The "Acting Out" of Transference: Managing the Epistemic Authority of Psychoanalytic Institution in a Translocal-Local Process

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Epistemologies

Abstract

A controversial "science" from its inception, psychoanalysis is now marginalized in clinical settings in the West. In recent decades, however, psychoanalytic psychotherapy has become increasingly prominent in China, especially in training, amidst multiple tensions between doctors and lay analysts, between local authorities in different cities, and between Western teachers from different countries. Why have psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic institutions remained divided while psychoanalytic psychotherapy has become increasingly popular in China? After six months of ethnography in a transnational and a local psychoanalytic training program and conferences, and interviews with 11 Chinese psychoanalytic psychotherapists and 7 Western psychoanalysts, I approach this question by examining the epistemic authority of the psychoanalytic institution. My main finding is that psychoanalytic epistemic authority is constructed through an ongoing dynamic between the trans-local and the local. In particular, transference, an originally psychoanalytic construct that refers to the unconscious redirection of feelings and desires from past relationships onto another person, moves beyond the clinics and shapes the social process of the psychoanalytic institution. In therapeutic settings, the use of transference as a technique is enabled and constrained by psychoanalytic training, constituting the uncertain nature of psychoanalytic practice while legitimating psychoanalysis as a science. In trans-clinical events, transference generates charismatic authority and hostility in the professional relationship, further rupturing and reshaping the organizational structure of the psychoanalytic institution. In transnational imaginaries, Western teachers and Chinese students develop transference and countertransference toward each other, constantly negotiating between acknowledging cultural differences and fetishizing otherness. Through an ethnographic examination of transference, this study reveals how psychoanalytic psychotherapy in China today manages its epistemic uncertainty between localness and trans-localness in therapeutic, scientific, and political processes.

Author

• Xi Wang, Northwestern University