The present essay examines transference as an ethical relation in the context of psychoanalysis and as the stage where Louis Althusser rehearses the object of the materialist dialectic. Althusser’s uses of the term transference marks the tension between the materialist ambitions of structuralist Marxism and psychoanalysis. For this very reason, it helps to illuminate the problem of metaphor and, specifically, the metaphor of work, in the formulation of the materialist dialectic. Together with the influence that Spinoza exercised over Althusser –an influence that the latter confessed but never explicitly developed– the missed encounters between Althusser and Lacan with respect to the concept of transference help to demonstrate how Althusser reformulated his ideas concerning philosophy’s materialism by defining the relationship between philosophy and ideology as a problem for his later work in general, and in his course on Machiavelli, specifically.