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Artist’s Salon: Hannah Zeavin on how transference, boundary violations, and feminism have shaped psychoanalysis

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There are few figures more potently endowed with that peculiar combination of authority and intimate knowledge than the psychoanalyst. Taciturn and expressionless in his seat behind the couch, the image of the Freudian analyst is one of withholding, not warmth; power, not reciprocity. He—and in the conventional received image of the psychoanalyst, it is always a he—is assumed to hold intimate and vital secrets about his patients, to know things about them that they do not know about themselves. And in the early years of psychoanalysis, most of those patients were women. 

This gendered imbalance of power in the analytic relationship was the launching point for Hannah Zeavin’s talk at the Clayman Institute’s annual Artists’ Salon, held at Attneave House during spring quarter. Zeavin, an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley and the founding editor of Parapraxis, a new journal of psychoanalysis, is a leading voice of a new generation of millennial scholars and critics who have turned to Freudian psychoanalysis as both an interpretive lens and a clinical practice. Drawing on her 2022 paper “No Touching: Boundary Violation and Analytic Solidarity,” published in Psychoanalysis and Solidarity, Zeavin traced how the concepts of transference, the boundary, and boundary violation have shaped both clinical practices and the self-conception of the psychoanalytic field. 

It is fraught territory. As Zeavin explained, the analytic relationship, with its isolation, authority, and intimacy, has long been both a source of tremendous potential and an environment rife with the possibility of abuse. “No one is watching,” Zeavin said—both an invitation, and a threat.  This potential has provoked anxiety and ambivalence among psychoanalysis’ critics—particularly 20th-century American feminists—and has been historically compounded by the use of psychoanalytic frameworks and vocabularies in projects of American social conservatism, such as the 1965 Moynihan report. “Is Freud taking us back into patriarchy?” is how Zeavin summarized this anxiety from psychoanalysis’ critics. 

“No one is watching,” Zeavin said—both an invitation, and a threat.  This potential has provoked anxiety and ambivalence among psychoanalysis’ critics—particularly 20th-century American feminists...

But Zeavin suspects that many of the outside criticisms of psychoanalysis can in fact be explained with recourse to psychoanalytic terms. Like feminism, Zeavin said, psychoanalysis is subject to “intense negative transference,” from the outside. Much of the early instances that later critics of Freud and his disciples would classify as boundary violations, she says, are products of the discoveries of those very phenomena—that is, of transference, the boundary, and violation themselves. 

“Transference,” the false connection or recognition that the patient sees in the analyst, is now a central pillar of analytic treatment, allowing the patient to use her relationship with her doctor to reenact a ruptured or dysfunctional prior relationship. But it was something that Freud had to uncover through his work. It was hinted by his mentor, Joseph Breuer, in the treatment of the early Austrian feminist Bertha Pappenheim, to whom Freud gave the pseudonym “Anna O.”; it was uncovered further by happenstance, when Freud attempted to salvage lessons from his disastrously mishandled treatment of a teenage girl he called Dora. 

Zeavin explained that transference, as Freud understood it, was a dynamic, complex, and capacious phenomenon, one that signaled emotions beyond those of erotic love. But in the hands of midcentury American ego psychologists, the term “transference” was reduced to signaling erotic transference—that is, the phenomenon in which a female patient supposedly falls in love with her male analyst. “Women were repressed everywhere but the couch,” is how Zeavin characterized contemporary interpretations of the phenomenon, “which is why they always fall in love with their analyst.” The male analyst, in turn, is faced with the question of what to do with his patient’s feelings: whether to reject them angrily, to attempt to sublimate them back into treatment, or to yield. 

A large number of early analysts, both in America and in Europe, took the latter approach. Freud’s two most famous students, Carl Jung and Sandor Ferenczi, both slept with patients, Zeavin recounts. Without excusing this conduct by early practitioners, Zeavin attempted to contextualize it, emphasizing that the nature of psychoanalytic treatment, and the function of transference, was not immediately clear to early analysts who learned by doing—that is, who learned about their new profession, in part, by making sometimes disastrous mistakes. 

But the role of transference and boundary violation came into new focus in the postwar era, when American psychoanalytic training institutes exploded with new trainees. And this time, as all the so-called “helping professions” rapidly feminized, young new analysts crowding training institutes were overwhelmingly women. 

...with new rhetorical tools on concepts like exploitation and sexual harassment being offered by the era’s second wave feminist movement—these women analysts were able to offer a critique not only of their own personal experiences, but of how boundary violations shaped the clinical practice of psychoanalysis itself. 

Like all those who wish to become analysts, these young women students were required to be analyzed themselves. And according to Zeavin, a remarkable number of them experienced boundary violation within the context of this training—that is, their analysts made sexual advances toward them. But with new perspectives of women injected into the analytic community—and with new rhetorical tools on concepts like exploitation and sexual harassment being offered by the era’s second wave feminist movement—these women analysts were able to offer a critique not only of their own personal experiences, but of how boundary violations shaped the clinical practice of psychoanalysis itself. 

There were other incentives that sparked the changes that followed. (Zeavin points to the emergent demands of malpractice insurers for greater regulation of psychoanalytic practice.) But it was these women whose new understanding of boundary violation led to a sea change in the field. In the 1970s, through their efforts, psychoanalytic training and accreditation institutes began formally barring practitioners from sexual contact with patients. It was this rule, Zeavin says—with its prohibition on abuse and its necessary redirection of transference feelings—that finally allowed psychoanalysis to fulfill its potential as clinical practice. “For a lot of people, psychoanalysis proper begins with the rejection of the seduction theory,” Zeavin said. “For me, psychoanalysis begins when analysts develop the concept of boundary violation.”