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Analysis and Transference 
Antony Tatlow 
    Analysis is supposed to: have uncovered or "deconstructed"
its unconscious presuppositions or it remains caught up in the 
problems it wishes to understand and assuage. We can map 
psychoanalytical and critical procedures onto each other 
because both rest on acts of interpretation. If all the world's a 
text, then knowledge is only ever an interpretative truth. The 
problems of transference and counter-transference have their 
direct equivalents in writing and criticism. A text or narrative 
is shaped in anticipation of a response and that response, if we 
are capable of reflecting upon its origins, permits us to situate 
the whole process of communication. The problem is that we 
never can understand it fully; something always eludes our 
grasp. I want to look at examples of counter-transference in 
readings of Brecht. Of course, this terrain is a mine field. 
    Derrida's deconstructive technique, his gift for seizing on 
the apparently inconsequential but telling detail from which 
you can then unravel the whole structure of a position, has 
sensitized us to the unexaminable parameters that hold our 
arguments together, unexaminable because they sustain 
positions we do not wish to question. My own are probably 
opaque to me, and I shall doubtless be enlightened sooner 
rather than later, but I am struck by what seem to me mostly 
unconscious, or at least unexamined, presuppositions in recent 
readings of Brecht. Perhaps they appear strange to me because 
I am not so closely part of that historical culture which has 
produced them and so am less predisposed to internalize its 
value judgments. 
    It is over ten years since the first decisive shift away from 
orthodox readings of Brecht which had identified with what 
they believed to be the author's political position. One reaction, 
a complete refusal to accept that position, aligned itself with 
the developing "New Philosophy," another re-read Brecht's 
texts against the grain of those established, socially authorized 
conventions. Grimm drew attention to Brecht's reading of 
Nietzsche.' Lehmann deepened our understanding of the af- 
finities.2 I watched these arguments with fascination because 
they both corroborated and challenged assertions of mine based 
on reading Brecht's response to East Asian culture, where 
interrogating the silences of an episteme could be considered 
the primary path to understanding.