BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION

heart is accessible to the priest, so every want is an opportunity for

approaching one's neighbor with the air of friendship, and saying, 'Dear
friend, I will give you what you need, but you know the conditio sine qua
non. You know what ink you must use in signing yourself over to me. I
shall swindle you while providing your enjoyment/ All this constitutes a
universal exploitation of human communal life.) The entrepreneur
accedes to the most depraved fancies of his neighbor, plays the role of
pander between him and his needs, awakens unhealthy appetites in him,
and watches for every weakness in order, later, to claim the remuneration
for this labor of love."19 The man who has thus become subject to his
alienated needs is "a mentally and physicaly dehumanized being . . . the self-
conscious and self-acting commodity."20 This commodity-man knows only one
way of relating himself to the world outside, by having it and by
consuming (using) it. The more alienated he is, the more the sense of
having and using constitutes his relationship to the world. "The less you
are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your
alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being."21
Discussing Marx's concept of alienation, it might be of some interest to
point to the close connection between the phenomenon of alienation and
the phenomenon of transference which is one of the most fundamental
concepts in Freud's system. Freud had observed that the psychoanalytic
patient tended to fall in love with the analyst, to be afraid of him, or to hate
him, and all this quite without regard to the reality of the analyst's
personality. Freud believed that he had found the theoretical explanation
to this phenomenon by the assumption that the patient transferred the
feelings of love, fear, hate, he had experienced as a child toward father and
mother, to the person of the analyst. In the "transference," so Freud
reasoned, the child in the patient relates himself to the person of the
analyst as to his father or mother. Undoubtedly, Freud's interpretation of
the transference phenomenon has much truth in it, and is supported by a
good deal of evidence. Yet it is not a complete interpretation. The grown-
up patient is not a child, and to talk about the child in him, or "his"
unconscious, is using a topological language which does not do justice to
the complexity of the facts. The neurotic, grown-up patient is an alienated
human being; he does not feel strong, he is frightened and inhibited
because he does not experience himself as the subject and originator of his
own acts and experiences. He is neurotic because he is alienated. In order to
overcome his sense of inner emptiness and impotence, he chooses an
object onto whom he projects all his own human qualities: his love,
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