Countertransference and friendship
26 July 2024
[NOTE: This is the fifteenth in a series of articles about Lacanian psychoanalysis and free speech. For the previous article, click here. For the next article, click here.]
In the eighth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between three kinds of friendship (Greek: φιλίας; filías), depending on whether the friendship is based on pleasure, utility, or goodness. We can relate these three kinds of friendship to the three fundamental types of human activity that Hannah Arendt distinguishes between in The Human Condition: labour, work, and action. These categories reflect the different ways in which humans engage with the world and relate to their own existence.
- Labour refers to all the activities related to biological processes and the maintenance of life. These include tasks necessary for sustaining life, such as eating, sleeping, and reproducing. Labour is repetitive and endless, aligned with the cycles of nature (e.g., the daily need for food). The products of labour are consumed almost immediately and do not last. Labour is driven by necessity and is essential for survival, and typically takes place in the private sphere, associated with the household and family life.
- Work pertains to the activities that create a durable world of objects, artefacts, and institutions. It involves the fabrication and construction of a human-made environment. The products of work are more permanent and outlast the immediate activity of their production (e.g., buildings, tools, artworks). Work introduces a human-made order distinct from the natural world and is often goal-oriented, involving means-ends reasoning and planning. Work belongs both to the private and to the public sphere — private, because the craftsman often works in isolation, and public, as it involves the creation of a shared world where humans live together, and results in products that must be exchanged in the marketplace.
- Action involves those activities that occur directly between people without the mediation of things or matter. It is about political engagement and the exercise of freedom; Arendt regards speech as a form of action. Action reveals the distinctiveness and individuality of each person. It is the way individuals disclose themselves in the public realm. Action requires a plurality of actors and is inherently collective; it takes place among people and involves interaction. The outcomes of action are unpredictable and irreversible, as they depend on the interplay of multiple agents. Action is the realm of human freedom, where individuals can initiate new, spontaneous, and unforeseen events.
Arendt’s distinctions help to highlight different dimensions of human life and the varied ways in which we interact with and shape our world. Labour ensures our biological survival, work constructs our shared environment, and action fosters political life and personal identity. The three kinds of friendship can be related to the three fundamental types of human activity as follows:
- Friendship based on pleasure arises from the world of labour, since the most basic pleasures arise directly from the tasks necessary for sustaining life, such as eating, sleeping, and reproducing. Higher pleasures such as delighting in the wit of another, when they do not arise as by-products of higher kinds of friendship (such as those based on utility or goodness), but are pursued purely for one’s own enjoyment and independently of any regard for the other person (whether in terms of a fair exchange or their good), can also be viewed as forms of recreation, which is necessary for the reproduction of one’s own labour power.
- Friendship based on utility arises from the world of work, since the durable artefacts that are fabricated through work must be exchanged in the marketplace. Although work partially belongs to the public sphere, as it involves the creation of a stable arena in which action can readily take place and continue (the agora, for example), when workers interact they do so in a way that is pre-political, since they do not interact directly, but only via the mediation of things or material objects.
- Friendship based on goodness arises only in the world of action, since it is all about speech and the exercise of freedom (i.e. politics, in the sense that Aristotle and Arendt use this term). It is through action that friends reveal their individuality to each other and distinguish themselves from others; it is the way individuals disclose themselves in the public realm. Like action, this kind of friendship requires a plurality of actors and is inherently collective; it takes place among people and involves interaction. The outcomes of this kind of friendship, like those of action, are unpredictable and irreversible, as they depend on the interplay of multiple agents. Like action, this kind of friendship is the expression of human freedom, and involves the initiation of new, spontaneous processes with unforeseeable outcomes.
The relationship between the analyst and analysand can be seen as a form of friendship based on goodness. Aristotle regards this as the most perfect form of friendship (Nicomachean Ethics, 1156b5ff):
The perfect form of friendship is that between the good, and those who resemble each other in virtue. For these friends wish each alike the other’s good in respect of their goodness, and they are good in themselves; but it is those who wish the good of their friends for their friends’ sake who are friends in the fullest sense, since they love each other for themselves and not accidentally.
The neutrality of the analyst is thus far from the stereotype of the cold and indifferent, even amoral character that is portrayed in movies such as Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945), in which Dr. Murchison (Leo G. Carroll) comes across as frosty and haughty; Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), which features Willem Dafoe as an unnamed and rather detached therapist; and A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg, 2011), in which Freud is depicted as emotionally distant and rigid in his adherence to psychoanalytic theory. It is, rather — to use the term proposed by Edmund Bergler at the Symposium on the Theory of the Therapeutic Results of Psycho-Analysis in 1937 — a benevolent neutrality. Sacha Nacht was frankly Aristotelian when he described this neutrality in terms of “goodness” in his 1954 paper on “The difficulties of didactic psychoanalysis in relation to therapeutic psycho-analysis” (International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 35 [2], 250–253).
Countertransference can be thought of as any unconscious feelings or attitudes to the analysand that get in the way of this benevolent neutrality If the ideal form of transference is a love (Greek: φιλίας, filías) for the analyst that resembles the third kind of friendship (Greek: φιλίας, filías) — that based on goodness — then the ideal form of countertransference is a love for the analysand that similarly resembles this kind of friendship, which according to Aristotle can exist between unequals as well as between equals, and which is not necessarily reciprocal.
