The Place of Transference in Psychosocial Research Ian Parker Manchester Metropolitan University Psychoanalysis provides a complex discursive matrix for making sense of, or unrav- eling the existing sense of, textual material in social research. However, the relationship between psychoanalytic work in the clinic and psychoanalytic social research poses a series of questions for those working in each domain. The relationship opened up new fields of enquiry, of empirical and theoretical research, but it also now gives rise to empirical and theoretical problems. This paper is concerned with the elaboration of clinical concepts in the emerging field of psychosocial research, with a particular focus on the use of transference. The paper distinguishes 3 versions of transference in the psychoanalytic tradition, drawing attention to the importance of an “intersubjective” conception of transference in psychosocial research as an alternative to “attachment” models that appeal to mainstream empiricist approaches to psychological inquiry. The third version of transference elaborated in Lacanian psychoanalysis, one concerned with signification, is used to ground an analysis of the clinic as specific space in which the phenomenon manifests itself. Analysis of the clinic as “transferential space” enables us to conceptualize the place of psychoanalysis in the clinic and to question the extrapolation of transference to social research. The paper concludes with a consider- ation of generalized transference outside the clinic. Keywords: psychoanalysis, Lacan, transference, research, clinic Psychoanalysis faces a problem that arises from its apparent success as an interpretative paradigm. The problem is that what was once thought to be particular to clinical practice has become universalized, and this by way of a surreptitious infiltration of psychoanalytic ex- planation through the human sciences so that it functions as an interpretive matrix that confirms the shape of a world it expects to find instead of changing it—and this problem may even be said to afflict those who use psychoanalysis with radical intent (e.g., Clarke & Hoggett, 2009; Hollway & Jefferson, 2000). The emergence of psychosocial research as a distinct field of conceptual and empirical work promises to connect our understanding of the individual with an exploration of social pro- cesses, but the use of psychoanalysis as a dom- inant framework has been contentious (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008). The role of transference as a motif in this research is particularly indicative of the problematic role of psychoanalytic the- ory, particularly use of the work of Klein (1986). The term transference in this research is used to describe the way significant relation- ships from the past, of an interviewee for ex- ample, are replicated in the intersubjective space of the interview, and it is assumed that these past relationships are communicated to the researcher who then attends to them as their own countertransference. Proponents of psy- chosocial research now argue, for example, that interview material can be interpreted in terms of “unconscious intersubjective dynamics” and in- cludes illustrative focus on the case of “mother and daughter transferences and countertransfer- ences” (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000, p. 52). In this work there is the claim that transference and countertransference can be deployed to make sense of social phenomena (Hollway, 2008). These are the methodological cornerstones of a theory of the “defended subject” (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000), one which privileges Kleinian psychoanalysis. Ian Parker, Division of Psychology and Social Change, Manchester Metropolitan University. I thank the reviewers of the earlier version of this paper for their sharp, helpful comments which have, I think, improved the argument. Correspondence concerning this article should be ad- dressed to Ian Parker, Discourse Unit, Department of Psy- chology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Gaskell Campus, Hathersage Road, Manchester, M13 0JA, UK. E-mail: i.a.parker@mmu.ac.uk Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology © 2010 American Psychological Association 2010, Vol. 30, No. 1, 17–31 1068-8471/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0019104 17 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.