves a very specific purpose: it is “constructed so as to give you the very 
image of your desire.”
44
 
In Seminar VIII Lacan takes a very important step in developing a radically dif-
ferent logic for love in psychoanalysis – a logic that interrogates the relation-
ship between love and knowledge on the basis of transference. To include the 
function of knowledge means that it does not suffice to posit the state of being 
in love from the point of narcissistic satisfaction: “I only love you in order to 
39
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, p. 131. 
40
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, p. 282. 
41
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, p. 276.
42
 Jacques Lacan, “Presentation of Transference,” Écrits, p. 184.
43
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, p. 142.
44
 Ibid.

45
transference: from agalma to palea
see myself as I love myself,” but rather, “I love you for something that is in you, 
which is what I lack.” Hence, for the subject to embody the Other for somebody 
else – this is one of the main theses in Seminar VIII – he/she must have what 
the subject has lost, a precious object, agalma, the object that the one in love 
always tries to re-find in the Other. It is this precious object that, according to 
the Lacan of Seminar VIII, is the cause of the love that one has for the Other: it 
is because the Other has what the subject has lost that his/her image acquires a 
consistency that the subject feels he/she lacks. 
It is worth noting that in Seminar VIII Lacan situates this agalmatic object at 
the level of being. To the extent that the subject can come into being only by 
entering the field of the Other, i.e. by being represented by a signifier for another 
signifier, which is why the subject lacks being, s/he can regain some of his/her 
being through the object a, which will give him/her, in the imaginary register, 
the consistency that s/he lacks in the symbolic. The subject will therefore love 
the one who seems to hold the truth of his/her desire, of his/her being. This also 
explains why Lacan, at least from Seminar VIII onwards, insists on the link be-
tween love and knowledge, which is crucial to Lacan’s reading of Socrates’ posi-
tion in Plato’s Symposium. In his commentary on the miracle of love presented 
in Symposium – a miracle that consists in a kind of reciprocity: the erómenos, the 
beloved, in turn starts to love the erastés – Lacan elaborates on what he called 
“metaphor of love”.
In the situation of love, the erastés, the lover or the one who loves, is at the same 
time the one who is lacking something, without knowing exactly what this 
something is, while the erómenos, the beloved, does not know what s/he has 
that makes him/her attractive to the lover any more than the lover knows what 
s/he lacks. Setting out from this happy encounter of two kinds of not-knowing, 
Lacan defines the metaphor of love as the substitution of one for the other: “It 
is insofar as the function of erastés or the person who loves, as a lacking sub-
ject, comes to take the place of, or is substituted for, the function of erómenos, 
the loved object, that the signification of love is produced.”
45
 This miraculous 
transformation, whereby the subject passes from being loved to loving, from 
desired object to desiring subject, is only possible because reciprocated love, 
“love as a response,” as Lacan claims, “implies the domain of not having.” 
45
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VIII: Transference, p. 40.

46
jelica šumič riha
Hence, “one cannot love without presenting oneself as if one does not have, 
even if one does.”
46
 
Now, this reciprocity of love is exactly what Socrates refuses. Thus, in his at-
tempt to seduce Socrates, Lacan notes, Alcibiades wanted to “make him into 
someone instrumental and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades’ 
desire – ágalma, the good object.”
47
 In so doing, Alcibiades succeeds in render-
ing visible what Lacan calls “the central articulation of the transference.”
48
 The 
main point to recognise is that, for Alcibiades, “Socrates is nothing but the en-
velope in which the object of desire is found.” But Alcibiades can only show that 
Socrates is “nothing but this envelope” by showing that “Socrates is desire’s 
serf […] enslaved to Alcibiades by his desire.”
49
 For what Alcibiades demands 
from Socrates is proof; he wants to see “Socrates’ desire manifest itself in a sign, 
in order to know that the other – the object, ágalma, was at his mercy.”
50
 What 
Alcibiades clearly spells out, or, rather, the lesson an analyst should draw from 
Alcibiades’ “coming out” is not simply that in transference love the ultimate aim 
is to obtain the agalma, i.e. exactly what Alcibiades believes “Socrates is the 
ungrateful container of.”
51
 In humiliating himself Alcibiades rather reveals what 
Lacan calls “the most shocking secret,” namely, that “the ultimate mainspring 
of desire, which in love relations must always be more or less dissimulated, [...] 
is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a.”
52
 
Several controversial corollaries follow from this stance. One of the lessons to be 
drawn from Lacan’s reading of Symposium is that, for the object of desire to be 
overvalued, as it is, the Other, Socrates, who incarnates it, as can be seen in the 
case of Alcibiades, must be lowered to the level of object, what Lacan designates 
as “the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a”. We have here the first formulation 
of the mutilation of the Other involved in desire as a mainspring of love that 
brings to the fore a hidden link between love and desire, which was elaborated 
in more detail in Seminar XI: “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you 
46
 Ibid., p. 357.
47
 Ibid., p. 176.
48
 Ibid., pp. 699–700. 
49
 Ibid., p. 176.
50
 Ibid.
51
 Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School,” p. 7.
52
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VIII: Transference, p. 176. 

47
transference: from agalma to palea
something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you.”
53
 Without going to 
the extremes of desire, taken in its pure state, which is to say, desire that “culmi-
nates in the sacrifice, strictly speaking, of everything that is the object of love in 
one’s human tenderness,”
54
 Lacan nevertheless indicates here, avant la lattre so 
to speak, that due to the impossibility of the sexual relation, speaking beings, 
inasmuch as they are speaking, are subject to the phallic jouissance, which is 
universally valid regardless of their sex, a jouissance that prevents them from 
relating to the Other as such. Thus, instead of enjoying the body of the Other, 
they can only enjoy it in the guise of a part of it, the object a.
55
On the other hand, however, it is exactly because Socrates refuses the reciproc-
ity of love and in so doing proves that he is truly the one “who is knowledge-
able in matters of love,” more precisely, in the emergence of transference love, 
that Lacan recognises in him “the precursor of psychoanalysis.” Indeed, “who 
knows better than Socrates,” asks Lacan, “that he holds only the meaning he 
engenders in retaining this nothing, which enables him to refer Alcibiades to 
the actual addressee of his discourse, Agathon (as if by chance).”
56
 Following 
Lacan’s description according to which “what is at stake in an analysis is 
nothing other than bringing to light manifestations of the subject’s desire,”
57
 
Socrates is a true precursor of the analyst for revealing to Alcibiades the ul-
timate paradox of the subject’s desire, as Lacan puts the words in Socrates’ 
mouth: “Everything you [Alcibiades] just did, and Lord knows it isn’t obvious, 
was for Agathon’s sake. Your desire is more secret still than all the unveiling 
you have just given yourself over to. It now aims at yet another. And I will des-
ignate that other – it is Agathon.”
58
We are dealing here with what could be called Socrates’ Versagung, which es-
sentially consists in leaving “empty the place he is called upon [by Alcibiades] 
53
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, p. 268.
54
 Ibid., p. 275.
55
 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX: Encore, trans. B. Fink, W. W. Nor-
ton & Company, New York 1998, p. 15.
56
 Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School,” p. 7.
57
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VIII: Transference, p. 238.
58
 Ibid., p. 177.

48
jelica šumič riha
to occupy.”
59
 If Socrates’ desire consists in leading “his interlocutors to gnóthi 
seautón (know thyself),” which is to say, to guide them on the path of desire, 
defined as the Other’s desire, which implies that, for Socrates, too, as Lacan 
emphasises it, his desire is “unbeknown to him”. But despite this Socrates can 
guide his interlocutor on the path of desire because he “makes himself into 
its [desire’s] accomplice.” In so doing, albeit “unbeknown to him,” Socrates 
takes the place of the analyst at the tipping point at which Alcibiades’ love for 
Socrates, who is knowledgeable in nothing except “in matters of love,” should 
take a different path, that of an inquiry into his true desire. More exactly: “[t]o 
the extent to which Socrates does not know what he himself desires – it being 
the Other’s desire – Alcibiades is possessed by what? By a love about which one 
can say that Socrates’ only merit is to designate it as transference love, and to 
redirect him to his true desire.”
60
Here Lacan presents a second metaphor, different from the miracle of love: in-
stead of the substitution of erastes by eromenos, we are dealing here with the 
substitution of the lack, the division of the subject, by the agalma. By refusing 
the reciprocity of love, by holding firmly to his own desire, his lack, Socrates 
becomes all the more agalmatic. For Lacan, this substitution of his division 
by the agalmatic object, is what transference is about, at least if we consider 
it from the side of love, and at this moment of his teaching. But it is precisely 
by emphasising the analyst’s refusal of the reciprocity of love, a refusal that 
makes the analyst agalmatic, that Lacan opens a wholly different perspective 
on transference: that of the analyst’s desire. In keeping the gap open between 
the ego-ideal and the object a, Lacan provides us, in the final part of Seminar 
VIII, with the first formulation of what he calls an “absolute point”, which will 
be developed in Seminar XI in terms of the desire of the analyst, and which is 
in Seminar VIII modelled on Socrates’ atopia. Just like the analyst’s, Socrates’ 
proper place is “that of pure desiriousness.”
61
 If Socrates is a precursor of the 
analyst, as Lacan claims, then the task for psychoanalysis is to conceptualise 
how a subject can “occupy the place of pure desiriousness – in other words, ab-
stract or subtract himself, in the relationship to the other, from any supposition 
59
 Ibid., p. 368.
60
 Ibid., p. 179.
61
 Ibid., p. 368.

49
transference: from agalma to palea
of being desirable.”
62
 Indeed, to support “the pure place of the subject qua de-
siring,” the subject of desire, as Lacan goes on, “can say nothing about himself 
without abolishing himself as desiring.”
63
 
In a way, we are dealing here with an elaboration at two levels: at the level of 
the analysand in analysis and at the level of the analyst’s response. On the one 
hand, the analysand elaborates knowledge of what s/he is as a subject, i.e. the 
subject of the unconscious as an effect of the signifier, namely, pure lack, pure 
loss, and which therefore cannot be hooked onto the signifier. Then, on the oth-
er hand, there is a theoretical subsumption of clinical experience: there is a lack 
in the Other, which is why the Other cannot, by definition, respond to the lack of 
the subject. Thus, whereas the analyst incarnates the barred Other, we have, on 
the side of the analysand, castration. At this precise point Lacan brings together 
what is at stake at the end of analysis and in the analyst’s desire. 
While (transference) love is no doubt an inevitable consequence of the analytic 
setting and, as such, a condition of the possibility of the cure, it can also disrupt 
an analysis if it is not elaborated logically. That is because, as a specular mirage, 
love, according to Freud and Lacan, is essentially deception because it is situ-
ated at the level of “that sole signifier necessary to introduce a perspective cen-
tered on the Ideal point, capital I, placed somewhere in the Other, from which 
the Other sees me, in the form I like to be seen.”
64
 Due to the presence of the 
subject that is supposed to hold the truth of his/her being, the analytic situation 
inevitably triggers transference love in the analysand: the latter loves his/her 
analyst because the analyst is supposed to hold something the analysand lacks, 
which is why it causes his/her desire. In the analytic setting, this desire takes 
the form of a desire articulated with the lack-of-being. The analysand wants to 
know something about him-/herself that will make him/her whole. The logic of 
transference love therefore needs to be elaborated so that the goal of analysis 
can now be stated as allowing the subject to reconcile him/-herself with the 
singularity of his/her subjective position. The focus of that effort, however, is to 
shift the analysand from identification with the ego ideal to the position of the 
62
 Ibid., p. 369.
63
 Ibid., p. 370.
64
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, p. 268.

50
jelica šumič riha
subject of desire via identification with the object a. By refusing to give any indi-
cation as to his/her desire, the analyst leads the analysand to take up the path 
of the logic of the signifier in order to face what s/he is as the object of desire, 
that, namely, 
before which the subject sees himself being abolished when he realizes himself as 
desire. In order for the subject to accede to this point beyond the reduction of the 
ideals of the person, it is as desire’s object a, as what he was to the Other in his 
erection as a living being, as wanted or unwanted when he came into the world, 
that he is called to be reborn in order to know if he wants what he desires.
65
 
One can see here one of the first attempts to articulate the dialectics of alien-
ation and separation: insofar as the subject, by being represented by the signi-
fier, disappears in it, or, to be even more precise, is “erased” in his/her being 
and thus reduced to silence, unable to say anything about him-/herself, unable 
to designate him-/herself by a signifier that would be proper to him/her, it is 
precisely at this point that the subject confronting his/her “namelessness as a 
subject”
66
 is encouraged to recognise him-/herself in the object a, the desire’s 
object-cause. 
The essential moment that, according to Lacan, is of particular relevance to the 
question of the analyst’s ability to handle transference is the moment in which 
Socrates, by claiming “to know anything, except on the subject of Eros, that is 
to say, desire,” sets up “the place of transference.” There is transference, Lacan 
claims, as soon as “the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere.”
67
 
Yet in Socrates’ case as well as that of the analyst, this supposition of knowl-
edge is only operational, effective, if it incarnates what Lacan calls “an absolute 
point with no knowledge.”
68
 If Lacan insists on the absence of knowledge, this is 
precisely because there is no knowledge prior to the emergence of transference. 
65
 Lacan, “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: ‘Psychoanalysis and Personality 
Structure’”, Écrits, p. 571. 
66
 See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Presentation of Book VI of the Seminar of Jacques Lacan”, 
www.lacan/actuality/presentation-of-book-vi-of-the-seminar-of-jacques-lacan/. I am in-
debted to Cindy Zeiher for drawing my attention to this text.
67
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, p. 232.
68
 Ibid., p. 253.

51
transference: from agalma to palea
And, indeed, Lacan claims, “of the supposed knowledge, he [the analyst] knows 
nothing.”
69
 What is emphasised instead in the supposed knowledge attributed 
to the analyst is the structural function that the analyst has to assume, namely, 
to incarnate a point of non-knowledge in order to arouse in the analysand a 
desire for knowledge.
Taking the position of Socrates as a model for the analyst, the presence of the 
analyst should be considered from two radically different perspectives: trans-
ference love begins once the analysand falls prey to the illusion that the analyst 
is already in possession of the truth of his/her being, of his/her unconscious de-
sire. That is why the analysand, like Alcibiades, strives to arouse the analyst’s 
love in order to make him/her yield the longed-for knowledge that s/he lacks. 
By refusing to yield to the analysand the precious object, the agalma, that the 
analyst is supposed to incarnate, the presence of the analyst is a negative pres-
ence as it manifests itself in the analyst’s restraint as a means to awaken in the 
analysand a desire for knowledge. Viewed from this perspective, the knowl-
edge of the analyst as the supposed subject of knowledge is not to be confused 
with ignorance. It should be taken instead as an effort to keep knowledge in 
abeyance. What is crucial at this point is Lacan’s distinction between referen-
tial knowledge, the linking of a sign to its referent, and textual knowledge, a 
knowledge that can be produced by following the logic of the signifier.
70
 The 
subject thus becomes the signifier only by supposing the presence of the sub-
ject of knowledge. In slightly different terms, it is by following the logic of the 
signifier that we see “isolated […] the pure aspect of the subject as free relation 
to the signifier, the one from which the desire for knowledge as desire of the 
Other can be isolated.”
71
 
We can see here how the so-called algorithm of transference that introduces 
the supposed subject of knowledge captures the paradoxical aspect of the onset 
of the transference formerly implied by the metaphor of love. The key factor is 
the analysand’s willingness to impute knowledge about him-/herself that s/he 
lacks to the analyst. However, if the supposition of knowledge is equivalent to 
the agalma, the side of the signifier involved in knowledge, what Lacan termed 
69
 Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School,” p. 7.
70
 Ibid. 
71
 Ibid.

52
jelica šumič riha
“textual knowledge”, is, by contrast, the reverse of love. What makes the re-
placement of the metaphor of love with the algorithm of transference possible is 
the assumption according to which the algorithm is nothing but the application 
of the definition of the signifier according to which the signifier represents the 
subject for another signifier. Seen from this perspective, then, transference is 
not to be seen as a relation between subjects, it should instead be viewed as a 
relation between signifiers as the subject of the unconscious itself is nothing but 
an effect of the signifier. There are two signifiers involved in transference: the 
first signifier, S
1
, also called the signifier of transference, is enigmatic insofar as 
it is all alone. Such an isolated signifier, cut off from the signifying chain, is con-
stitutive of the analytic symptom insofar as it is based on the assumption that 
“it means something,” which is why it is addressed to the supposed subject of 
knowledge, the analyst. But this also explains why the analyst has to be situated 
in the place of “any signifier,”
72
 as Lacan calls it. In being implicated with the in-
different signifier, the enigmatic signifier emerges as a demand for knowledge, 
and it is this demand that brings about the supposed subject of knowledge. The 
“indifferent signifier”, which is, strictly speaking, whatever is obviously not the 
knowledge that would solve the enigma addressed to it. Rather, insofar as it is 
incarnated by the analyst, the indifferent signifier is a stand-in for a mute, un-
responsive corporeal presence as a site of jouissance, a presence that does not 
respond to the demand for knowledge. 
The necessity of situating the analyst as a mute presence sheds light on the 
shift that has been taking place in the handling of transference: from the re-
lation between knowledge and love, constitutive of the Freudian transference, 
to the relation between knowledge and jouissance that designates the novelty 
of the Lacanian elaboration of transference. As exemplified by the position of 
Socrates, the emergence of a desire for knowledge implies a certain restraint, a 
holding back on the part of the analyst that allows the production of the agalma 
as the cause of a desire to know. However, when the relation of knowledge and 
jouissance is at stake in transference the position of the analyst changes. This 
is because jouissance, insofar as it involves a living body, requires presence in 
the process of handling transference, one could even say a positivated presence. 
This shift in the conception of the analyst’s position from a negative to a posi-
tive presence is already announced in Seminar XI with transference designated 
72
 Ibid., p. 5.

53
transference: from agalma to palea
as “the enactment of the reality of the unconscious,”
73
 thus allowing Lacan to 
separate transference from repetition. With the distinction between two modali-
ties of repetition, automaton and tyche, the latter being the repeatedly missed 
encounter with the real, the focus of the new conception of transference be-
comes the impossible encounter with the real insofar as the real is an “impos-
sible to say”. The handling of transference would then consist in circumscribing 
the “impossible to say” as the very core of what is said. 
The new version of the handling of transference already announces a new figure 
of the subject: instead of the subject of the signifier, the subject as a lack of be-
ing, impossible to pin down by one signifier, elusive and therefore changed each 
time it is represented by different signifiers, we now have what Lacan termed a 
“parlêtre”, a speaking-being, a being of speech, or, even better, a speaking body. 
The emphasis shifts from the effect of the signifier to presence and substance as 
jouissance can only be experienced in the body. In bringing together knowledge 
and jouissance, the focus in the handling of transference now moves towards 
the corporeal presence as a stand-in for what is unsayable: that dimension of 
the speaking being that belongs to the body as real. The unsayable presence in 
the speaking being, for being unrepresentable by the signifier, can therefore be 
presentified by one of the four instances of the object a: the gaze, the voice, the 
breast, or the faeces. Hence, we are dealing here with the presentification of the 
speaking being via the materiality of the object instead of the representation of 
the subject of the unconscious via the signifier. In the new modality of handling 
transference, the goal is to isolate what is unsayable for the subject that can 
therefore take on the status of the object. Upon confronting that dimension of 
the speaking being that can only be designated as a mute, corporeal presence, 
the site of jouissance, the subject supposed of knowledge becomes inoperative, 
ineffective, precisely because knowledge itself comes up against an unsurpass-
able limit. This unsayable dimension of the speaking being can therefore only 
be presentified by the analyst’s mute presence. Hence, what the analyst lends 
his/her body to is precisely this dimension of jouissance as a mute staging of the 
drive, a dimension that remains irreducible to the signifier, which can neverthe-
less be circumscribed in the handling of transference. 
73
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanal-
ysis, p. 146.

54
jelica šumič riha
Hence, the analyst takes upon him-/herself the task of presentifying this “im-
possible to say”. Beyond transference love, which, being love, is like any love 
deceptive and thus a misrecognition of this real, there is the analyst’s desire 
that, by refusing the analysand’s demand for love, guides the analysand to what 
is the true kernel of the demand for love, the object a around which the drive 
circulates. The end of analysis, seen from this new conception of transference, 
would then be designated as the separation from the object rather than identifi-
cation with the analyst as the incarnation of the ego-ideal.
Transference love vs. the analyst’s desire
The very fact that Lacan speaks of the handling of transference signals that 
transference during analysis and transference at the end of analysis is not the 
same thing. Which is why the thorny question for Lacan is none other than: 
What is it the analyst is supposed to know? Despite the fact that, as the sub-
ject supposed to know actually knows nothing about the analysand, the analyst 
should nevertheless know, having gone through actual experience, “what it is 
all about,” that is to say, “he must know,” as Lacan vehemently emphasises, 
“what it is around which […] the process through which he guides his patient 
[…] turns.”
74
 In short, what the analyst is expected to know, according to Lacan, 
is that “transference is unthinkable unless one sets out from the subject who is 
supposed to know,”
75
 but the analyst is also expected to know that this supposed 
knowledge is in itself the transference effect, the effect of love. The analyst, in-
sofar as s/he assumes the responsibility to guide the analysand through analy-
sis, is confronted with a particular difficulty, namely: “[i]n so far as the analyst 
is supposed to know, he is also supposed to set out in search of unconscious 
desire.”
76
 But to attain this goal, the analyst has to set in motion, render opera-
tional, the only weapon at his/her disposal: the desire of the analyst, which can 
only be articulated in the “relation of desire to desire,” a relation which is itself 
based on the assumption that the speaking being’s desire, precisely for being a 
being of speech, is the desire of the Other. 
74
 Ibid., p. 230.
75
 Ibid., p. 253.
76
 Ibid., p. 235. 

55
transference: from agalma to palea
In Seminar VII Lacan broaches the question of the analyst’s desire via the price 
to be paid by the analyst. Thus, for Lacan, “an analyst has to pay something if 
he is to play his role. He pays in words, in his interpretations. He pays with his 
person to the extent that through the transference he is literally dispossessed.”
77
 
Just like Socrates, who makes himself into the accomplice of his interlocutor’s 
desire that remains unbeknown to him, the analyst, too, has to pay “with a 
judgement on his action.” Lacan can therefore boldly state that, “from a certain 
point of view, the analyst is fully aware that he cannot know what he is doing in 
psychoanalysis. Part of this action remains hidden even to him.”
78
 
To realise this, it suffices to ask with Lacan what it is actually that is demanded 
of an analysis: “What is demanded can be expressed in a simple word, bon-
heur or ‘happiness,’ as they say it in English.”
 79
 That the analyst cannot simply 
ignore the analysand’s demand for happiness results from a momentous his-
torical change: once “happiness has become a political matter”, as is the case 
since the French Revolution, this involves that for the modern subject “there is 
no satisfaction for the individual outside of the satisfaction of the all”. Hence, 
in a certain sense, happiness is considered to be one of the essential rights of 
man. Or to state it with Lacan, it is “because happiness has entered the political 
realm” that the demand for happiness is situated “at the level of the needs of 
all men.”
80
 And it is exactly in such a context that “the analyst sets himself up 
to receive a demand for happiness.”
81
 Indeed, this is something that should be 
taken into account, Lacan warns,
whenever the analyst finds himself in the position of responding to anyone who 
asks him for happiness. […] To have carried an analysis through to its end is no 
more nor less than to have encountered that limit in which the problematic of 
desire is raised. That this problematic is central for access to any realization of 
oneself whatsoever constitutes the novelty of the analysis.
82
 
77
 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 
trans. D. Porter, W. W. Norton & Company, New York 1992, p. 291.
78
 Ibid.
79
 Ibid., p. 292.
80
 Ibid.
81
 Ibid.
82
 Ibid., p. 300.

56
jelica šumič riha
In contrast to love, transference love included, which consists in giving what 
one does not have, 
[w]hat the analyst has to give, unlike the partner in the act of love, is something 
that even the most beautiful bride in the world cannot outmatch, that is to say, 
what he has. And what he has is nothing other than his desire, like that of the 
analysand, with the difference that it is an experienced desire. What can a desire 
of this kind, the desire of the analyst, be? We can say right away what it cannot be. 
It cannot desire the impossible.
83
 
 
There is a tipping point here that announces a change in perspective, if not a 
paradigm shift. From Seminar VII onwards, Lacan posits that there is a lack in 
the Other and that the Name-of-the-Father fails to account for this lack. Hence, 
when the subject, through his/her question and desire, encounters this lack, 
precisely at this point s/he loses something. This is, as Lacan affirms, the great 
secret of analysis, and it is precisely at this point that he raises the question: 
What is the analyst’s desire? 
What highlights the unheard of novelty of psychoanalysis is not simply the dis-
covery of the unconscious, but also its refusal to satisfy the analysand’s demand 
to make him/her happy again by getting rid of the symptom, the cause of the 
analysand’s suffering. In ignoring the analysand’s futile pursuit of happiness, 
psychoanalysis nevertheless offers something precious in return: it seeks to 
arouse in the analysand the desire to know and to recognise in his/her symp-
tom, this being the indelible trace of a contingent encounter with jouissance, 
the mark of his/her singularity. Refusing to promise the analysand the recovery 
of his/her happiness by helping reconcile him/her to civilisation, psychoanaly-
sis promises the analysand something entirely different: the uncovering of the 
revolutionary potential of his/her very symptom.
To uncover this revolutionary potential it is essential to further elaborate the 
position of the analyst in transference. Thus, while transference love bears 
upon the knowledge that the analyst is supposed to hold, beyond this supposed 
knowledge, the analyst is also a corporeal presence, a body, or rather an object, 
whose main function is not to facilitate a dialogue with the analysand but in-
83
 Ibid.

57
transference: from agalma to palea
stead to provide through its mute presence a corporeal support that enables the 
installation of the analysand’s true partner, his/her symptom. The analyst has 
to draw a clear line of demarcation between offering his/her body to incarnate 
the agalmatic object that the analysand is desperately demanding, and guiding 
him/her to the real of his/her libidinal body, fragmented by the drives and, as a 
consequence, inundated by jouissance. 
This also explains the curious dialectics of transference that consists of two dia-
metrically opposed yet complementary operations: alienation and separation. 
If transference love marks the moment of the subject’s initial alienation in the 
Other, the separation from this Other marks the resolution of transference and 
thereby the end of analysis. The Other is thus at the very heart of the analysand’s 
symptom; one is almost tempted to state that the subject’s symptom is none 
other than the Other. The reason for this can be found in the very production 
of the analytic symptom. For the symptom to be “read” and eventually elimi-
nated, it is necessary that the symptom, just like the subject, originates in the 
field of the Other, more specifically, in that trait that brings the subject into his/
her symbolic existence, the unary trait that by marking him/her with an indel-
ible trait, sets him/her apart. What specifies the unary trait, which is why it has 
some affinities with the master’s signifier,
84
 is the link between the ideal and 
the symptom. It is through the unary trait that the symptom is rooted in the 
symbolic. However, the separation of the symptom from the Other is not the end 
of the story for that matter insofar as the symptom is also the drive satisfaction 
allowing the subject to draw some jouissance from his/her suffering caused pre-
cisely by the symptom. 
The question then becomes how to bring the subject to the point of recognising 
in the symptom s/he complains about the very knot that holds him/her togeth-
er: the imaginary unity attained through the image of the body which provides 
to the subject a sense of consistency, a symbolic existence as it is through the 
signifier that the subject finds a place in the field of the Other, and the real of 
his/her always unique, singular mode of jouissance. Or, rather, how to lead the 
84
 As Lacan himself will note in Seminar XVII, considered as “the function of the simplest 
form of mark,” the unary trait is “properly speaking […] the origin of the signifier.” Jacques 
Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. 
R. Grigg, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, London 2007, p. 46.

58
jelica šumič riha
subject to the point of being able to give a name to the real that designates the 
singularity of his/her subjective position, in short, to discover in the symptom a 
new unary trait as his/her true, that is to say, symptomal name? This new iden-
tification, the identification with the symptom, which is a true identification in 
the real, is to be distinguished from the imaginary and the symbolic identifica-
tion. This is because the symptom, now situated as a kind of Archimedean point 
opens the horizon of the possible for the subject, yet against the background 
of the impossible, which, for psychoanalysis, is none other than the “There is 
no sexual relation.” It could then be argued that, from the point of view of psy-
choanalysis, the symptom in its revolutionary, unruly capacity is precisely that 
which opens up for the analysand the possibility of escaping from the format-
ting imposed upon him/her by the dominant discourse and, in so doing, of en-
abling him/her to think otherwise, this being the only prospect for innovative 
action. The presence of the analyst may well be itself a “manifestation of the 
unconscious,”
85
 as Lacan claims, but, by incarnating the agalmatic object for 
the analysand, the analyst is also present as the object a. Hence, what counts in 
an analysis is the analyst’s being, not his/her lack thereof which would imply 
that the status of the analyst is that of the subject. 
It is precisely at this point that Lacan situates the opposition between transfer-
ence love and the analyst’s desire defined as “a desire which intervenes when, 
confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in position 
to subject himself to it.”
86
 It is by incarnating the agalmatic object for the analy-
sand that the analyst raises the analysand’s hope that s/he will regain what s/
he has lost, whether the truth of his/her being or the mythical, yet unattainable 
jouissance that would make him/her whole again. The analyst’s desire points 
in the opposite direction. It is precisely at the point where the analysand is con-
fronted with the primary signifier to which s/he is initially submitted, where the 
analysand expects the analyst’s response to his/her demand of love (of knowl-
edge), that s/he encounters the analyst’s desire, “a desire to obtain absolute 
difference” between the agency of alienation, the ego-ideal, the point I, and the 
agency of separation, and the object a. Using the terms from “Proposition”, it 
could then be said that the analyst’s desire becomes operative, effective, only 
85
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanal-
ysis, p. 125.
86
 Ibid., p. 276.

59
transference: from agalma to palea
to the extent that it “comes to the place of the x […] whose solution delivers the 
psychoanalysand his being, and whose value is written [either] (-φ), the gap 
that, if one isolates it in the castration complex, is designated as the function of 
the phallus, or (a) for what obiturates it with the object that can be recognised 
in the function approximated by the pregenital relation.”
87
 
For transference to emerge, the analysand has to establish a relation with the 
analyst “at the level of the privileged signifier known as the ego ideal,” as it is 
only from that point of view that the analysand will “feel himself both satisfac-
tory and loved.”
88
 Yet for the analysand to be able to “read his/her (unconscious) 
desire” that will enable him/her to confront the mode of jouissance that singu-
larises him/her, in a word, to wrench him-/herself from the alienating identifi-
cation and to break with the autistic, repetitious jouissance that condemns the 
subject to his/her deadly solitude, another function is called for, one that “in-
stitutes an identification of a strangely different kind, and which is introduced 
by the process of separation.”
89
 This identification “of a different kind” is none 
other than identification with the object a that allows the subject to separate 
him-/herself, to exit the alienation that only brings about what Lacan calls “the 
vacillation of being.”
90
 
For there to be a way of avoiding the impasse of an approach whose ultimate goal 
is identification with the analyst, it is therefore important to indicate that there 
is “a beyond to this identification, and this beyond is defined by the relation 
and the distance of the objet petit a to the idealizing capital I of identification.”
91
 
What characterises the position of the analyst is precisely a shift, a move, a pas-
sage from the place in which the analysand situates him/her: that of the ego-
ideal, to that of the object a. But how exactly does the position of the analyst 
relate to the function of the object a? 
In the closing chapter of Seminar XI Lacan designates the end of analysis as the 
operation of leading the analysand to the “point of lack that the subject has to 
87
 Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School,” p. 8.
88
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI: Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanal-
ysis, p. 257.
89
 Ibid.
90
 Ibid., p. 258.
91
 Ibid., pp. 271–272.

60
jelica šumič riha
recognize himself.” The handling of transference, supported by the analyst’s 
desire, would then consist in an operation that “maintains a distance between 
the point at which the subject sees himself as lovable – and that other point 
where the subject sees himself caused as a lack by a and where a fills the gap 
constituted by the inaugural division of the subject.”
92
 Seen from this perspec-
tive, the handling of transference is centred around the object a, a peculiar ob-
ject “discovered by analysis” in the sense that it is the “object around which the 
drive moves,” yet “whose very reality is purely topological.”
93
 There is, however, 
another, essential trait of “this privileged object”: its “special status” is revealed 
in the handling of transference since it designates the place where the analyst 
must be in order to lead the process of transference to its resolution. It is pre-
cisely because “the fundamental mainspring of the analytic operation” consists 
in maintaining “the distance between the I – identification – and the a” that 
Lacan can circumscribe two pivotal points of the whole operation: 
if the transference is that which separates demand from the drive, the analyst’s 
desire is that which brings it back. And in this way, it isolates the a, and places 
it at the greatest possible distance from the I that he, the analyst, is called upon 
by the subject to embody. It is from this idealization that the analyst has to fall in 
order to be the support of the separating a.
94
Transference at the end of an analysis does not, properly speaking, amount to 
its liquidation. The encounter between the love of knowledge and the analyst’s 
desire aims at a resolution, but a resolution that leaves a remainder. 
Clearly, the analyst’s desire viewed from the perspective of the ideal ego is en-
tirely different from the analyst’s desire seen from the perspective of the object 
a. But there is a price to be paid for this shift. Situated in the position of the ob-
ject a, “the analyst,” Lacan notes, “cannot help but think that any object what-
soever can fill it.”
95
 Which is why Lacan concludes Seminar VIII by claiming that 
the analyst must mourn love, since no object is more valuable than another. The 
analyst’s desire is centred around this bereavement that reveals, as the logic of 
92
 Ibid., p. 270.
93
 Ibid., p. 257.
94
 Ibid., p. 273.
95
 Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VIII: Transference, p. 397.

61
transference: from agalma to palea
drives does, that any object whatsoever will do. If the analyst vacillates when 
the question of what the analyst’s desire involves, it is precisely because s/he 
must accept that s/he will no longer be agalmatic for the analysand, or, rather, 
s/he must accept losing his/her agalma, becoming nothing more than a waste 
product of the cure; s/he must consent to a radical mutation of the object a: 
from agalma to palea. In incarnating and veiling at the same time the disbeing, 
désêtre, of the supposed subject of knowledge, the agalma of the analysand’s 
desire, the analyst must be from the outset “ready to pay for it through reducing 
himself, himself and his name, for any given signifier.”
96
 Hence, it is precisely 
the role that the analyst has to take on in order to sustain the analysand in his/
her operation that makes him/her “destitute as subject,” condemned in ad-
vance to become the remainder. Lacan can then claim that, for the analyst, his/
her “[s]ubjective destitution is written on the entry ticket”.
97
 Paradoxically, only 
by accepting in advance that s/he will become a residue, palea, useless as dung –  
once the analysand, at the end of analysis, succeeds in producing knowledge 
about the being of his/her desire, agalma, the desire’s cause, as a (structurally 
necessary) lure yet void of being – will the analyst succeed in guiding his/her 
analysand to the point at which s/he will reconcile him-/herself with the in-
exorable logic of the drive. But the price for making the analyst’s desire opera-
tional is nothing less than to willingly accept being “the reject of humanity.” 
Thus, what distinguishes the analyst, as Lacan somewhat provocatively claims 
in “Italian Note”, is that “he knows that he is a reject.”
98
 
This very passage from agalma to palea indicates that the analyst’s desire signi-
fies “an a-subjective function,” as Marie-Hélène Brousse designates “the result 
of a subjective operation,” namely, that of an analysis which allows the analy-
sand at the end of his/her analysis “to consent to and decide to operate under 
this function: thus a desire to take a specific place in the device and thereby 
contribute to its reproduction.”
99
 But then the question becomes how, exactly, 
is desire modified by analysis. Or, put differently, if the goal of every analysis 
is to reveal at the end the cause of desire, what then is the cause of the desire 
that supports the handling of transference and its resolution? That the cause of 
96
 Lacan, “Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the School,” p. 10.
97
 Ibid., p. 8.
98
 Jacques Lacan, “Note italienne,” Autres écrits, Seuil, Paris 2001, p. 309.
99
 Marie-Hélène Brousse, “A Desire without Cause?”, lacanian ink, no. 40, p. 61. 

62
jelica šumič riha
the analyst’s desire poses a problem can be seen in the fact that Lacan himself 
designates the desire of the analyst as an “unheard-of desire.” If the unheard-of, 
unprecedented novelty of the analyst’s desire relates to its very cause, and if this 
is the case, Brousse asks, “what new cause gives rise to an unheard-of desire?”
100
 
Or, more specifically, how are we to conceive of “the relationship between desire 
and the object-cause which a subject can incarnate for another subject?”
101
 If the 
analyst’s desire is without precedence or “unheard-of”, as Lacan claims, this is 
first and foremost because it is a desire that is operational, effective, without the 
division of the subject since the analyst is placed in analysis as an object rather 
than a subject. 
Taken as “the desire’s function,” the analyst is indeed situated as an object, yet, 
as Brousse rightly remarks, as “a de-phallicized object,” an object that is not 
even lost because it remains as “an irretrievable waste”
102
 at the end of analysis. 
So, either the analyst’s desire is a desire literally without a cause, or its cause is 
unlike any other cause of desire known so far. If the analyst’s desire is caused 
neither by the object of a drive, nor even by the object-nothing, then the only 
option that remains is that it is caused by an impossible, unsayable real, that 
renders the symbolic inoperative because the real cannot be written. The real 
in question here, the real for the speaking being, is encapsulated in the famous 
Lacanian formula: “There is no such thing as a sexual relation.” Since the real 
specific to the speaking being is the impossibility of writing the sexual relation, 
what takes the place of the object a, this real-cause – the cause of the analyst’s 
desire – is strictly speaking not an object. Rather, due to the impossibility of 
translating the real into the symbolic, the object that causes the analyst’s desire 
is ultimately erased as an object.
It is then, to follow Brousse's suggestion, this “impossible that is placed in the 
position of the cause of the analyst’s desire.” This is because it is only by mak-
ing this place void, that the analysand can place therein the object of his/her 
fantasy, whatever it may be.
103
 In this sense, it is only by losing its “agalmatic 
value of surplus jouissance,” that the object-cause of the analyst’s desire can be 
100
 Ibid.
101
 Ibid., p. 65.
102
 Ibid., p. 63.
103
 Ibid., p. 67.

63
transference: from agalma to palea
articulated to the senseless emergence of the real exactly at the point at which 
the Other as the guarantor of meaning used to be situated. The possibility of 
handling transference therefore depends – in order to mark the impossibility of 
the sexual relation for each and every analysand – on the effective voiding of the 
object. And it is precisely as such, i.e. void of all objectality, that the object-cause 
of the analyst’s desire bears witness to the encounter with the impossible-real 
that every analysand brings to analysis and to the consequences to be drawn 
therefrom – as can be evidenced in the production of new knowledge. Therein 
we can see the object a, the object-cause of the analyst’s desire. 
Today, however, this path of knowledge seems to be unviable since, once knowl-
edge is downgraded, devaluated, it is “no longer an object of love, but has be-
come merchandise itself”
104
. Once there is a disjunction between knowledge and 
the Other, its guarantor, there inevitably arises the following question: What 
kind of relation does the contemporary subject have with knowledge and jouis-
sance? In discovering transference Freud also discovered a link between love 
and knowledge. For Lacan, by contrast, what is at issue in transference is not 
only the secret connection between love and knowledge, since for him, beyond 
knowledge, there is the sexual reality of the unconscious, this being the real that 
love dissimulates. With the emergence of a new paradigm of surplus jouissance, 
when knowledge itself is evaluated from the point of view of its jouissance value, 
it appears to be devalued. Having lost its “agalmatic value,”
105
 knowledge has 
become something quite indifferent. There is then an undeniable connection be-
tween “the rise to the zenith of the object a” and the devaluation of knowledge. 
For the paradigm of knowledge that dominates today is a knowledge cut from 
both the object and the subject, a knowledge reduced to an algorithmic technol-
ogy. Just like the drive, circling blindly around the hole and therefore indifferent 
to the object that enables it to remain in circulation, algorithmic knowledge is 
an acephalic machine for the calculation and evaluation of everything, which 
means anything. With the current de-agalmisation of knowledge, there seems 
to be no room for the subject supposed to know, supposed to be in the posses-
sion of the precious truth about the subject’s being. Contemporary subjectivity, 
being indifferent to knowledge, knows only of the various experiences of the 
object, its addictive and inexorable mode of jouissance, which from the start 
104
 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire : Livre XVI : D’un Autre à l’autre, Seuil, Paris 2006, p. 39.
105
 See Jean-Claude Milner, Le Juif de savoir, Grasset & Fasquelle, Paris 2006.

64
jelica šumič riha
prevents the onset of transference. Without the possibility of clarifying what 
his/her status is as an object of the drive, the subject nowadays is condemned to 
the unsayable, repetitive, and unchangeable jouissance. 
From the perspective of the prevailing indifference to knowledge that renders 
transference difficult if not impossible, psychoanalysis, too, seems to be in dan-
ger of extinction. Hence, for there to be psychoanalysis, it is of paramount im-
portance to re-examine the current possibility of transference in psychoanaly-
sis. In the era of the tyranny of jouissance, as manifest in the current triumph 
of narcissism and indifference to knowledge, transference appears less to be a 
matter of supposed knowledge articulated to love, than a matter of knowing 
how to deal with the real of jouissance.