The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relationships and explains why they are tragic: we cannot know each other. We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others. We cannot see each other plain. A horrible kind of predestination hovers over each new attachment we form.

'Only connect,' E. M. Foster proposed. 'Only we can't,' the psychoanalyst knows

 Janet Malcolm - Psychoanalysis; the impossible profession