Freud’s Media: Transference,Metaphor,and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture

Abstract

In a 1912 technical paper, Freud turns to a print metaphor to explicate the clinical phenomenon of transference. The patient’s relationship to the analyst, he writes, is like a reprint made from a stereotype plate. Though the reference is scarcely legible to the contemporary reader, stereotype printing was a well-known innovation of the 19th-century print industry that enabled the mass reproduction of texts and images. Approaching Freud’s metaphor from the perspective of the poetics of knowledge, this article shows how 19th-century mass media provided the conceptual scaffolding for early psychoanalytic theory. In addition to elaborating the media-technological grounding of foundational clinical phenomena like transference [Übertragung], the article foregrounds the processes of erosion that have obscured Freud’s media metaphors. The article both situates Freud’s propensity for metaphor within a broader context of scientific theory building and reveals psychoanalysis’s indebtedness to a forgotten print technology.