Lacan's Whore House

“I remember a seminar I once attended that was led by a brilliant and flamboyant Hungarian analyst named Robert Bak. The issue under debate was the nature of transference, and I raised my hand and asked rhetorically, ‘What would you call an interpersonal relationship where infantile wishes, and defences against those wishes, get expressed in such a way that the persons within that relationship don’t see each other for what they objectively are but, rather, view each other in terms of their infantile needs and their infantile conflicts. What would you call that?’ And Bak looked over at me ironically and said, ‘I’d call that life’.”