Something has been missing in practice as well as in psychoanalytic theory ever since Freud. It happens to be the psychoanalytic processing of exactly something that has to do with the two 'highborns'. For these, as mentioned above, Freud would have required one more working life.
Indian psychoanalyst S. Kakar stresses this from his perspective.1 Though G. Bose had found an approach for a solution to the problem with his theory of 'opposite wishes', the term 'wish' was incorrect. Freud supported this misunderstanding by often speaking of 'unconscious wishes'. Actually, we are dealing with 'opposite signifiers', SHINES / SPEAKS and attention / 'assignment'. This we have to exercise, so that we can work with them in a constructive way
We would want to continue with Bose's well-appointed approach that a man's 'desire to be a woman' is nothing other than a SHINES of its own SPEAKS (here the SHINES is prevailing), that such a patient would attempt to avoid an 'assignment', an 'assignment' to follow through with and to master the male 'Lebensentwurf' (Freud's term, meaning: life plan).
The patient in comparison is inclined toward a maternal-female 'flowing rhythm' (Lacan).2 But on the other side Bose's theory is still not always quite suitable for a classic analytic method and setting. Here a look on the Surat Shabd Yoga would be helpful. Bose went to suggest to some of his patients with rather strong demand to repeatedly imagine such fantasies of unconscious 'desire to be a woman'.3
Such manipulation represents a demotion of his scientific work. If only he had applied Surat Shabd Yoga and let the patients perform exercises with the SHINES / SPEAKS. He would have only had to give an indication that these are two opposite principles, or drives, that may also assume the gaze-images of 'man' and 'woman'. Should female images and rhetoric have surfaced increasingly, then he would have had good opportunities to offer his interpretations. So, it is mythical-imagery expression that is required in Surat Shabd Yoga, and a voyage to steeper heights and depths.
At the same time, though, this is a great and necessary challenge for psychoanalysis as well. The follower, or analyzed person, must search for the combination of SHINES / SPEAKS as if it were actually his own combination. This even reaches as far as into his head's neurology, as into the 'dextrorotary spin'.4
1 Kakar, S., Schamanen, Heilige und Ärzte, Biederstein (1984) ; [approx.: ‚Shamans, Saints and Physicians']
2 Lacan's term: fließender Rhythmus. Lacan is in line with the anaclitic mode of identification and not with the narcissistic one common to us.
3 Bose. G., Intern. J. Psychoanalysis 11 (1930) p. 36 to 41.
4 Freud's pupil C. G. Jung even went as far as to say, that dreams in which certain shapes appeared from the right-hand side are to be regarded as positive in prognosis. The right-hand side in a dream is beneficial, right. Bose's theory also determines an opposite wish as a turn into the other direction.
