And, (2) It is wrong to think that interpretation deals only in what is concealed or disguised or, what is its correlate, that ‘the unconscious’ is omniscient. In particular, it cannot be the case that ‘the unconscious’ knows all about transference and repetition, By establishing new connections, comprehensive context, and coordinated perspectives on familiar actions, interpretation creates new meanings or new actions. Not everything that has yet been organized has been actively kept apart by defensive measures, not everything that has not yet been recognized has been denied. This point is obvious, but it is often obscured by formulation, some of Freud’s among them, which suggest that interpretation is only just uncovering (Fingarette, 1963).
What, then, is interpretation? And how does it work? Extremely little seems to be known about it, but this does not prevent an almost universal belief in its remarkable efficacy as a weapon. Interpretation has, it must be confessed, many of the qualities of a magic weapon. It is, of course, felt as such by many patients. Some of them spend hours at a time in providing interpretations of their own - often ingenious, illuminating, correct. others, again, derive a direct libidinal gratification from being given interpretations and may even circulate interpretation is usually either scoffed at as something indicated or develop something parallel to a drug-addition to them. In some non-analytical circles interpretation is usually either scoffed at as something ludicrous or dreaded as a frightful danger. This last attitude is shared, as more than is often realized, by a certain number of analysts. This was particularly revealed by the reactions shown in many quarters when the idea of giving interpretations to small children was first mooted by MeIanie Klein. However, it is believed that it would be true in general to say, that analysts are incline to feel interpretation as something extremely powerful whether for good or ill. And there might seem to be a good many grounds for thinking that our feelings on the subject tend to distort our beliefs, at all events, many of these beliefs seem superficially to be contradictory, and the contradictions do not always spring from different schools of though, but are apparently sometimes held simultaneously by one individual. Thus, we are told that if we interpret too soon or too rashly, we hazardously risk of losing a patient: That interpretation may give rise to intolerable and unmanageable outbreaks of anxiety by ‘liberating’ it. That interpretation is the only way of enabling a patient to cope with an unmanageable outbreak of anxiety by ‘resolving’ it. That interpretation must always refer to material on the very point of emerging into consciousness, that the most useful interpretations are rally deep ones. Be cautious with your interpretations; , says one voice, ‘When in doubt, interpret’ says another. Nevertheless, although there is enviably a good deal of confusion in all of this. Do not think these views are necessarily incompatible: The various pieces of advice may turn out to refer to different circumstances and different cases and to imply unlike moderations of differently more or less kinds of applicable character uses of the word ‘interpretation’.
For the word is evidently used in more than on sense. It is, after all, perhaps, only a synonym for the old phrase we have already come across - ‘making what unconscious conscious and it shares all of the phrase’s ambiguities. For in one sense, if you give a German-English dictionary to someone who knows no German, you will be giving him a collection of interpretations, what is more, is the kind of sense in which the nature of interpretation has been discussed in a recent paper by Bernfield. Such descriptive interpretations have no relevance to our present topic, nonetheless, in proceeding, the actuality as dispensed among the ultimate instrumentations of psycho-analytic therapy and to which for convenience the name ‘mutative’ interpretation is so that is, given a schematized outline of what is understood by a view to clarify of expositional instances for which the interpretation of hostile impulses are by virtue of this power (his strictly limited power) as auxiliary super-ego, that the analyst gives permission for a certain small quantity of the patient’s id-energy (in our instance, in the form of an aggressive impulse), the object of the patient’s id-impulses, the quality of these impulses which is now released into consciousness will become consciously directed toward the analyst. This is the critical point. If all goes well, the patient’s ego will become aware of the contrast between the aggressive character of his feelings and the real nature of the analyst, who does not behave like the patient’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ archaic objects. The patient, which is to say, will become aware of a distinction between his archaic phantasy object and the dimensionality of an actualized external object. The interpretation has now become a mutative one, since it has produced a breach in the neurotic vicious circle. For the patient, having become aware of the lack of aggressiveness of actuality that is potentially realized of the existing external object, will be able to diminish his own aggressiveness; the new object which he introjects will be less aggressive, and consequently, the aggressiveness of his super-ego will also diminish, as, too, the further corollary of these events. And with them the patient will obtain access to the infantile material which is being re-experienced by him in his relation to the analyst.
Something as taken or advanced as fact, which is in having the quality of becoming actual and not confuted in being of such a comparison with an expressed or implied standard or absolute, that we are now found to embark upon a description of the successive phases of therapy with the chronically schizophrenic adult patient. The ‘Out-of-contact’ phase’, is not properly or sufficiently attended to or in progress of any measurable extent over which of something exists, however, the term is phraseologically accessible to meaning, such that I do not term this the ‘autistic phase’, for the reason that the word ‘autistic’ has come to have a certain connotation, in psychodynamic theory, which is regarded as invalid and therefore do not advocate. Specifically, the term ‘autistic’, as generally used, conjures up Freud’s (1911) psychodynamic formulation of schizophrenia as involving withdrawal of libido from the outer world and its subsequent investment in the self-as involving of a regression into narcissism. Instead, however, is that there occurs in schizophrenia, a regressive dedifferentiation toward an early level of ego-development which has its prototype in the experience of a young infant for whom the inner and outer worlds have not yet become clearly distinguishable, as an amount of anxiety which is related to the unfamiliarity as found to be the major sources of anxiety in individuals suffering from [paranoid] schizophrenia. Where the sources of such anxiety is variously ego-defensive by phenomena. We well know that to any psychiatric patient himself, the threatening affects present themselves not undistortedly, but in forms modified by ego-defences which, although intently protective, at the same time distortions that may appear as something experiential in a strange and frightening way.
He finds himself unable to renounce any concern with that of the other patients. Exceptions are those patients whose projections attach not to any real-life figure at all, but to quite pure-culture alter-ego. And reach their of peace about the matter. For in actuality this would be tantamount to repudiating important components of himself, moreover, the other person is necessary to him as the bearer of these externalized (e.g., projected) emotions. Bu t, cannot find peace through a friendly acceptance of the prosecutory figure, for this would b e unsurmountable to accept, however, his own picture of himself, various qualities abhorrent to him. So an uneasy equilibrium is maintained, with his experiencing a gnawing, threatened, absorbing concern with the prosecutory figure whom he cannot rid from his mind (this is in line with the formulation of Werner (1940) and Loewald (1960)).
It leaves to appear with great interest that which Mahler and Furer (1960) emphasize that ‘Our first therapeutic endeavour in both types of infantile psychosis (i.e., both autistic and symbiotic) is to engage the child in a ‘corrective symbiotic experience’ . . . Loewald (1960) too, report that what a symbiotic relatedness occurs in the schizophrenic patient’s transference to the therapist: As he puts it, . . . If ego and objects are not clearly differentiated, if ego boundaries and object boundaries are not clearly established, the character of transference also is different, In as much as ego and objects are still largely merged. . . .
Such that the therapist, operating from this basic-orientation can meet usefully a wide variety of typical problem-situations, that which is in response to the patient‘s manifestation of delusional thinking, he will be aware that, for the patient, the delusions represent years of arduous and subjectively constructive thought, and are therefore most deeply cherished. He will not forget that obscured that obscures them is an indispensable nucleus of reality-perception. Likewise, when a patient is having vigorously to disavow any feeling about a clearly affect -laden matter, the therapist will remain in tune with the patient‘s own feeling experience, by remarking, "I gather you don’ t find yourself having any particular feeling about this" - or. Better, will make no mention of feeling - rather than try to overcome the unconscious denial by asserting: But ‘ surely this must make you very angry (or hurt, or whatever). Similarly, in response to the expressions of an archaic, harsh, superego in the patient, rather than set himself up as the spokesman, the personification, of the repressed id-impulses, he will realize that it is in the superego that the patient’s conscious self-his personal identity-mainly resides: Thus, he will seldom urge the patient to recognize sexual or aggressive feelings within, and will more often acknowledge how strong a sense of protest or outrage the patient feels upon perceiving these in others.
To the extent that the therapist is free from a compulsion to rescue the suffering patient, he can remain sufficiently extricated from that suffering to be able to note significant sequence in the appearance of such symptoms as hallucinations, verbalized delusions, and so forth, and thus be in a position to be genuinely helpful. Even when on a car ride with a patient, or grappling with the latter’s physical assault, the therapist may on occasion be able to allow himself enough detachment to help the patient situations from earlier life, such ‘action interpretations’ may be especially important to the patient whose memory and whose capacity for abstract thinking are severely impaired.
Thus, one places in the long run a minimum of pressure on the patient who is already paralysed with pressure, and keeps oneself in a comparatively unanxious and receptive state which, better than anything else, helps eventually to relieve the patient’s anxiety and unlock his tongue. Sooner or later, like a bright dawn pushing back a long night, the patient will put his rusty vocalization capacities to work in venting reproach, contempt, and fury upon the therapist for doing, as the patient sees it, nothing to help him.
The therapist learns to take fewer and fewer things for grantee in his work, to question more and more of his long-held assumptions and discard many of them. He learns that one does not set a ceiling upon human beings’ potential growth. He finds recurrent delight in the creative spontaneity with which the schizophrenic patient pierces the sober and constructing wrapping of our culture’s conventions, and he discovers that humour is present in his work in rich abundance, leaving the genuine tragedy and helping to make it supportable. While developing a deep confidence in his intuitive ability, when working with the severely fragmented or differentiated patient he will not jump too quickly to attempted communicated ‘closure’ (in the Gestalt sense), but will leave it in the patient’s hands to do, no matter how slowly and painfully, the parts of the communicational work which only he can do. Meanwhile, he will not need no shield himself, through the maintenance of an urgently and actively ‘helpful’ or ‘rescuing’ attitude, from feeling at a deep level the impact of the fragmented and differentiated world, with its attendment feelings, in which the patient exists. The unfolding of such feeling experiences, the therapist of the next phase of the therapy, the ‘urgently helpful’ therapist attitude is unconsciously designed to avert, comparable to the defensive function. In the patient, of the latter’s schizophrenic delusions.
From a purely descriptive viewpoint, schizophrenia an be seen to consist essentially in an impairment of both ‘integration’ and ‘differentiation’ - which are but opposite faces of a unitary growth process. From a psychodynamic viewpoint as well, this malfunctioning of integration-and-differentiation seems basic to all the bewilderingly complex and varied manifestations of schizophrenia.
Taking first the matter of integration: When we assess the schizophrenic individual in terms of the classically structural areas of the personality - id, ego, and superego - we discover these to be poorly integrated with one another. The id is experienced by the ego as a Pandora’s box, the contents of which will overwhelm one if it is opened. The ego is, as many writers have stated, severely split, sometimes into innumerable islands which are not linked discernibly with one another. And the superego unintegrated ego are, if anything, even more destructive to it than are the accessions of the threatening id-impulses, as Szalita-Pemow (1951), Hill (1955) and others have emphasized. Moreover, the superego is, like the ego, even in itself not well integrated, its utterances contain the most glaring inconsistencies from one moment to the next. Jacobson (1954) has shown that there is actually a dissolution of the superego, as an integral structure - a regressive transformation back into the threatening parental images whose conglomeration originally formed it.
Differentiation is a process which is essentially to integration, and vice versa, for personality structure-functions or psychic contents to become integrated, they must first have emerged as partially differentiated or separated from one another, and differentiation in turn can emerge only out of a foundation of more or less integrated function or contents.
When we look at this process of differentiation in the schizophrenic person, we find it to be, similarly, severely impaired. It is difficult or impossible for him to differentiate between himself and the outer world. He often cannot distinguish between memories and present perceptions, memories experienced with hallucinatory vividness and immediacy are sensed as perceptions of present events. And perceptions of present events may be experienced as memories from the past. He may be unable to distinguish between emotions and somatic sensations, feelings from the emotional sphere often come through to him as somatic sensations, or even variations in his somatic structure (changes in the size, colour and so forth, of bodily parts).
He cannot distinguish between thoughts and feelings on the one hand, and action on the other: Thus, if the therapist encourages him to explore thoughts and feelings of a sexual or murderous nature, for example, he feels that the therapist is trying to invite him into sexual activity, or incite him to murder. He may be unable to differentiate, perceptually, one person from another, so that he is prone to misidentify them.
In the conduct of his daily life and in his communicating with other persons, he is unable, as Bateson et al. has reported, to distinguish between the symbolic and the concrete. If his therapist uses symbolic language, he may experience this in literal terms, and, on the other hand, the affairs of daily life (eating, dressing, sleeping and so on) which we think of as literal and concrete, he may react to as possessing a unique symbolic significance which completely obscures their ‘practical’ importance in his life for being part of the untold story for being human.
However, in the schizophrenic these two processes, that is to say, that of integration and differentiation, that tend to be out of step with one another, so that at one moment a patient’s more urgent need may be for increased integration, whereas at another he may more urgently need increased differentiation. And there are some patients who show for months on end a more urgent need in one of these areas, before the alternate growth-phase comes on the scene. Thus, there is a modicum of validity in speaking of two different ‘types’ of schizophrenic patients. This distinction is largely artificial, but it is useful for purposes of serving to explain of something that makes clear what is obscure bu t not readily understood or grasped from the main centres of human activity.
One comes to realize, how premature have been one’s efforts to find out what feelings the patient is experiencing or what thoughts he is having: One comes to realize that much of the time he has neither feelings nor thoughts differentiated as such and communicable to us.
Such differentiation as the patient possess tends to crumble when intense emotion enters his awareness. A paranoid man, for example, may find that when his hatred toward another person reaches a certain degree of intensity, he is flooded with anxiety because he no longer knows whether he hates, or instead, ‘really loves’ the other individual. This is not based, as primarily upon the mechanism which Freud (1911) outlined in his classical description of the nature of paranoid delusions of persecution, a description in which repressed homosexual love played the central role. the central difficulty is rather that the ego is too poorly differentiated to maintain its structure in the face of such powerful affects, and the patient becomes overwhelmed with what can only be described as ‘undifferentiated passion’, precisely as one finds an infant to be overwhelmed at times with affect which the observer cannot specifically identify as any one kind of emotion.
As for the feelings which the therapist himself experiences in working with the ‘non-differentiated type’ of patient, we fund, again, a persistent threat of the therapist’s sense of identity. But whereas, in the instance the threat was felt predominantly as a disturbance of one’s personal integration, it is felt predominantly as a weakening of one’s sense of differentiation. In this instance, the ‘therapeutic symbiosis’ which a necessary development, tends to occur earlier, for this patient’s predominant mode of relatedness with other persons, at the developmental level at which point we find him at the very beginning of a symbiotic relatedness among others, that is to say, with its subjective absence of ego-boundaries, involves not only special gratification but anxiety-provoking disturbances of one’s sense of personal identity.
The comparatively rapid development of symbiotic relatedness is facilitated by the patient’s characteristically non-verbal, therapeutic sessions. In response, the therapist’s own behaviour becomes more and more similar, so that each participant is now offering to the other, the intermittence over which of times are silent, impassive screen which facilitates abundant mutual projecting and introjecting. Thus a symbiotic state is likely to be reached earlier than in one’s work with the typically much more verbal type of patient whom, for instance, that the patient’s and the therapist’s more abundant verbalizations tend persistently to stress the ego-boundaries separating the two persons from one another.
With the predominantly non-differentiated patient, the therapist’s sense of identity as a complexly differentiated individual entity becomes further eroded, or undermined, as he finds the patient persistently operating on the unwavering conviction, that, time after time, that the therapist is but an undifferentiated aspect of the whole vague mass of which his own poorly differentiated hostility, but which in the patient’s tenaciously held view, is the way the world around him really is.
Further, since the patient typically verbalized little but a few maddeningly monotonous stereotypes, the therapist tends to feel over the course of time, with so little of his own intellectual content being explicitly tapped in the relationship, that his richness of intellect is progressively rusting away - becoming less differentiated, more stereotyped and rudimentary. Moreover, the patient presents but one of two emotional wavelengths to which the therapist can himself tune in. Rather than a rich spectrum of emotion which calls into resource a similarly wide range of feelings from the therapist himself. Thus not only the therapist’s intellectual resources, but his emotional capacities too, become subjectively narrowed down and impoverished, as he finds that his patient evokes in him neither any wide range of ideas, nor any emotion except, for example, rage, or contempt, or dull hopelessness.
This feeling experience on his part, anxiety-provoking and discouraging though he finds it, is a necessary therapeutic development. it is necessary, that is, for him thus to experience at first hand something of the patient’s own lack of differentiation, for, as in the therapy with the non-integrated patient, that, again, the healing process occurs external to the patient, as it were, at an intrapsychic level in the therapist, before it becomes established in the patient himself. That is, the therapist’s coming to view the patient, his relationship with the patient, and himself in this relationship, all for being largely non-differentiated, is a development which sets the stage for the patient’s gradually increasing differentiation. Now the therapist comes too sense, time after time, newly emerging tendrils of differentiation in the patient, before the latter is himself conscious of them. In responding to these with spontaneity as they show themselves, time and again, that the therapist helps the patient to become aware that they are a part of him. But there are times when a therapist can only say that he feels a new response in himself in reaction to behaviour which objectively seems as stereotyped as ever.
Thus a heavy reliance upon one’s intuition is a technical point, although a second point concerns the relatively sparing use of transference interpretation - perhaps, more sparing than in one’s work with the predominantly non-integrated, or fragmented, patient. in the instance of that first ‘type’ of patient, such that transference interpretations may have a specific value in fostering the patient’s wholeness, his integration, by focussing his disparate personality fragments into the context of the patient-therapist relationship. But the predominantly non-differentiated patient, who is, above all trying to branch out, in his interpersonal relationships and in his intrapsychic content, beyond the immediate, symbiotic situation with the therapist, premature transference interpretations which tend to bring it all back to the relationship with his therapist - which tend, that is, to reduce divergent ramifications of meaning to this one idea that something conveys to the mind as the one purpose to accomplish or do, as such is the intention of meaning.
The third and last technical point is, like the others, a function of the growth process of a process which involves both patient and the therapist. The patient’s differentiation is fostered not only by the therapist’s sensing, and responding to, an increasingly differentiated person in him, but also by the therapist’s permitting his own personality differentiation, his own complex individuality which was to a greater extent, already firmly established before beginning work with this patient, to come more and more freely into play in the therapeutic relationship. At a crucial point is, for example, he must have the courage to act upon the course that his own intuition directs, in deferring sharply from the patient - to be the person he knows himself to be and to address the person he knows to inhabit the patient’s body, no matter how sharply this conflicts with the patient’s own image of himself and of his therapist. Whereas, it was essential earlier to allow the anxiety-arousing symbiosis to develop, now the therapist must find similar courage to help determinedly in its resolution. In asserting increasingly his own complex individuality, he provides the patient with an increasingly clearly differentiated person with whom to identify and over against whom to become conscious of his own separate self.
That the states of what are called non-integration and non-differentiation should be thought of as not merely rather fixed levels of maturation or regression at which a patient exists over a long period of time, but as flexible defences of the ego against overwhelming anxiety. Thus, from noticing at what moments in the theopathic session, or at what junctures over the long course of treatment, a patient’s characteristic non-integration or non-differentiation notably increases or notably lessons, we can tell when areas of particularity severe anxiety have been encountered in his personality investigation, and chart the resolution of this anxiety as growth proceeds.
Reality is a difficult word to use to every one’s satisfaction or even to one’s own satisfaction. In this instance the word reality is used arbitrarily to designate the direct, here-and-now impact of the analyst upon the patient. Reality. In this sense, contrasts with the impact the analyst has through his representation in the patient’s fantasy life, neurosis, and transference, since both kinds of impact seem always to coexist and since the former - the analyst’s real impact - may be the worst enemy of the transference, the matter of their differentiation is possibly the most challenging aspect of analysis.
The analytic situation, which is set up to shut out ordinary reality intrusions, that cannot, . . . neither should not exclude all, but to say, that in the beginning months, for instance, reality inevitably has the upper hand. The analyst, the office, the procedure, are all overwhelmingly real. Everything is strange, frightening and exciting, gratifying and frustrating. Unlike the patient can test it and orient himself to it, the impact of this reality is usually so great that even an ordinary useful transference relationship cannot be expected to develop.
Perhaps the most confusing aspect of this beginning period is the frequent appearance in it of what can be regarded as a false transference relationship. With great intensity and clarity, the patient may reveal, through transference-like references about the analyst, some of the deepest secrets only of his neurosis but of its genesis. The pseudotransference, too good to be true, is almost sure to be nothing more than the patient’s attempt to deal with the person of the analyst, the entire spectrum of his various patterns of behaviour. If, it is easy to do, the analyst overlooks the likelihood that the patient’s relationship with at this time is really about that almost everything said about it is related, analysis may get off to a very bad start. And if, as is even earlier to do, the analyst’s interests the genetic meaning of the openly exposed material, a good transference relationship may be seriously delayed and a workable transference neurosis may never appear. even after initial reality has had time to fade, reality may continue to intrude in ways that are very hard to detect and that is very troublesome.
One of the most serious problems of analysis is the very substantial help which the patient receives directly from the analyst and the analytic situation. For many a patient, the analyst in the analytic situation is in fact the most stable, reasonable, wise and understanding person he has ever met, and the setting in which they meet may actually be the most honest, open, direct and regular relationship he has ever experienced. Added to this is the considerable helpfulness to him of being able to clarify his life storey. confess his guilt, express his ambitions, and explore his confusions. Further real help comes from the learning-about-life accruing from the analyst’s skilled questions, observations and interpretations. Taken together, the total real value to the patient of the analytic situation can easily be immense. The trouble with this kind of help is that it goes on and on, it may have such a real, direct and continuing impact upon the patient that he can never get deeply enough involved in transference situation to allow him to resolve or even to become acquainted with his most crippling internal difficulties. The trouble is far too good, the trouble also is that we as analysts apparently cannot resist the seductiveness of being directly helpful, and this, when combined with the compelling assumption that helpfulness is bound to be good, permits us top credit patient improvements to ‘analysis’ when more properly it should often be recognized for being the amounting result for the patient’s using the analytic situation, as the model, for being the preceptors and supporter in the dealing practically within the immediate distractions as holding to some problem.
Perhaps, we can now refer to something in a clear unmistakable manner, and it would be to mention, for being, that one more difficult-to-handle intrusion of reality into the analysis, that by saying, that this is the definitive and final interruption of the transference neurosis by the reality of termination; in the sense, the situation is reversed and the intrusion is analytically desirable, since ideally the impact of reality of impending and certain termination is used to facilitate the resolution of the transference. As with the resolution of earlier episodes of transference neurosis, this final one is brought about principally by the analyst’s interpretations and reconstructions. As these take effect, the transference neurosis and, hopefully, along with it the original neurosis is resolved. This final resolution, however, which is much more comprehensive, is usually very different and may not come about at all without the help of the reality of termination. Accordingly, any attenuation of the ending, such as tapering off or causal or tentative stopping, should be expected to stand in the way of an effective resolution of the transference. Yet, it seems that this is what most commonly happens to an ending, and because of this a great many patients may lose the potentially great benefit of a thorough resolution and are forever after left suspended in the net of unresolved transference.
Yet, utter indistinctly rigorous termination seems understandable, as difficult as transference neurosis may be in the analyst at other times, this ending period, if rigorously carried out, simply has to be the period of his greatest emotional strain. There can surely be no more likely time for an analyst to surrender his analytic position and, responding to his own transference, become personally involved with his patient than during the process of separating from a long and self-restrained relationship. Accordingly, it may be better to slur over the ending lightly than to mishandle it in an attempt to be rigorous.
In considering more broadly the function of the transference in the psychoanalytic process, one is confronted by the apparent naïve, but, nonetheless important questions of the role of the actual (current) object as compared with that of the object representation of the original personage in the past. We recall Freud’s paradoxical, somewhat gloomy, but portentous concluding passage in "The Dynamics of Transference." This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is the permanent cure of the neuroses. It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psychoanalysis with the greatest difficultly, but it should not be forgotten that they do us the inestimable service of making the patient ‘s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses of showing their immediate and manifested impossibilities, for when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigies.
Both object and representations are made necessary by the basic phenomenon of original separation. The existence of an image of the object, which persist in the absence of the object, is one of the important beginnings of psychic life in general, certainly an indispensable prerequisite for object relationship. As generally construed. Whether this is viewed as (or a times demonstrably is) something unstable for allotting introjection, s always subject to alternative projection, or an intrapsychic object representation clearly distinguished from the self-representation, or firm identification in the superego, or in the ego itself, these phenomena are in various ways components of the system of mastery of the fact of separation, or separateness, from the original absolutely necessarily anaclitic (in the earliest period) symbiotic ‘object’. In the light of clinical observation, it would appear to be that the relative stabilities (parental) object representation. At which time of varying degree, are to a greater extent for the archaic phenomena. Even in nonpsychotic patients, overwhelmed by them, sometimes resembles the restoration from oedipal identification, which provides the preponderant basis for most demonstrable analytic transferences. That within the necrotic patients, the transference is effectively established when this representation invests the analyst to a degree - depending on intensity of drive and most of ego participation - which ranges in all the, wishing and strivings to remake and analyst to biasses judgements and misinterpretation of data, finally are the actual perceptual distortions.
However, the old object representations may be invested, however rigidly established the libidinal or aggressive cathexis of the image may be, this as such can become the actual and exclusive focus of instinctual discharge, or of complicated and intense instinct-defence solutions, only and general energy-sparing quality of strictly intrapsychic processes. For the vast majority of persons, visible to any degree, including those with severe neurosis, character distortions, addictions and certain psychoses, the striving is toward the living and actual object, even at the cost of intense suffering. In a sense, this returns us to the state in which the psychological ‘object-to-be’. Has a cr11itical importance never again to be duplicated, except in certain acute life emergencies, even if the object is not firmly perceived as such, in the sense of later object relations? And it does seem that trance impressions from the earliest contacts in the service of life preservation, and the associated instinctual gratifications, and innumerable secondarily associated sensory impressions. Are activated by the specific inborn urges of sexual maturation? These propel the individual to renew many of the earliest modes of actual bodily contact, in connection with seeking for specific instinctual gratification. Or, to look away from clear-cut instinctual matters to the more remote elaborations of human contact: Few regard loneliness as other than a source of suffering, even self-imposed, as an apparent matter of choice, and the forcible imposition of ‘solitary confinement ‘ is surely one of the most cruel of punishments.
In taking to question, we are entering an area of life in which things are other then themselves, where meaning is multifaceted, and where the line between the old and the new is blurred. It should, by, its immediate measure, help develop our recognition or meaning of the pertinent applicability as to the relevance of interrelated aspects of the psychology of ‘metaphor’. In the psychology of metaphor we will find a useful analogy to the psychology of transference interpretation. Our’s will be newly encountered as good metaphors, those it response to which we say, ‘That’s it exactly’ or ‘That really captures it‘ or ‘That says it all’.
Some literary and linguistic analysis, (e.g., Lewis, 1936 and Snell, 1953) and also people in everyday life, believe that there are experiences that can only be expressed metaphorically. And for this achievement that these metaphors, which may be entire poem or as lines or even words highly valued. But how can this be so? Just what in th e ‘it’ that the metaphor ‘is’ or ‘captures’ or ‘says’? If this ‘is’ or this ‘experience’ can only be rendered metaphorically, when we can know it only as such, that is, as the metaphor itself. Of the position out of which are put forward by, T.S, Eliot (1933) and E.W. Harding (1963) in their discussion of poetry, for in these instances we are granted that there are no known and logically independent version of the experience that can serve to validate the metaphor. Whatever the metaphor makes available to us depends on it and it and so cannot be used to prove its correctness.
It seems justifiable warrantable to consider that the metaphor is a new experience rather than a mere paraphrase of an already fully constituted expedience. The metaphor creates an experience that one has never had before. It is an experience one has not realized by oneself. The metaphor does, of course, suggest certain constituent experiences of which one may have been more or less dimly aware. One may say, therefore, that the metaphor speaks for those constituents, on the existence of which much of its appeal depends. But in its organizing and implicit ly rendering these constituents in its new way, it is a creation rather than a mere paraphrase or anew edition. Paraphrasing and new editions never speak as forcefully as good new metaphors, nor could they facilitate further new experience. One analytically familiar feature of these creations is that they make it safe and pleasing to experience something that otherwise would be considered too threatening and so would be kept in fragmented obscurity through defensive measures.
Thus, when one says, ‘That’s it exactly’ one is implicitly recognizing and announcing that one has found and accepted a new mode of experiencing oneself and one’s world, which is to say, asserting a transformation of one’s own subjectivity. Something is now said to be true, and in a sense it is true, but it is true for the first time. Nothing of one and the same can ever happen again, for the second time cannot be the same as the first. One can’ t step into the same watering point and then step once again into the same spot of that river. A revelatory metaphor re-encountered or repeated later may lose some of its force, alternatively, it may gain some significance, butt it cannot remain exactly the same metaphor or mobilize an experience identical with the first. The point applies as well as to new metaphors that are similar to familiar ones: They have to be judged or experienced through their conventionalized predecessors, as through methods of knowing or already proved instrumentally of perceiving. The audience and the performer, who may be one person, as such that may not have, as yet.
What is to be said about the psychology of metaphor is analogous to the transformational aspects of developed transference and the steadfast interpretation that both facilitate and organize them as transference. Allowing that these transferences and ‘remembered’ experiences come into existence over a period of time, nothing that is identical with them has ever before been enacted, and nothing will ever be enacted again. They are creations that may be fully achieved only under specific analytic conditions. Such that living was not reliving that moment, words like re-living, re-experiencing and reliving simply do not do justice to the phenomena, that in making this claim. A seeming contradiction over-writes some of our well-establish ideas. - in offering, - I am not contradicting some of our well-established ideas about interpretation and insight, I am, however, disputing the point that insight refers to a greater proportion or in its range of comprehension, which its distance between possible extremes extent and regain former or normal state, such that, for the recovery of lost memories, and takes in as well, a new grasp of the significance and interpretations of events one has always remembered. In point, as, Freud pointed out, ‘As a matter of fact I’ve always known it, only that I’ve never thought of it; (1914), In fact, it is to develop that point in furthering to say that it takes an adult to do that, especially with the help of an analyst. It was, after all, Freud’s analysis of adults that make it possible to define infantile psychosexuality. In this respect, but without disregard, child analysis retains a quality of applied psychoanalysis’ in the same way that the interpreted transference neurosis is: Both are always of describing as true something that was not true in quite that way at the time of its greatest developmental significance. This apparent paradox about ‘remembering’ as a form of creating goes a long way, probably that what it is, is distinctive about psychoanalytic interpretation.
This time, however, to further the discussion on the interpretive technique that surrounds the phase of a mutative interpretation - that in which a portion of the patient’s id-relation to the analyst is made conscious in virtue of the latter’s positions as auxiliary super-ego - is in itself complex. In the classical model of an interpretation, the patient will first be made aware of a state of tension of an interpretation, will next be made aware that there is repressive factor at work (that his super-ego is threatening him with punishment), and will only then be made aware of the id-impulse which has stirred up the protects of his super-ego and so given to the anxiety in his ego. This is the classical scheme. In actual practice, the analyst finds himself working from all three sides at once, or in irregular successions. At one moment a small portion of the patient‘s super-ego may be revealed to him in all its savagery, at another the shrinking defencelessness of his ego, at yet another his attention may be directed to the attempts which he is making at restitution - at compensating for his hostility, on some occasions a fraction of id-energy may even be directly encouraged to break its way through the last remains of an already weakened resistance. There is, however, one characteristic which all of these various operations has in common, they are essentially upon a small scale. For the mutative interpretation is inevitably governed by the principle of minimal doses. It is a commonly agreed clinical fact that alternations in a patient under analysis appear almost always to be extremely gradual: We are inclined to suspect sudden and large changes as an indication that suggestive rather than psycho-analyst processes are at work. The gradual nature of the change brought about in psychoanalysis will be explained, as, only to suggest, those changes are the result of the summation of an immense number of minuet steps, each of which correspond to a mutative interpretation. And the smallness of each step is in turn imposed by the very nature of the analytic situation. For each interpretation involves the release of a certain quantity of id-energy, and, if the quantity released is too large, the higher unstable state of equilibrium which enables the analyst to function as the patient’s auxiliary super-ego is bound to be upset. The whole analytic situation will thus be imperilled, since it is only in virtue of the analyst’s acting as auxiliary super-ego that these released id-energy can occur at all.
The effectuality from which follow the analytic attempt to bring unequalled amounts in the confronting collections of some improper use too a resultant quantity of id-energy into the patient’s consciousness all at once. On the one hand, nothing whatever may happen, or on the other hand there may be an unmanageable result, but in neither event will be a mutative interpretation has been effected. The analyst’s power as auxiliary super-ego may be for two very different reasons. It may be that the id-impulses were trying to bring out being not in fact sufficiently urgent at the moment: For, after all, the emergence of an id-impulse depends on two factors - not only on the permission of the super-ego, but also on the urgency (the degree of cathaxis) of the id-impulse itself. This, then, may be one cause of an apparently negative response to an interpretation, and evidently a fairly harmless one. but the same apparent result may also be due to something else, in spite of the id-impulse being really urgent, the strength of the patient’s own repressive forces (the degree of repression) may have been too great to allow his ego to listen to the persuasive voice of the auxiliary super-ego. Now we have a situation dynamically identical with the next one we have to consider, though economically different. this next situation is one in which the patient accepts the interpretation, that is, allows the id-impulse into his consciousness, but is immediately overwhelmed with anxiety. This may show itself in a number of ways, for instance, the patient may produce a manifest anxiety-attack. Or the may exhibit signs of ‘real’ anger with the analyst with a complete lack of insight, or he may break off the analysis. In any of these cases the analytic situation will, for the moment, at least, have broken down. The patient will be behaving just as the hypnotic subject behaves when, having been ordered by the hypnotist to perform an action too much at variance with his own consciousness, he breaks off the hypnotic relation and wakes up from his trance. This state of things, which is manifest where the patient responds to an interpretation with an actual outbreak of anxiety or one of its equivalents, may be latent were the patient shows no response, and this latter case may be the more awkward of the two, since it is masked, and it may sometimes be the effect of a greater overdose of interpretation than where manifest anxiety arises (though obviously other factors will be of determining importance, and in particularly the nature of the patient’s neurosis). Yet this threatened collapse of the analytic situation to an overdose of interpretation: But it might be more accurate in some ways to ascribe it to an insufficient dose. For what has happened is that the second phase of the interpretation process has not occurred: The phase in which the patient becomes aware that his impulse is directed toward an archaic phantasy object and not toward a real one.
In the second phase of a complete interpretation, therefore, a crucial part is played by the patient’s sense of reality: For the successful outcome of that phase depends upon his ability, at the critical moment of the emergence into consciousness of the released quantity of id-energy, to distinguish between his phantasy object and the real analyst. The problem is closely related to one that has been discussed elsewhere, namely that of the extreme liability of the analyst’s position as auxiliary super-ego. The analytic situation is all the time threatening to degenerate into a ‘real’ situation. But this actually means the opposite of what it appears to. It means that the patient is all the time on the brink of turning the really external object (the analyst) into the archaic one; that is to say, he is on the brink of projecting his primitive introjected images onto himself. In so far as the patient actually does this, the analyst becomes like anyone else that he meets in real life - a phantasy object. The analyst then ceases to possess the peculiar advantages derived from the analytic situation, he will be introjected like all other phantasy objects into the analytic situation, he will be introjected like all other phantasy objects into the patient’s super-ego, and will no longer be able to function in the peculiar ways which are essential to the effecting of a mutative interpretation. In this difficulty the patient’s sense of reality is an essential but a very feeble [-ally]: An improvement in it is one of the things that we hope the analysis will bring about. It is important, therefore, not to submit it to any unnecessary strain, and that is the fundamental reason why the analyst must avoid any real behaviour, that is likely to confirm the patient’s view of him as a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ phantasy object. This is perhaps more obvious as regards the ‘bad’ object. If, for instance, the analyst were to show that he was really shocked or frightened by one of the patient’s id-impulses, as the patient would immediately treat him in that respect as a dangerous object and introject him into his archaic severe super-ego. Therefore, on the one hand, there would be a diminuation in the analyst’s power to function as an auxiliary super-ego and to allow the patient’s to become conscious of his id-impulses - that is to say, in his power to bring about the first phase of a mutative interpretation, and on the other hand, he would, as a real object, become sensibly less distinguishable from the patient’s ‘bad’ phantasy object and to that extent the carrying through of the second phase of a mutative interpretation would also be made more difficult. Or, agin, there is another case. Supposing the analyst behaves in an opposite way and actively urges the patient to give free rein to his id-impulse. There is then a possibility of the patient confusing the analyst with the image of a treacherous parent who, at the beginning, encourage him to seek gratification, and then suddenly turns and punishes him. In such a case the patient’s ego may look for defence by itself suddenly turning upon the analyst as though he were his own id-, and treating him with all the severity of which his super-ego is capable. again, the analyst is running a risk of losing his privileged position. But it may be equally unwise for the analyst to act really in such a way as to encourage the patient to project his ‘good’ introjected object on to him. For the patient will then tend to regard him as a good objective and archaic sense and will incorporate him with his archaic ‘good’ images and will use him as a protection against his ‘bad’ ones. In that way, his infantile positive impulses as well as his negative ones may escape analysis, for there may no longer be a possibility for his ego to make a comparison between the phantasy external object and the real one. it will, perhaps, be argued that, with the best of wills in the world, the analyst, however careful he may be, will be unable to prevent the patient from projecting these various images on to him. This is, of course, indisputable, and, the whole effectiveness of analysis depends upon its being so. The lesson of these difficulties is merely to remind us that the patient’s sense of reality has the narrowest limits. It is a paradoxical fact that the best way of enuring that his ego will be able to distinguish between phantasy and reality is to withhold reality from him as much as possible. but it is true, his ego is so weak - so much at the mercy of his id and super-ego - that he can only cope with reality if it is administered in minimal doses. And these doses are in fact what the analyst gives him, in the form of interpretations.
A mutative interpretation can only be applied to an id-impulse which is actually on a state of cathexis. This seems self-evident; for the dynamic changes in the patient’s mind implied by a mutative interpretation can only be brought about by the operation of a charge of energy originating in the patient himself: The function of the analyst is merely to ensure that the energy should or can flow along one channel rather than along another. It follows that the purely informative ‘dictionary’ type of interpretation will be non-mutative, but useful it may be a prelude to mutative interpretations. And this leads to a number of practical inferences. Every mutative interpretation must be emotionally ‘immediate, but the patient must live through it as something actual or genuine. This requirement, that the interpretation must be ‘immediate’, may be expressed in another way by saying that interpretation must always be directed to the ‘point of urgency’. At any given moment some particular id-impulse will be generated in activity, this is the impulse that is susceptible of mutative interpretation at the time, and no other one. It is, no doubt, neither possible nor desirable to be giving mutative interpretations all the time. as Melanie Klein has pointed out, it is a most precious quality in an analyst to be able at any moment to pick out the point of urgency.
But the fact that every mutative interpretation must deal with an ‘urgent’ impulse takes us back one more to the commonly felt fear of the explosive possibilities of interpretation, and particularly of what is vaguely referred to as ‘deep’ interpretation. The terminological description is, no doubt, as the interpretation of material which is neither genetically early and historically distant from the patient’s actual experience nor under an especially heavy weight of repression – material, in any case, which is in the normal course of things exceedingly inaccessible to his ego and remote from it. There seems reason to believe, moreover, that the anxiety which is liable to be aroused by the approach of such material to consciousness and may be of peculiar severity. The question whether it is ‘safe’ to interpret such material will, as usual, mainly depend upon whether an interpretation can be carried through, in the ordinary run of the case, as this material which is urgent during the earlier stages of the analysis is not deep. We have to deal at first only with more or less far-going displacements of the deep impulse. And the deep material itself is only reached later and by degrees, so that no sudden appearance of unmanageable quantities of anxiety is to be hesitorially anticipated. In exceptional cases, however, owing to some peculiarities in the structure of the neurosis, deep impulses may be urgent at a very early stage of the analysis. We are then faced by a dilemma. If we give an interpretation of this deep material, the resultant amounts of anxiety produced in the patient may be so great that his sense of reality may not be sufficient to permit of its accomplishment, and the whole analysis may be jeopardised, but, it must not be thought that, in such critical cases as we are now considering, the difficulty can necessarily be avoided simply by not giving any interpretation or by giving more superficial interpretations of non-urgent material or by attempting reassurances. It seems probable, in fact, that these alternative procedures may do little or nothing to obviate the trouble, on the contrary, they may even exacerbate the tension created by the urgency of the deep impulses which are the actual cause of the threatening anxiety. Thus the anxiety may break out in spite of these palliative efforts and, if so, it will be doing so under the most unfavourable conditions, that is to say, outside the mitigating influences afforded by the mechanism of interpretation. It is possible, therefore, that, of these alternative procedures which are open to the analyst faced by such a difficulty. The interpretation of the urgent id-impulses, deep though they may b e, will actually be the safer.
It is, of course, a matter of common experience, that it possible with certain patients to continue indefinitely giving interpretations without producing any apparent effect whatever. There is an amusing criticism of this kind of ‘interpretation-fanaticism’ in the excellent historical chapter of Rank and Ferenczi. But it is clear from their words that what they have in mind are essentially extra-transference interpretations, for the burden of their criticism is that such a procedure implies neglect of the analytic situation. This is the simplest case. Where a waste of time and energy is the main result. But there are other occasions, on which a policy of giving strings of extra-transference interpretations is apt to lead the analyst into more positive difficulties. Attention was drawn by Reich a few years back, in the course of some technical discussions in Vienna too a tendency among inexperienced analysts to get into trouble by eliciting from the patient great quantities of material in a disordered and unrelated fashion: This may, be maintained, be carried to such lengths that the analysis is brought to an irremediable state of chaos. He pointe out truly that the material we have to deal with is stratified and that it is highly important in digging it out not to interference, more that we can help with th e arrangement of that state. He had in mind, of course, the analogy of an incompetent archaeolist, whose clumsiness may obliterate for all time the possibility of reconstructing the history of an important site. However, the results in the case of a clumsy analysis do not hold of any pessimistic cause to happen, as it were, re-stratification itself of its own accord if it is given the opportunity; That is to say, in the analytic situation. At the same time, is that of the presence of the risk, and it seems to be particularly likely to occur where extra-transference interpretation is excessively or exclusively restored to. The means of preventing it, and the remedy if it has occurred, lie in returning to transference interpretation at the point of urgency. For if we can discover which of the material is ‘immediate’ in the sense that the problematic occurrence enabling stratification is automatically solved, and it is a characteristic if most extra-transference material that it has no immediacy and consequently stratification is far more difficult to decipher. The measures suggested by Reich himself for preventing the occurrence of this state of chaos are not inconsistent with those that he stresses the importance of interpreting resistance as opposed to the primary id-impulses themselves - and this, was a policy that was laid down at an early stage in the history of analysis. But it is, of course, one of the characteristics of a resistance that it arises in relation to the analyst. Thus, interpretation of a resistance will almost inevitably be a transference interpretation.
But the most serious risks that arise from the making of extra-transference interpretation are due to the inherent difficulty in completing their interpretation, for a successful outcome as such, depends upon his ability, at which time of the emergence into consciousness and the released quantity of id-energy. They are from their nature unpredictable in their effects. There seems to be a special risk of the patient not carrying through to a competed interpretation, hitherto, namely that the extreme liability of the analyst’s position as auxiliary super-ego, is that, the analytic situation is all the time threatening to degenerate into a ‘real’ situation. It means that the patient is all the time perched upon the circumference edge-horizon of turning the external object (the analyst) into the archaic one, but of projecting the id-impulse that has been made conscious on to the analyst. This risk, no doubt, applies to some extent to transference interpretations. However, the situation is less likely to arise when the object of the id-impulses is actually present and is moreover the same person as the maker of interpretation. We may, once, more, recall the problem of ‘deep’ interpretation, and point out that its dangers, even in the most unfavourable circumstances, seem to be greatly diminished if the interpretation in question is a transference interpretation. Even so, there appears to be more of a chance that in this whole process occurring silently and so being overlooked in the case of an extra-transference interpretation, particularly in the earlier stages of an analysis. For this reason, it would seem to be important after giving an extra-transference interpretation to be specially in the ‘qui-vive’ for transferences complications. This last peculiarity of the extra-transference interpretation is actually one of their most important from a practical stand-point. For on account of it they can be made to act as ‘feeders’ for the transference situation, and so to pave the way for mutative interpretations. In other words, by giving an extra-transference interpretation, the analyst can often provide a situation in the transference of which he can then give a mutative interpretation.
Therefore, it is probable that a large majority of our interpretations are outside the transference - though it should be added that it often happens that one is ostensibly giving an extra-transference interpretation one is implicitly giving a transference one. A cake cannot be made of nothing but currants, and, though it is true that extra-transference interpretations, are not for the most part, mutative and do not they bring about the crucial results that involve a permanent change in the patient’s mind. They are, nonetheless essential, if taken to an analogy of trench warfare, the acceptance of a transference interpretation corresponds to the capture of a key position, while the extra-transference interpretations correspond to the general advance and to the consolidation of a fresh line of defence, which are made possible by the capture of the key position. But when this general advance goes beyond a certain point, there will be another check, and the capture of a further key position will be necessary before progress can be resumed. An oscillation of this kind between transference and extra-transference interpretations will represent the normative course of events in an analysis.
Although the giving of mutative interpretations may thus only occupy a small portion of psycho-analytic treatment, it will, upon be, that the most important part from the point of view of deeply exerting affective percussions. Do so, because of the influencing characteristic confirmations as drawn upon the spoken-exchange of the patient’s mindful knowing, in that the individuals that feel, perceive, think, wills, and especially reasons are all taken into heedful compliance. It may be of interest to consider how a moment which is such importance to th e patient affects the analyst himself. Mrs. Klein has suggested that there must be some quite special internal difficulty as to involve the analyst in interpretations. This is shown in their avoidance by psycho-therapists of non-analytic schools, but many psycho-analysts will be aware of traces of the same tendency in themselves. It may be rationalized into mutative interpretations. This is shown in the avoidance by psycho-therapists of non-analytic schools, yet not many consisting of a psycho-analyst flow of some flowing emptiness, nonetheless, this dialectic awareness traces of the same tendency as in themselves. But behind this there is somewhat of a lurking difficulty in the actual giving of the interpretation, for there seems to be a constant temptation for the analyst to do something else instead. Questions may be asked of whether o r not. As given to the reassurances or advice or discourses upon theory, or may give interpretations -but interpretations that are not mutative, extra-transference interpretations, interpretations that are non-immediate, or ambiguous, or in exacting of two or more alternative interpretations simultaneously, or he may, perhaps, give interpretations and at the same time, show his own scepticism about them. All of this strongly suggests that the giving of a mutative interpretation is a crucial act for the analyst as well as for the patient. And this inturn will become intelligible when we reflect that at the moment of interpretation the analyst is in fact deliberately evoking a quantity of the patients id-energy while it is a live and actual and unambiguous and aimed directly himself. Such a moment must be above all others put to the test his relations with his unconscious impulses.
One of the most serious problems of analysis is the very substantial help that the patient receives directly from the analyst and the analytic situation. For many a patient, the analyst in the analytic situation is in fact the most stable, reasonable, wise and understanding person he has ever met, and the setting in which they meet may actually be the most honest, open, direct and regular relationship he has ever experienced. Added to this is the considerable helpfulness to him of being able to clarify his life storey. Confess his guilt, express his ambitions, and explore his confusions. Further real help comes from the learning-about-life accruing from the analyst’s skilled questions, observations and interpretations. Taken together, the total real value to the patient of the analytic situation can easily be immense. The trouble with this kind of help is that it goes on and on, it may have such a real, direct and continuing impact upon the patient that he can never get deeply enough involved in transference situation to allow him to resolve or even to become acquainted with his most crippling internal difficulties. The trouble is far too good, the trouble also is that we as analysts apparently cannot resist the seductiveness of being directly helpful, and this, when combined with the compelling assumption that helpfulness is bound to be good, permits us top credit patient improvements to ‘analysis’ when more properly it should often be recognized for being the amounting result for the patient’s using the analytic situation, as the model, for being the preceptors and supporter in the dealing practically within the immediate distractions as holding to some problem.
Perhaps, we can now refer to something in a clear unmistakable manner, and it would be to mention, for being, that one more difficult-to-handle intrusion of reality into the analysis, that by saying, that this is the definitive and final interruption of the transference neurosis by the reality of termination; in the sense, the situation is reversed and the intrusion is analytically desirable, since ideally the impact of reality of impending and certain termination is used to facilitate the resolution of the transference. As with the resolution of earlier episodes of transference neurosis, this final one is brought about principally by the analyst’s interpretations and reconstructions. As these take effect, the transference neurosis and, hopefully, along with it the original neurosis is resolved. This final resolution, however, which is much more comprehensive, is usually very different and may not come about at all without the help of the reality of termination. Accordingly, any attenuation of the ending, such as tapering off or causal or tentative stopping, should be expected to stand in the way of an effective resolution of the transference. Yet, it seems that this is what most commonly happens to an ending, and because of this a great many patients may lose the potentially great benefit of a thorough resolution and are forever after left suspended in the net of unresolved transference.
Yet, slurring over a rigorous termination seems understandable, as difficult as transference neurosis may be in the analyst at other times, this ending period, if rigorously carried out, simply has to be the period of his greatest emotional strain. There can surely be no more likely time for an analyst to surrender his analytic position and, responding to his own transference, become personally involved with his patient than during the process of separating from a long and self-restrained relationship. Accordingly, it may be better to slur over the ending lightly than to mishandle it in an attempt to be rigorous.
In considering more broadly the function of the transference in the psychoanalytic process, one is confronted by the apparent naïve, but, nonetheless important questions of the role of the actual (current) object as compared with that of the object representation of the original personage in the past. We recall Freud’s paradoxical, somewhat gloomy, but portentous concluding passage in "The Dynamics of Transference." This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is on that field that the victory must be won - the victor y whose expression is the permanent cure of the neuroses. It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psychoanalysis with the greatest difficultly, but it should not be forgotten that they do us the inestimable service of making the patient ‘s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses of showing their immediate and manifested impossibilities, for when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigies.
Both object and representation is made necessary by the basic phenomenon of original separation. The existence of an image of the object, which persist in the absence of the object, is one of the important beginnings of psychic life in general, certainly an indispensable prerequisite for object relationship. As generally construed. Whether this is viewed as (or a times demonstrably is) something unstable for allotting introjection, s always subject to alternative projection, or an intrapsychic object representation clearly distinguished from the self-representation, or firm identification in the superego, or in the ego itself, these phenomena are in various ways components of the system of mastery of the fact of separation, or separateness, from the original absolutely necessarily anaclitic (in the earliest period) symbiotic ‘object’. In the light of clinical observation, it would appear to be that the relative stability (parental) objects representation. At which time of varying degree, are to a greater extent for the archaic phenomena. Even in nonpsychotic patients, overwhelmed by them, sometimes resembles the restoration from oedipal identification, which provides the preponderant basis for most demonstrable analytic transferences. That within the necrotic patients, the transference is effectively established when this representation invests the analyst to a degree - depending on intensity of drive and most of ego participation - which ranges in all the, wishing and strivings to remake and analyst to biasses judgements and misinterpretation of data, are finally the actual perceptual distortions.
However, the old object representations as such may be invested, however rigidly established the libidinal or aggressive cathexis of the image may be, this as such can become the actual and exclusive focus of instinctual discharge, or of complicated and intense instinct-defence solutions, only and general energy-sparing quality of strictly intrapsychic processes. For the vast majority of persons, visible to any degree, including those with severe neurosis, character distortions, addictions and certain psychoses, the striving is toward the living and actual object, even at the cost of intense suffering. In a sense, this returns us to the state in which the psychological ‘object-to-be’. Has a critical importance never again to be duplicated, except in certain acute life emergencies, even if the object is not firmly perceived as such, in the sense of later object relations? And it does seem that trance impressions from the earliest contacts in the service of life preservation, and the associated instinctual gratifications, and innumerable secondarily associated sensory impressions. Are activated by the specific inborn urges of sexual maturation? These propel the individual to renew many of the earliest modes of actual bodily contact, in connection with seeking for specific instinctual gratification. Or, to look away from clear-cut instinctual matters to the more remote elaborations of human contact: Few regard loneliness as other than a source of suffering, even self-imposed, as an apparent matter of choice, and the forcible imposition of ‘solitary confinement ‘ is surely one of the most cruel of punishments.
Of these few generalizations have some important implications, no reaction to another individual is all transference, just as surely as no relationship is entirely free of it. There is not only the general maturational-developmental drive toward the outer world, but the seeking for a variety of need and pleasure satisfactions, learned or simulated in relation to the primordial object, but necessarily and inevitably transferred from this object the generically related things and persons in the expanding environment. These may be used or enjoyed without penalty, if the distinction between the original and the new is profoundly and genuinely established (with due respect for the quantitative ‘relativism’ of such concepts). The range of such inevitable displacement (transfers) in endless in all spheres - sexual, aggressive, aesthetic, utilitarian, intellectual. More immediately relevant, in the lives of those whose development has been relatively healthy, are those individuals whose vocations provide similarities or parallels, however, rarefied, to the caretaking functions of the original parents: Teachers, physicians, clergymen, political rulers, occasionally others. Again it must be noted, that such persons perform real functions, that the adult individual’s interest in them, his specific need for them, often greatly outweighs similar reactions to parents, who retain their unique place for a complex and variable combination of other reasons. For such surrogate parents perform for the adult what his parents largely performed for him in realist years, and the psychological comparison is with an old object representation, or with an early identification, to which such latter-day parent surrogates may add important layers of elaborations. It is on the basis of such functional resemblances that persons in these roles have a unique transference valence. The analyst is first perceived as a real object, who awakens hope of help in the patients experience at all level of integration, from that of actual and immediate perception, evaluation, and response, to the activation of original parental object representations and their cathexes. That the analyst becomes invested with such representations, in forms ranging from wishes or demands to functional or even perceptual misidentifications, comprises the broad range of phenomena that we know as the therapeutic transference. Thus, the complicate structural phenomena of conflict are activated in relation to a real object, and such activation is uniquely dependent on the participation of this object, in a situation whose realities revive, with the affirmative associations, the memories of old and painful frustrations. In this situation, the continuing and prolonged contact, under strictly controlled conditions, is an important real factor, which has been elaborated previously. Without these actualities, dream life, - or instance of greater energid imbalance between impulses and defence - neurosis, will be the spontaneous solution, while everyday ‘give-and-take’ object relations are, at least on the surface, maintained as such. Occasionally, neurotic behaviour, where transferences dominate the everyday relationships, will supervene.
Interpretation, recollection or reconstruction, and, of course, working through, is essential for the establishment of effective insight, but they cannot operate mutatively if applied only to memories in the structural sense, whether of higher cathected events or persons. For it is the thrust of wish or impulse, or the elaboration of germane dynamic fantasies, and the corresponding defensive structures and their inadequacies, associated with such memories, which give to neurosis. It is a parallel thrust that creates the transference neurosis. Where memories are clear and vivid, through recall, or accepted as much through reconstruction and associated with variable, optional, and adaptive, rather than rigidly structuralized’ response patterns, the analytic work has been done.
This view does place somewhat of a weighty emphasis on the horizontal coordinate of procedural operations, the conscious and unconscious relation to the analyst as a living and actual object, which is of investing upon the becoming imagery, traits, and functions of critical objects of the past. The relationship is to be understood in its dynamic, economic, and adaptive meaning, in its current structuralized tenacity, the real and unreal carefully separated from one another. The process of subjective memory or of reconstruction, the indispensable genetic dimension, is, in this sense, involved toward the decisive and specific autobiographic understanding of the living version of old conflict, than with the assumption that the interpretative reduction of the transference neurosis to gross mnemic elements is, in itself and automatically, mutative. At least, this view of the problem would seem appropriate to most chronic neurosis embedded in germane character structures of some plexuity. That neurosis symptoms connected with isolated traumatic events, covered by amnesia, may, at times, disappear on restoration of memories with adequate effective discharge, regardless of technical method, is, of course, indisputably true, even though the details of process, including the role of transference, are probably not yet adequately understood. Psychoanalysis was born in the observation of this type of process. In a thoughtful manner, the role of transference, in the early writings of both Freud and Ferenczi, seemed weighted somewhat in the direction of its resistance function, i.e., as directed against recall, although its affirmative functions were soon adequately appreciated, and placed in the dialectical position, which has obtained to the present day.
Other while, the primal processes of projection ad introjection, being inextricably linked with the infant’s emotions and anxieties, initiate object-relations, by projecting, i.e., deflecting libido and aggression onto the mother’s breast, the basis for object-relations is established, by introjecting the object, first of all the breast, relations to internal objects comes into being. The term ‘object-relations’ are based on the contention that the infant has from the beginning post-natal life a relation to the mother, although focussing primarily of her breast, which is imbued with the fundamental element’s of an object-relation, i.e., loves, hatred, phantasies, anxieties, and defences? The introjection of the breast is the beginning of superego formation that extends over years. We have grounds for assuming that from the first feeding experience onwards the infant’s introjection, the breast in its various aspects. The core of the superego is thus the mother’s breast, both good and bad. Given to the simultaneous operation of introjection and projection, relations to external and internal objects interact. The father too, who soon plays a role in the child’s life, early on becomes part of the infant’s internal world it is characteristic of the infant‘s emotional life that there are rapid fluctuations between love and hate, between external and internal situations between perception of reality and the fantasises relating to it, and accordingly, an interplay between prosecutory anxiety and idealization - both referring to the internal and external object’s, the idealized object brings a corollary of the prosecutory, extremely bad one.
The ego’s growing capacity for integration and synthesis leads more and more, even during these first few months, to states in which love and hatred, and correspondingly the good and bad aspects of objects, for being synthesized. This gives rise to the second form of anxiety - depressive anxiety - for the infant’s aggressive impulses and desires toward the bad breast (mother) are now felt to be a danger to the good breast (mother) as well. In the second quarter of the first year these emotions are reinforced, because at this stage the infant increasingly perceives and introjects the mother as a person. Depressive anxiety is intensified, for the infant feels he has destroyed or is destroying a whole object by his greed and uncontrollable aggression. Moreover, owing to the growing synthesis of his emotions, he now feels that these destructive impulses are directed against as a ‘loved person’. Similar processes operate in relation to the father and other member s of the family. These anxieties and corresponding defences constitute the ‘Depressive position’, which comes to a head about the middle of the first year and whose essence is the anxiety and guilt relating to the destruction and loss of the loved internal and external objects.
It is at this stage, and bound up with the depressive position, that the oedipus complex sets in. Anxiety and guilt add a powerful impetus toward the beginning of the oedipus complex. For anxiety and guilt increase the need to externalize (project) bad figures and to internalize (introject) good ones. There to attaching desires, love, feeling of guilt, and reparative tendencies to internal figures in the external world, however, not only is the search for new objects that dominates the infant’s needs, but also, the drive toward new life proposes: Away from the breast toward the penis, i.e., from oral desires toward genital ones. Many factors contribute to these developments, the forward drive of the libido, the growing integration of the ego, physical and mental skills and progressive adaption to the external world. These trends are bound up with the processing of symbol formation, which enables the infant to transfer not only emotions and phantasies, anxiety and guilt, from one object to another.
The processes are linked with another fundamental phenomenon governing its mental life, such that pressures exerted by the earliest anxiety situation are factors through which bring about the repetition compulsion, however, one conclusion about the earliest states of infancy are a continuation of Freud’s discoveries; on certain points, nonetheless, the divergencies having to arise of which are very relevant, perhaps, its main contention that object-relations are operative from the beginning of post-natal life.
Nevertheless, the view that autoerotism and narcissism are the young infant contemporaries with the first relation to objects - external and internalized, that hypothetically, autoerotism and narcissism include the love for and relation with the internalized good object that in phantasy forms part of the loved body and self. It is to this internalized object that in autocratic gratification and narcissistic stages a withdrawal takes place. Concurrently, from birth onwards, a relation to objects, primarily the mother (her breasts) is present. This hypothesis contradicts Freud’s concept of autoerotic and narcissistic stages that preclude an object-relation. However, the difference between Freud’s statement on this issue is equivocal. In various context he explicitly and implicitly expresses opinion that suggested a relation to an object, the mother’s breast, preceding autoerotic and narcissism.
In this context, it is reminded that of Freud’s findings about early identification. In "The Ego and the Id," speaking of abandoned object cathexes. He said, ‘ . . . The effects of the first identification in earliest childhood will be profound and lasting. This leads us back to the origin of the ego-ideal, . . . Freud then defines the first and most important identifications that lie hidden behind the ego-ideal as the identification with the father, or with the parent’s, and places them, as he expresses it, in the ‘prehistory’ of every person’. These formulations come close to the deceptions as described of their resulting of introjected objects, for by definition identifications are the result as such, but that the statement and the passage quoted from the Encyclopaedia article, it can be deduced that Freud, although he did not pursue this line of though t, however, he did assume that in the earliest infancy that both an object and introjective processes play a part.
That is to say, as regards autoerotism and narcissism we meet with an inconsistency in Freud’s views. Such inconsistencies that exist on a number of points of theory clearly show, which on these particular of issue s Freud had not yet arrived at a final decision. In respect to the theory of anxiety he stated this explicitly in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. His realization that much about the early stages of development was still unknown or obscure to him is also exemplified by his speaking of the first years of a girl’s life as, ‘ . . . lost in a past so dim and shadowy . . .’
As regards to the question of autoerotism and narcissism, Anna Freud - although her views about this aspect of Freud’s work remains unknown, but she seems only to have taken into account Freud’s conclusions that an autoerotic and a narcissistic stage precede object-relations, and not to be allowed for other possibilities, of which are implied in some of Freud’s statements such as the ones inferred above. This is one of the reasons why the divergence between Anna Freud’s conception and the immediacy of early infancy is far greater than that between Freud’s views, taken as a whole, and those of stating it as the essential to clarify the content and nature of the differences between the two schools of psychoanalytic thought, represented by Anna Freud and those that imply of such clarification is required in the interests of psychoanalytic training and also because it could help to open up fruitful discussions between psychoanalysts and thereby contribute to a greater generality of a better understanding of the fundamental problems of early infancy.
The hypothesis that a time interval extending over several months precedes object-relations implies that - except for the libido attached to the infant’s own body - impulses, phantasies, anxieties, and defences either are not present in him, or are not related to an object, that is to say, they would operate in vacua. The analysis of very young children, as to implicate, would show that there is no instinctual urge, no anxiety situation, no mental process that does not involve objects, external or internal, in other words, object-relations are at the centre of emotional life. Furthermore, love and hatred, phantasies, anxiety and defences are also operative from the beginning and are ‘ad initio’ indivisibly linked with object-relations.
The oedipus complex, in a pragmatic analytic sense, retains its position as the ‘nuclear complex’ of the neurosis. It is a climactic organization experience of early childhood, apart from its own vicissitudes, It can under favourable circumstances provide certain solutions for pregenital conflicts, or in itself suffer from them. In any case, include them in its structure. Only when the precursor experiences have been of a great severity, for which it is to claim to a shadowy organic determinacy, as the new ‘frame of reference’, which hardly having the independent and decisive significance of its own. In any case, its attendant phallic conflicts must be resolved in their own right, in the analytic transference. From the analyst, (or his current surrogate in the outer world) thus from the psychic representation of the parent, the literal (i.e., bodily) sexual wishes must be withdrawn, and genuinely displaced to appropriate objects in the outer world. The fraction of such drive elements that can be transmuted to friendly, tender feeling toward the original object. Or too other acceptable (neutralized) variants, will of course, influence the economic problem involved. This genuine displacement is opposed to the sense of ‘acting out’, while other objects are perceptually different substitutes for the primary object (thus for the analyst). This may be thought to follow automatically on the basic process of coming to terms with (accepting) the childhood incestuous wish and its parricidal connotation. Such assumption does not do justice to the dynamic problem implicit in tenaciously persistent wishes. To the extent that these wishes are to be genuinely disavowed or modified, rather than displaced, a further important step is necessary: The thorough analysis of the functional meaning of the persisting wishes and the special etiologic factors entering into their tenacity, as reflected in the transference neurosis. Thus, in principle, the literal accuracy of the concept phrased by Wilhelm Reich, "transference of the transference," as the final requirement for dissolution of the erotic analytic transference, even though the clinical discussion, which is its context, is useful. This expression would imply that the object representation that largely determines the distinctive erotic interest in the analyst can remain essentially the same, so long as the actual object changes. While a semantic issue may be involved in some degree, it is one that impinges importantly on conceptual clarity. However, such definite conceptualization of one basic element in the phenomenon or transference may be, and should be, subject to the reservations appropriately attaching themselves to any very clear-cut ideas about obscure areas, with the clinical concept of transference, its clinical derivation and its generally accepted place in the psychnalytic process.
The evolution of the reality-relatedness between patient and therapist, over the course of the psychotherapy, is something that has received little more than passing mention in the literature, Hoedemaker (1955), in a paper concerning the therapeutic process in the treatment of schizophrenia, stresses the importance of the schizophrenic patient’s forming healthy identifications with the therapist, and Loewald (1960), his concerns and considerations to the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis in general, repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the real relationship between patient and analyst, but only in the following passage eludes the evolution, the growth, of this relationship over the course of treatment:
In the final months of the therapy, the therapist clearly sees that extent to which the patient’s transferences to him as representing a succession of figures from the latter’s earlier years have all been in the service the patient’s unconscious successively decreasing extent, fro experiencing the full and complex reality of the immediate relatedness with the therapist in the present. The patent at last comes to realize that the relationship with a single other human being - in this instance, the therapist - is so rich as to comprise all these earlier relationships - so rich as to evoke all the myriad feelings that have been parcelled out and crystallized, wherefore, in the transference that have now been resolved. This is a province most beautifully described by the Swiss novelist, Herman Hesse (1951) winner of the Nobel Prize in 1946,in his little novel. Siddhartha. The protagonist in a lifelong quest for the ultimate answer to the enigma of man’s role on earth, finally discovers in the face of his beloved friend all the myriad persons, things, and events that he has known, but incoherently before, during the vicissitudes of his many years of searching.
It is thus that the patient, schizophrenic or otherwise, becomes at one with himself, in the closing phase of psychotherapy. But although the realization may come to him as a sudden one, it is founded on a reality-relatedness that has been building up all along. Loewald (1960) in his magnificent paper to which transference resolution plays in the development of this reality-relatedness. As, perhaps, that the evolution of the ‘countertransference’ - not counter-transference in the classical sense of the therapist’s transference to the patient, but rather in the sense of the therapist’s emotional reaction to the patient’s transference - forms an equally essential contribution to this reality-relatedness.
It is, nonetheless, but often, that the therapist who sees a new potentiality in the patient, a previously unnoted side of him that heralds a phase of increasing differentiations. And frequently the therapist is the only one who sees it. Even the patient does not see it as yet, except in the projected form, so that he perceives this as an attribute of the therapist. This situation can make the therapist feel very much inalienable as separated from others that apart or detached in the isolated removal and intensely threaten.
Upon which the transference relationship with the therapist, we find that the patient naturally brings this relationship, just as he brings into the relatedness in which the difficulties concerning differentiation and integration that were engendered by the pathological upbringing upon the advances in differentiation and integration necessarily occur first outside the patient - namely, in the therapist’s increasingly well differentiated and well-integrated view of, and consequently, responses to, him - before these can become well established within him.
Because the schizophrenic patient did not experience, in his infancy, the symbolic relatedness with his mother such as each human being needs for the formation of a healthy core in his personality structure, in the emotion of the transference relationship to his therapist he must eventually succeed in establishing such a mode of relatedness.
This means that he must eventually regress, in the transference, to such a level in order to get a fresh start toward a healthier personality differentiation and integration than he had achieved before entering therapy. This is not to say that he must ‘act out’ the regressive needs in his daily life, to be sure, the schizophrenic patient, whether in therapy or not, inevitably does so to a considerable degree, but to the extent that these needs can be expressed in the transference relationship, they need not seek expression, unconsciously, thorough acting out in daily life.
Focussing now upon the transference relationship with the therapist, we find that the patient naturally brings about the difficulties concerning differentiation in the process of integration that was engendered by the pathological upbringing as for being the one more interruption in the impeding principle of reconstructions of an identifying manufacture of the transference. And the every day, relationships are found in the interplaying form of corresponding advances in differentiated dynamic integrations necessarily occur first outside the patient - namely, in the therapist’s increasingly well or acceptably differentiated by the integrated extent or range of vision, that the position or attitudes that determine how of the intent of something (as an aim or an end or motive)or by way the mind is directed. Its view of and the consequent response ought to become acknowledgingly established within them.
Because the schizophrenic patient did not experience, in his infancy, the establishment of and later emergence form, a healthy symbiotic relatedness with his mother such as each human brings needs for the formation of a healthy core in his personality structure, in the evolution of the transference relationship to his therapist he must eventually succeed in establishing such a mode of relatedness.
This means that he must eventually regress, in the transference, to such a level, in order to get a fresh start toward a healthier personality differentiation and integration than he had achieved before entering therapy. This is not to say that he must act out the regressive needs in his daily life. To be sure, the schizophrenic patient, whether in therapy or not, inevitably does so to a considerable degree; even to the extent that these needs can be expressed in the transference relationship, they need not seek expression, unconsciously, through acting out in daily life.
This symbiotic mode of relatedness is necessarily mutual, participated in by therapist as well as patient. Thus, the therapist must come to experience not only the oceanic gratification, but also the anxiety involved in his sharing a symbiotic, subjective oneness with the schizophrenic patient. This relationship, with its lack of felt ego-boundaries between the two participants, at times invokes the kind of deep contentment, the kind of felt communion that needs no words, which characterize a loving relatedness between mother and infant. But at other times it involves the therapists feeling unable to experience himself as differentiated from the pathology-ridden personality of the patient. He feels helplessly caught in the patient’s deep ambivalence. He feels one with the patient’s hatred and despairs and thwarted love, and at times he cannot differentiate between his own subjectively harmful effect upon the patient, and the illness with which the patient was to come or go or nearly recede in the achievement afflicting when the therapist first undertook to help him. Thus, at these anxiety-ridden moments in the symbiotic phase, the therapist feels his own personality to be invaded by the patient’s pathology, and feels his identity severely threatened, whereas in the more contented moments, part of the contentment resides in both participants enjoying a freedom from any concern with identity.
This same profound lack of differentiation may come to characterize the patient’s view of the persons about him, including his therapeutic, and at time’s, in line with his need to project a poorly differentiated conglomeration of ‘bad’ impulses, he may perceive the therapist for being but one head of a hydra-headed monster. The patient’s lack of differentiation in this regard, prevailing for month after month of his charging the therapist with saying or doing various things that were actually said or have done by others in the hospitalized presences to its containing of environmental surfaces, or by the family members, can have a formidably eroding effect upon the therapist’s sense of personal intensity. But the patient may need to regress to just such a primitivist, poorly differentiated view of the world in order to grow up again, psychologically, in a healthier way this time.
Among the most significant steps in the maturation that occurs in successful psychotherapy are those moments when the therapist suddenly sees the patient in a new light. His image of the patient suddenly changes, because of the entry into his awareness of some potentiality in the patient. Which had not shown itself before? From now on, his responses t o the patient is a response to this new, enriched view, and through such responding he fosters the emergence, and further differentiation, of this new personality area. This is another way of describing the process that Buber and in Friednan, 1955, calls ‘making the other person present, seeing in the other persons potentialities of such even presents: Seeing in the other persons potentiality of which in him, that he is not aware of his helping him, by responding to those potentialities, to realize them.
Schizophrenic patient’s feelings start to become differentiated before they have found new and appropriate modes for expressing the new feelings, thus patient’s may use the same old stereotyped behaviour or utterance to express nuances of new feelings. This is identical with the situation in those schizophrenics’ familiar which is permeated with what Wynne (1958) termed ‘pseudo-mutuality’ or toward maintaining the sense of reciprocal perceiving expectations. Thus, the expectations are left unexplored, and the old expectations and roles, even though outgrown and inappropriate in one sense, continue to serve as the structure for the relation.
The therapist, through hearing the new emotional connotation, the new meaning, in the stereotyped utterance and responding in accordance with the new connotation, fosters the emerging differentiation. Over the course of months, in therapy, he may find the same verbal stereotype employed in th e expression of a whole gamut of newly emerging feelings. Thus, over a prolonged time-span, the therapist may give as many different responses to a gradually differentiating patient as are simultaneously given by the various members of the surrounding environment, to the patient who shows the contrasting ego-fragmentation (or, in a loose manner of speaking, over-differentiations).
Persistently stereotyped communications from the patient tend to bring from the therapist communications that, over a period of time, become almost equally stereotyped. One can sometimes detect, in recordings playing during supervisory hours, evidence that new emotional connotations are creeping into the patient’s verbal stereotypes, and into the therapist’s responsive verbal stereotypes, before either of the two participants has noticed this.
What the therapist does which assists the patient’s differentiation often consists in his having the courage and honesty to differ from whether the patient’s expressed feelings or, often most valuable, with the social role into which his sick behaviour tends to fix or transfix the therapist. This may consist in his candid disagreement with some of the patient, and s strongly felt and long-voiced views, or in his flatly declining to try to feel ‘sympathy’ - such as one would be conventionally expected to feel in response to behaviour, which seems, at first glance, to express the most pitiable suffering but which the therapist is convinced primarily expresses sadism on the patient’s part. Such courage to differ with the expected social role is what is needed from the therapist, in order to bring to a close the symbiotic phase of relatedness that has served, earlier, a necessary and productive function. Through asserting his individuality, and at many later moments in the therapeutic interaction, the therapist fosters the patient’s own development of more complete and durable ego-boundaries. At the same time he offers the patient the opportunity to identify with a parent-figure who dares to be an individual-dares to be so in the face of pressures from the working group of which he is part, and from his own reproachful superego, it can be of notice, that of a minor degree a consciously planned and controlled therapeutic technique wherefore, the content descriptions are rather a natural flow of events as in the transference evolution, with which the therapist must have the spontaneity to go along.
The patient, particularly in the symbiotic phase of the therapy but in preceding and succeeding phases as well, is notably intolerant of sudden and marked changes in the therapeutic relationship - that is, of suddenly seeing himself, or feeling that his therapist sees him, through new eyes. He rarely gives the therapist to feel that the latter have made an importantly revealing interpretation, or should be concealed, but when to arrive at by reasoning from evidence or from its premises that we can infer from that which he was derived as to a conclusion, that it conveys of a higher illumination of mind. Methodologically historical information is an approving acceptation by the therapist, he does so causally, he tends to experience important increments of depreciated material, yet not as every bit for reverential abstractions as to make a new, amended, or up-to-date reversion of the many problems involved in revising the earthly shuddering revelations in his development. The things that he has known all along and simply never happened to think of. His experience of an inherent perception of the world as surrounding him is often permeated by ‘deja vu’ sensations, and misidentification of the emphasizing style at which the expense of thought for taking the rhetorical rhapsody to actions or a single inaction of moving the revolutions of the earth around the sun is mostly familiar an act from his past.
The motional progressions in therapy, on the patient’s part, occur each time only after a recrudescence in his symptoms. It is as though he has to find reassurance of his personal identity, for being really the same hopeless person he has long felt himself to be, before he can venture into a bit or new and more hopeful identity.
Of what expressions are that object relations of state or fact of having independent reality whose customs that have recently come into existence, such by the actuality for something having existence from the beginning of life, being the mother’s breast that it splits into a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast; this splitting results in a division between love and hate. What is more, is that of the relation to the first object implies its introjection and projection, and thus, from the beginning object relations are moulded by an interaction between introjection and projection, between internal and external objects and situation.
. . . .With the introjection of the complete object in about the second quarter of the first year marked steps in integration are made. . . . The loved and hated aspects of the mother are no longer felt to be so widely separated, and the result is an increased fear of loss, a strong feeling of guilt and states akin to mourning, because the aggressive impulses are felt to be divorced against the love object, the depressive position has come to the fore . . .
. . . In the first few month of life anxiety is predominantly experienced as fear of persecution and . . . this contributes to certain mechanisms and defences that characterize the paranoid and schizoid positions. Outstanding among these defences is the mechanism of splitting internal and external objects, emotions and the ego. These mechanisms and defences are part of normal development and at the same time form the basis for later schizophrenic illness. The descriptive underlying identification by projection, i.e., projective identification, as a combination of splitting off parts of the self and projecting them onto another person . . .
Rosenfeld, a follower of Klein writes that, he presents detailed clinical data that serve to document the implicit point, among others, that whereas, the schizophrenic patient may appear to have regressed to such an objectless autoerotic level of development as was postulated by Freud (1911, 1914) and Abraham (1908), in actuality the patient is involved in object-relatedness with the analyst, object-relatedness of the primitive introjective and projective identification kind. For example, Rosenfeld concludes his description of, the data from one of the sessions as follows:
. . . only at a later stage of treatment was it possible to distinguish between the mechanisms of introjection of objects and projective identifications, which so frequently go on simultaneously (1952).
In trying to conceptualize such ego-states in the patient, and such states of relatedness between patient and doctor. Additional value placed the concept presentation by Little in her papers, "On Delusional Transference" (Transference Psychosis) (1958) and "On Basic Unity" (1960).
One of the necessary development, in along-delusional patient’s eventual relinquishment of his delusions is for these gradually to become productions that the therapist sees no longer as essentially ominous and the subject for either serious therapeutic investigation, or argumentation, or any other form of opposition, rather, the therapist comes to react to these for being essentially playful, unmaligant, creatively imaginative, and he comes to respond to them with playfully imaginative comments of his own. Nothing helps more finally to detoxicate a patient’s previously self-isolating delusional state than to find in his therapist a capacity to engage him in a delightfully crazy playfulness - a kind of relatedness of which the schizophrenic patient had never a chance to have his fills during his childhood. Typically, such early childhood playfulness was subjected to massive repression, because of various intra-familial circumstances.
Innumerable instances of the therapist’s uncertainty how to respond to the patient’s communication turn upon the question of whether the communication is to be ‘taken personally’ - to be taken as primarily designed, for instance, toward filling the therapist with perplexity, confusion, anxiety, humiliation, rage, or some other negatively toned affective state, or whether it is to be taken rather as primarily an effort to convey some basically unhostile needs on the patient’s par. Just as it is often essential that the therapist become able to sense and respond to personal communications in a patient’s ostensibly stereotyped behaviour or utterance, so too it is frequently essential that he be able to see, behind the overt ‘personal’ reference to himself - often a stinging or otherwise emotionally evocative reference - some fundamental needs that the patient is hesitantly to communicate openly.
Some comments by Ruesch, although concerned primarily with nonverbal communication, are beautifully descriptive of the process that occurs in such patients as the transference evolves over the course of the therapy:
The dependencies on which is focussed upon effectual acknowledge in the presence of which has its closest analogue, in terms of normative standards, is such that the personality development, in the experience and behaviour of the infant or of the young child. The dependency needs, attitudes, and strivings that the schizophrenic manifests may be defined in the statement that he seeks for another person to assume a total responsibility for gratifying all his needs, both physiological and psychological, while this person is to seek nothing from him.
Of the physiological needs, which the schizophrenic manifests, those centring about the oral zone of interaction are usually most prominent, analogous to the predominant place held by nursing in the life of the infant. Desires to be stroked and cuddled, likewise, so characteristic of the very early years of normal development, are prominently held within the schizophrenic. In addition, desires for the relief of genital sexual tensions, even though these have had their advent much later in the life history than have his oral desires, are manifested in much the same level of an early, infantile dependency. That is, such genital hungers are manifested in much the same small-child spirit of, ‘you ought to be taking care of this for me’ as are the oral hungers.
The psychological needs that are represented among the schizophrenic’s dependency processes consist in the desire for the other person to provide him with unvarying love and protection, and to assume a total guidance of his living,
In the course of furthering characterizations of the schizophrenic’s dependency processes will be defined much more fully, that is to say, it is to b e emphasized that no of the dependency processes are but described is characteristic only of the schizophrenic, or qualitatively different from processes operative at some level of consciousness in persons with other varieties of psychiatric illness and in normal persons. With regard to dependency processes, we find research in schizophrenia has its greatest potential value in the fact that schizophrenic shows us in a sharply etched form that which is so obscured, by years progressive adaptation to adult interpersonal living, in human beings in general. Wherefore, but in some degree, are about the patient’s anxiety about the dependency needs, are (1) As nearly as can be determined, the patient is unaware of pure dependency needs; for him, apparently, they exist in consciousness, if at all, only in the form of a hopeless conflictual combination of dependency needs plus various defences - defences that render impossible any thoroughgoing sustained gratification of these needs. These defences (which include, grandiosity, hostility, competitiveness, scorns and so forth) have so long ago developed in his personality, as a means of coping with anxiety attendant upon dependency needs, that the experiencing of pure dependency needs it, for him, lost in antiquity and so be achieved only relatively late in therapy after the various defences have been largely relinquished.
Thus it appears to be not only dependency needs ‘per se’ which arouses anxiety, but rather the dependency needs plus all these various defences (which tend in themselves to be anxiety-provoking) plus the inevitable frustration, to a greater or less degree, of the dependency needs.
Hostility as one of the defences against awareness of ‘dependency needs,’ that which for certainly repressed dependency needs are one of the most frequent bases of murderous feelings in the schizophrenic, in such instances the murderous feelings may be regarded as a vigorous denial of dependency. What frequently happens in therapy is that both patient and therapist become so anxious about the defensive murderous feelings that the underlying dependency feelings long remain unrecognized.
Every schizophrenic possesses much self-hatred and guilt that may serve as defences against the awareness of dependency feelings (‘I am too worthless for anyone possibly to care about me’), and which in any case complicate the matter of dependency. The schizophrenic has generally come to interpret the rejections in his past life as meaning that he is a creature who wants too much and, in fact, a creature who has no legitimate needs. Thus, he can accept gratification of his dependency needs, if at all, only if his needs are rendered acceptable to themselves by reason of his becoming physically ill or in a truly desperate emotional state. It is frequently found that a schizophrenic is more accessible to the gratification of his dependency needs when he is physically ill, or filled with despair, than at other times. In that way, th e presence of self-hatred, and guilt, one ingredient of the patient’s overall anxiety about dependancy needs has to do with the fact that these needs connote to him the state of feeling physical illness or despair.
In essence, then, we can see that the patient has a deep-seated conviction that his dependency needs will not be gratified. Further, we see that this conviction is based not alone on the fortunate past expedience of repeated rejection, but also, the fact that his own defences, called forth concomitantly with the dependency desires, make it virtually certain that this dependency needs will not be met. (2) The dependency needs are anxiety-provoking not only because they involve desires to relate in an infantile or small-child fashion (by breast - or penis sucking, being cuddled, and as so forth) which is not generally acceptable behaviour among adults, but also, and probably what is more important, because they involve a feeling that the other person is frighteningly important, absolutely indispensable to the patient’s survival.
This feeling as to the indispensable of importance of the other person derives from two main sources: (a) the regressed state of the schizophrenic’s emotional life, which makes for his perceiving the other for being all-important to his survival, just as in infancy the mothering one is all-important to the survival of the infant, and (b) certain additional disabling features of his schizophrenic illness, which render him dependent in various special ways that are not quite comparable with the dependency characteristic of normal infancy or early childhood. Thereof, a number of points in reference to (b) are, first, we can perceive that a schizophrenic who is extremely confused, for example, is utterly dependent on or upon the therapist or, some other relevantly significant person to help him establish a bridge between his incomparable, incongruent, conflicting, conditions in which things are out of their normal or proper places or relationships. Such are the complete mental confusions that the authenticity of a corresponding to known facts is to discover or rediscover the real reason for which such things as having no illusions and facing reality squarely face-to-face, a realistic appraisal of his chances for advancing to the reasonable facts as we can see the factional advent for understanding the absolutizing instinct to fancy of its reality.
Second, we can see also that the patient who is in transition between old, imposed values and not-yet-acquired values of his own, has only the relationship with his therapist to depend upon.
Third, is the concern and consideration that, in many instances, the schizophrenic appears to be what one might call a prisoner in th e present. He is so afraid both of change and of the memories that tend to be called forth by the present that he clings desperately to what in immediate. He is in this sense imprisoned in immediate experience, and looks to the therapist to free him so that he will be able to live in all his life, temporally speaking - present, past and future.
Forth, it might be surmised that an oral type of relatedness to the other person (with the all-importance of the other that this entails) is necessary for the schizophrenic to maintain, partly in order to facilitate his utilization of projection and introjection as defences against anxiety.
Anxiety, is the constructed foundation whose emotional state from which are grounded to the foundation structural called the ‘edifice’, that an emotional state in which people feel uneasy, apprehensive, or fearful. People usually experience anxiety about events they cannot control or predict, or about events that seem threatening or dangerous. For example, students taking an important test may feel anxious because they cannot predict the test questions or feel certain of a good grade. People often use the words fear and anxiety to describe the same thing. Fear also describes a reaction to immediate danger characterized by a strong desire to escape the situation.
The physical symptoms of anxiety reflect a chronic "readiness" to deal with some future threat. These symptoms may include fidgeting, muscle tension, sleeping problems, and headaches. Higher levels of anxiety may produce such symptoms as rapid heartbeat, sweating, increased blood pressure, nausea, and dizziness.
Bychowski (1952) says, ‘"The separation between the primitive ego and the external world is closely connected with orality, both form the basis for the mechanism that we call projection," and would add, for introjection. , That Starcke (1921) for earlier comments "I might briefly allude to the possibility that in the repeated alternation between becoming one’s own and not one’s own, which occurs during lactation . . . the situation of being nursed plays a part in the origin of the mechanism of something that extends beyond its level or the normal outer surface in which serves to support projection.
The patient has anxiety, and, least of mention, his dependency needs lead him either to take in harmful things, or to lose his identity.
The schizophrenic does not have the ability necessary to tolerate the frustration of his dependency needs, so that he can, once they emerge into awareness, subject them to mature discriminatory judgement before seeking their gratification. Instead, like a voraciously hungry infant, his tendency is to put into his mouth (either literally or figuratively) whatever is at hand, whether nutritious or with a potential of being harmful, this tendency is about th e basis of some of his anxiety concerning his dependency needs, for the fear that they will keep him blindly into receiving harmful medicines, bad advice, electro-shock treatment, lobotomy, and so forth. Schizophrenic patients have been known to beg, in effect, for all these, and many a patients have been known to beg, yet these patients have been ‘successful’ in his dependency desires. A need for self-punishment is, of course, an additional motivation in such instances.
A statement by Fenichel (1945) indicates that, "The pleasure principle, that is, the need for immediate discharge, is incompatible with correct judgement, which is based on considerable and post postponement of the reaction. The time and energy saved by this postponement are used in the function of sound and stable judgments. That in the early states the weak ego has not yet learned to postpone anything.
In the same symptomatic of one that finds that th e extent that the schizophrenic projects onto other persons his own needs too such and to devour, he feels threatened with being devoured by these other persons.
To elaborate now in a somewhat different direction upon this fear of loss of identity. Th e schizophrenic fears that his becoming dependent on another person will lead him into a state of conformity that other person’s wishes and life values. A conformer is almost the last sort of person as the schizophrenic wishes to become, since his sense of individuality resides in his very eccentricities. He assumes that the therapist, for example, in the process, requiring him to give up his individuality for the kinds of parental future in his past had e been able to salvage his refuge used to pay the price.
It seems of our apparent need to give the impression of being without necessarily being so in fact that things are not always the way they seem, as things accompanied with action orient of doing whatever is apprehended as having actual, distinct and demonstrateable existence from which there is a place for each thing in the cosmological understanding idea in that something conveys to the mind a rational allotment of the far and near, such of the values and standards moderate the newly proposed to modify as to avoid an extreme or keep within bounds.
For what is to say, in that we need to realize, that the patient is not solely a broken, inert victim of the hostility of persons in his past life. His hebephrenic apathy or his catatonic immobility, for example, represents for one thing, an intense active endeavour toward unconscious regressive goals, as Greenson (1949, 1953) has for his assistance to make clear in the boredom and apathy in neurotic patients. The patient is, in other words, no inert vehicle that needs to be energized by the therapist; rather, an abundance of energy is locked in him, pressing ceaselessly to be freed, and a hovering ‘helpful’ orientation on the part of the therapist would only get in the way. We must realize that the patient has made, and is continually making, a contribution to his own illness, however unwittingly, and however obscure the nature of this contribution may long remain.
More than often, it has been found that the histories of schizophrenic patients, whether male or female, describe the father for being by far, the warmer, the more accessible, of the responsive parents, and the patient as having always been very much attached to the father, whereas the mother was always a relatively cold, rejecting, remote figure, but for the repetitive correlative coefficient, that it was to be found that, disguised behind the child’s idol or inseparable buddy, is a matter of the father’s transference to the child’s being a mother-figure that the father, in these instances, is an infantile individual who reacts both to his wife and to his child, as the mother-figure, and who, by striving to be both father and mother to the child, unconsciously seeks to intervene between mother and child, that in such a way as to have each of them to himself, in the considerations that suggest of a number of cases when both are in the transference-development with the patient and the selective prospect of the patient’s generalization that limits or qualifies an agreement or other conditions that may contain or depend on a conditioning need for previsional advocates that include the condition that the transference phenomena would effectually raise the needed situational alliance.
The various forms of intense transference on the part of the schizophrenic individual tend forcibly to evoke complementary feeling-responses, comparably intense, in the therapist. Mabel Blake Cohen (1952) has made the extremely valuable observation, for psychoanalysis in general, that:
The accountable explanation in the support for reason to posit for the necessarily deep feeling-involvement on the part of the therapist is inherent in the nature of early ego-formation. The healthy reworking of which is so central to the therapy of schizophrenia. Spitz (1959), in his monograph on the early development of the ego, repeatedly emphasizes that emotion plays a leading role in th e formation of what he described as the ‘organizers of the psyche’ (which he defines as ‘emergent, dominant centres of integration’) during the first eighteen months of life. H e says, for example, that:
the ways they are dealt with - can be traced in this process.
The successive phases of which are best characterised, the psychotherapy of chronic schizophrenia, are the ‘out-of-contact phases, the phase of ambivalent symbiosis, the phase of pre-ambivalent symbiosis, the phase of resolution of the symbiosis, and the late phase, - that of establishment, and elaboration, of the newly won individuation through selective new identification and repudiation of outmoded identifications.
The sequence of these phases retraces, in reverse, the phases by which the schizophrenic illness was originally formed: The way of thinking, the aetiological roots of schizophrenia are formed when the mother-infant symbiosis fails to resolve into individuation of mother and infant - or, still more harmfully fails even to become at all firmly established - because of deep ambivalence of the part of the mother that hindered the integration and differentiation of the infant’s and young child’s ego, the child fails then to proceed through the normative development phases of symbiosis and subsequent individuation. Instead the core of his personality remains uniform, and ego-fragmentation and dedifferentiation becomes powerful, though deeply primitive and unconscious defences against the awareness of ambivalence in the object and in himself. Even in normal development, one becomes separate person only by becoming able to face, and accept ownership of, one’s ambivalence with which he had to cope in his relationship with his mother was too great, and his ego-formation too greatly impeded, for him to be able to integrate his conflictual feeling-states into an individual identity.
Of these, the theoretical concept has been fostered by Mahler’s (1956) paper on autistic and symbiotic infantile psychosis and by Balint‘s (1953, 1955) writings concerning phenomena of early ego-formation that he encountered in the psychoanalysis of neurotic patients. From a purely descriptive viewpoint, schizophrenia can be seen to consist essentially in an impairment of both ‘integration’ and ‘differentiation’ - which are but opposite faces of a unitary growth-process. From a Psychodynamic view point seems basic to all the bewilderingly plexuity with which are a varying manifestations of schizophrenia.
Taking in, is the matter of integration; when we assess schizophrenia individual in terms of the classical structural areas of the personality - id, ego, and superego - we discover these to be poorly integrated with one another. The id is experienced by the ego as a Pandora’s box, the contents of which will overwhelm one if it is opened. The ego is, as many writers have stated, severely split, sometimes into innumerable islands that are not linked discernibly with one another. And the superego has the nature of a cruel tyrant whose assaults upon the weak and unintegrated ego are, if anything, even more destructive to it than are the ascensions of the threatening id-impulses, as Szalita-Pemow (1951), Hill (1955), and others. Moreover, the superego is, like the ego, even in itself not well integrated; its utterances contain the most glaring inconsistencies from one moment to the next. Jacobson (1954) has shown that there is actually as dissolution of the superego, as an integrated destruction - a regressive transformation back into the threatening parental images whose conglomeration originally formed it.
Differentiation is a process that is essential to integration, and vice versa. For personality structure-functions or psychic contents to become integrated, they must first have emerged as partially differentiated or separate from one another, and differentiation in turn can emerge only out of a foundation of more or less integrated functions or contents. The intertwining mesh upon which is interwoven in the growth precesses of integration and differentiation, such that the impairment of both likewise interlocking. But in the schizophrenic these two processes tend to be out of step with one another, so that at one moment a patient’s more urgent need may be for increased integration, whereas at another he may more urgently need increased differentiation. And these are some patients who show for months end, a more urgent need in one of these areas, before the alternate growth-phase on the scene, that type is a modicum of validity in speaking and of two different ’types’ of schizophrenic patients.
One comes to realize, upon reasons of how premature have been one’s effort to find out what feelings the patient is experiencing or what thoughts he is having; one comes to realize that much of the time he has neither feelings nor thoughts differentiated as such and communicable to us.
Such differentiations as the patient posses of an inclining inclination that tend to break down when intense emotion enters his awareness. A paranoid man, for example, may find that when his hatred toward another person reaches a certain degree of intensity, he is flooded with anxiety because he no longer knows whether he hates, or instead ‘really loves’ the other individual. This is not based, on any line or its course, whereupon the primary mechanism that Freud (1911) outlined in his classical description of the nature of paranoid delusions of persecution, a description in which repressed homosexual love played the central role. The central difficulty is rather than the ego is too poorly differentiated to maintain its structure in the face of such powerful affects, and the patient becomes flooded with what can only be described as ‘undifferentiated passion’, precisely as one finds an infant to be overwhelmed at times with affect that the observer cannot be specifically identity as any one kind of emotion.
As for the feelings with which the therapist himself experiences in working within the variations in the differentiated patient, we find, again, a persistent threat of the therapist’s sense of identity. But, whereas in the unitary integration complex manifestations of such of a schizophrenic’s sense of identity. But as in the first instance that the threat was felt predominantly as a disturbance of one’s personal integration, it seems possible as a weakening of one’s sense of differentiation. In this instance, the ‘therapeutic symbiosis’ which implicates the necessary developments that it tends to occur earlier for which of the patient’s predominant mode of relatedness with other persons, at the developmental level at which we find him at the very beginning of our work, is a symbiotic one. Such descriptions, least of mention, agree with the necessary developments, in that it tends to occur for the patient ‘s predominant mode of relatedness with other persons, the symbiotic relatedness, with its subjective absence of ego-boundaries, involves not only special gratification, but anxiety-provoking disturbances on one’s sense of personal identity.
The comparatively rapid development of symbiotic relatedness is facilitated by the patient’s characteristically nonverbal, and physically more or less immobile, functioning during the therapeutic sessions. In response, the therapist’s own behaviour becomes more and more similar, is that each participant is now offering to the other, saying that over the hours of counselling, a silent, impassive screen that facilitates abundant mutual projecting and introjecting. Thus a symbiotic state is likely to be reached earlier than in one’s work with the typically much more verbal type of the patient when described for that instance, the patient’s and therapist’s more abundant verbalization’s tend persistently to stress the ego-boundaries separating the to persons from one another.
The applicability for which the predominantly non-differentiated patient, in that the therapist’s sense of identity as a complexly differentiated individual entity becomes further eroded, or undermined, as he finds the patient persistently operating on the unwavering conviction, that the hours of counselling are but an undifferentiated aspect of the whole vague mass of the institution, even in Psychodynamic terms, is in actuality the patient’s projection of his own poorly differentiated hostility, through which the patient’s tenaciously held view, is the way the world around him really is.
Further, since the patient typically verbalizes little but a few maddening monotonous stereotypes, the therapist tends to feel, over the course of time, with so little of his own intellectual content being explicitly tapped in the relationship, that his richness of intellect is progressively rusting away - becoming less differentiated, more stereotyped and rudimentary. Moreover, the patient presents but one of two emotional wavelengths to which the therapist can himself tune in, rather than a rich spectrum of emotion that calls into response a similarly wide range of feelings from the therapist himself. Thus not only the therapist’s intellectual resources, but his emotional capacities too, becomes subjectively narrowed down and impoverished, as he finds that, over the sessions of counselling, his patient in him neither any wide range of ideas, nor any emotions except, for example, rage, or contempt or dull hopelessness.
The feeling experience on his part, anxiety-provoking and discouraging though he finds it, is a necessary therapeutic development. It is for him thus to experience at first hand something of the patient’s own lack of differentiation; for, as in the therapy with the non-integrated patient, as, once, again, the healing process occurs external to the patient, as it was, at an intrapsychic level in the therapist, before it becomes established in the patient himself. That is, the therapist’s coming to view the patient, his relationship with the patient, and himself in this relationship, all for being largely non-differentiated, is a development that sets the stage for the patient’s gradually increasing differentiation. Now the therapist comes to sense, time and again, newly emerging tendrils of differentiation in the patient, before the latter are themselves and conscious of them. In responding to these with spontaneity as they show themselves, again, that in the therapist, helps the patient to become aware-theat they are a part of him.
To analyst and analytic student alike, the term ‘transference psychosis’ usually connotes a dramatic but dreaded development in which an analysand, who at the beginning of the analysis was overtly sane but who had in actuality a borderline ego-structure, becomes overtly psychotic, that the course of the evolving transference relationship. We generally blame the analyst for such as development and prefer not to think any more about such matters, because of our own personal fear that we, like the poor misbegotten analysand, might become, or narrowly avoid becoming, psychotic in our own analysis. By contrast, in working with the chronically schizophrenic patient, we are confronted with a person whose transference to us is no harder too identify partly for the very reason that his whole daily life consists in incoherent psychotic transference reactions, for which is to whatever, to everyone about him, including the analyst in the treatment session. Little’s comment (1960) that the delusional state ‘remains unconscious’ until it is uncovered in the analysts’ holds true only in the former instance, in the borderline schizophrenic patient; there, it is the fact that the transference is delusional which is the relative covert, hard-to-discern aspect of the situation, in chronic schizophrenia, by contrast, nearly everything is delusional, and the difficult task to foster the emergence of a coherent transference meaning in the delusional symptomatology. In other words, the difficult thing in the work with the chronically schizophrenic patient is to discover the ‘transference reality’ in his delusional experience.
The difficultly of discerning the transference aspect of one’s relationship with the patient can be traced to his having regressed to a state of ego functioning which is marked by severe impairment in his capacity either to differentiate among, or to integrate, his experiences. He is so incompletely differentiated in his ego functioning that he tends to feel, not that the therapist reminds him of, or is like, his mother or that of his father (or whomever, from his early life) but rather his functioning toward the therapist is couched in the unscrutinised assumption that the therapist is the mother or father. When, for example, in trying to bring to the attention of a paranoid schizophrenic women how much like she seemed to find the persons in her childhood on the one hand, and the person about her in the institution, including me, on the other, she dismissed this with an impatient retort, "That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, What difference does it make? For years subsequently in our work together, all the figures in her experience were composite figures, without any clear subjective distinction between past and present experiences, figures from the institutional scene peopled her memories of her past, and figures from what has become known to be her past were experienced by her as blended with the persons she saw about her in current life.
Transference situations in which the psychosis is manifested at a phase in therapy in which the deeply chronically confused patient, who in childhood had been accustomed to a parent’s during his thinking for him, is ambivalently (a) trying to perpetuate a symbiotic relationship wherein the therapist to a high degree does the patient’s thinking for him, and (b) expressing, by what the therapist feels to be sadistic and castrative and nullifying or undoing the therapist’s effort to be helpful, a determination to be a separately thinking, and otherwise separately functioning, individual
Difficult though it is to discern the nature and progressive evolution of the patient’s transference to the therapist, it is even more difficult to conceptualize that which is ‘new’ which the therapist brings into the relationship, and which, as J. M. Rioch (1943) has emphasized, is crucial to the patient’s recovery. Rioch is quite right in saying that, "Whether intentionally or not, whether conscious of it or not, the analyst does express, day in and day out, subtle or overt evidences of his own personality in relationship to the patient."
The conjectural considerations for which inadequate evidences in the understanding of questionable intent is that there is a companion evolution of reality relatedness between patient and therapist, concomitant with such a transference evolution as having had the impression that it is only when the reality relatedness between patient and therapist has reached, finally and after many ‘real life’ vicissitudes between them, a depth of intense fondness that there now emerges, in the form of a transference development, a comparably intense and long-repressed fondness for the mother.
Presumably, a point that Freud (1922) concerning projection also holds true for transference, he stated that projection occurs no ‘into the sky, so to speak, where there is nothing of the sort already’, but rather the persons who in reality posses an attitude qualitatively like that which the projecting person is attributing to them. So it is with transference, we may presume that when a patient comes to react to us as a loved and loving mother, this phrase - as well as other phrases - of the transference is founded upon our having come to feel, in reality, thus toward him. M. B. Cohen (1952) stresses the importance of the therapist’s inevitable feeling response to the patient’s transference, and, if only to suggest, that an equally healthy source of the therapist’s feeling participation be the evolving reality relatedness that pursues its own course, related to and parallelling, but not fully embraced by, the evolving transference relatedness over the years of person’s working together. What is more, is the countertransference that has already been written, but as to indicate, there is a great need for us to become clear about the sequence that the recovery process in the schizophrenic adult, very roughly analogous to the growth process in normal infancy, childhood, and adolescence, tends innately to follow. When we have become clearer and surer about this, and particularly about the validity-relatedness element necessary to it, in that the frequently - though by no means always - various manifestations of feeling regarded as unwanted countertransference will be seen to be inevitable, and utterly essential, components of the recovery process.
Further, the opening view of the personality for being divisible into the areas, id, ego, and superego, tends to shield us from the anxiety-fostering realization that in psychoanalytic change is not merely quantitative and partial - where id was, there shall ego be - in Freud’s dictum - but qualitative and all-persuasive. That is, that in such passages as the following. Freud gives a picture of personality-structure, and of maturation, which leaves the inaccurate but comforting impression that at least a part of us - namely, as part of the id - is free from change. In his paper entitled "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" in 1915, he said,
Freud himself, in his emphasis upon the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’ (1923), the repetition compulsion, and the resistance to analytic insight that he discovered in his work with neurotic patients, has shown the importance, in the neurotic individual, of anxiety concerning change, and him agrees with Jung’s statement that ‘a peculiar psychic inertia’ hostile to change and progress, is the fundamental condition of neurosis (Freud, 1915). This is, as we know, even more true of psychosis - so much as that only in very recent decades have psychotic patients achieved full recovery though modified psychoanalytic therapy. Finding it instructive to explore in detail the psychodynamics of schizophrenia in terms of the anxiety concerning change which one encounters, in a particular intense degree, at work in these patients, and in oneself in the course of treating them. What the therapy of schizophrenia can teach us of the human being’s standing concerning change, can broaden and deepen our understanding of the non-psychotic individual also.
This development can occur only after successive resolution of increasingly ancient personality-warp in the patient, and the establishment thereby, of a hard-won mutual trust and security. In this atmosphere the therapist relationship makes contact with the healthy ingredients of the patient’s symbiotic relationship with his mother, thus laying the foundation for subsequent new growth as a separate and healthy individual.
In such fashion the patient develops importance not merely as a separate object, but to a degree as a symbiotic partner, for the therapist as well as for other people, who participate with which the therapist himself, as well as such of the staff members, we hear from fellow-therapists and ward-personal of how ‘stunned’ or even ‘shocked’ them were at seeing dramatic improvements in a long-ill patient. Characteristically, too, the therapist notices only very belatedly various long-standing symptoms have dropped out of the patient’s behaviour. on looking back through his records, for example, prior to a staff-presentation, he finds to his surprise that a delusion, once long-familiar to him, has not been evidenced by the patient for several months. Thus, his feelings of personal loss are mitigated. Even so, that even among the most technically capable of therapists, is the initial reaction with dismay and discouragement to a patients, is the initial reacting with express verbally the depths of his despair, loneliness, confusion, infantile need, and so fort, typically, the therapist only belatedly recognizes the forward move this development constitutes. His initial response is traceable to the unconscious loss that this development inflicts upon him - the loss of the long-familiar and inevitable therefore cherished (unconsciously cherished) relatedness that therefor he had shared with the patient.
The patient, particularly in the symbiotic phrase of the therapy but in preceding and succeeding phase as well, is notably intolerant of sudden and marked changes in the therapeutic relationship - that is, of suddenly seeing himself, or feeling that his therapist sees him, through new eyes. He rarely gives the therapist to feel that the latter have made an importantly revealing interpretation, and when he himself conveys a highly illuminating nugget of historical information to his therapist, he does so casually, often feeling sure that he has already mentioned this before. He tends to experience important increments of de-repressed material not as earthshattering revelations in his development, yet the forward moves in therapy, on the patient’s part occur each time only after a recrudescence in his symptoms. It is as though he was to find reassurance of his personal identity, for being really the same hopeless person he has long felt himself to be, before he can venture into a bit of new and more hopeful identity.
There is a necessary phase of symbiosis between patient and doctor in the transference evolution followed by the recovering schizophrenic patient, a phase in which the ego boundaries between himself and the therapist are mutually relinquished to a large degree. This development can occur only after successive resolutions of increasingly ancient personality-wrap in the patient, and the establishment, thereby, of a hard-won in the patient, and his identity.
The following considerations, to be sure, the patient, in this reality and that this mutuality of a comparative participation is essentially inclined of a better understanding and a successful therapeutic outcome.
Freud (1911) made the comment that:
Similarly, because the therapist has seen the patient to be, earlier in the therapy, such a deeply fragmented person, he tends to retain a lingering impression of the fragility, an impression that may interfere with his going along at the faster pace that the patient, now a very different and far stronger person, is capable of setting. But even this memory-image of the fragile patient, carried with the therapist, has a natural function in the course of the psychotherapy, for it is only very late in the work that the patient himself is able to realize how very ill, how very fragile, he once was, until he becomes strong enough to integrate his realization into his self-image, the therapist has to be the bearer of this piece of the patient’s identity. This process is analogous to the well-known phenomenon in which each major forward stride in the patient’s therapeutic growth is accompanied, or presaged, by the therapist’s suddenly seeing in the patient a new and healthier person, there, too, the impact of the development falls primarily, for a time, upon the therapist rather than the patient. The patient himself, because his sense of identity is still, during the earlier therapeutic phases to which is easily overwhelming, and relatively tenuous. By the realization of the extent to which he is now changed, even though this change is, in our view, a most beneficial and welcoming one.
More often than not, is that the histories of schizophrenic patients, whether male or female, describe the father for being by far the warmer, and more accessible of the two parents, the father, whereas the mother was always relatively cold, rejecting, remote figure. However, that the disguise behind the child’s idol inseparable ‘buddy’ is a matter of the father’s transference to the child for being a mother-figure upon whom he, the father makes insatiable demands. It seems that the father, in these instances, is an infantile individual, who reacts both to his wife and to his child unconscious ly seeks to intervene between mother and child in such a way as to have each of them to himself. The seeming evidence of this by now, in a considerable number of cases, both in the transference-development and interviews with the parents.
The point being made, is that the mother and child allow this interposition by the father to happen, because of their anxiety about their fondness for being a mother-figure who exasperatingly allows as an infantile ‘buddy’, a kind of father to keep intervening, placing impossible demands for mothering upon the patient; finally comes a phase of th e patient’s responding to the therapist as a mother with whom he can share unashamedly fond relatedness, no longer burdened by the father’s scornfully and demandingly coming between them.
So it is with transference, we may presume that when a patient comes to react to us as a love and loving mother, this phase - as well as other phases - of the transference is founded upon our having come to feel, in reality, as, M. B. Cohen (1952) stresses the importance of the therapist ‘s inevitable feeling response to the patient’s transference, only to suggest, that of the therapist’s feeling participation is the evolving reality relatedness that pursue its own course, related to and parallelling, but not fully embraced by, the evolving transcendence relatedness over which time to occur is, namely introduced as countertransference, nonetheless, in the realm, as situated as one crucial phase of the work - a symbiotic kind of mutual dependency, which he mutually comes to feel toward the patient, his acceptance of a mutual caring which amounts at times to an adoration, and his being able to acknowledge the patient’s contribution - inevitable, in successful therapy - to his own personal integration. It must be noted, that the schizophrenic patient responds with great regularity to the therapist’s material warmth for being a sure indication that the latter are a homosexual or a lesbian. The younger therapist needs to become quite clear that this is, in actuality, a formidable resistance in the patient again the very kind of loving mother-infant relatedness that offers the patient his only avenue of salvation from his illness. Not to say, that the therapist should depreciate the degree of anxiety, referable to the deep ambivalence of the patient’s early relationship with his mother, which is contained within this resistance, perhaps, that the therapist’s deep-seated doubts as to his own sexual identity - and what person is totally free of such doubt? - should not make him lose of the fact that the patient’s contempt (or revulsion, or what not) is basically a resistance against going ahead and picking up the threads of the loving infant-mother relatedness that were long ago severed.
Upon comment, the patient has in reference to a different person, and is often couched in terms of a different temporal era, that is intended by the preconscious or unconscious impulse striving for expression. The circumstance of the patient’s having regressed to a more or less early level of ego-functioning is explanatory of many of the idiosyncrasies of schizophrenic communication. The clinical picture is complicated, in most instances, by the fact that the level of regression varies unceasingly, at times from one moment to the next, and there are even instances where the patient is functioning on more than one developmental level simultaneously.
The fact of the patient’s regressed, mode of psychological functioning helps to account for the ‘concreteization’, or contrariwise the seeming oversymbolization, of his communications; these phenomena represent his having regressed, in his thinking (and overall subjective experiencing), to a developmental level comparable with that in the young child who has not yet become able to differentiate between concrete and metaphorical (or similar forms of highly symbolic) thinking.
Similarly, the patient may tittle-tattle in a way that gives us to know that the content of his speech is relatively unimportant to him at the moment he is immersed in the pleasure of saying the words and hearing the sound of them, much like the young child who has not yet learned to talk but loves to babble and to hear the sound of his babbling. A nonverbal patient may usefully be regarded as having regressed even further, to the pre-verbal era of infancy or very early childhood.
The strikingly intense ambivalence, another fundamental aspect of the schizophrenic individual’s psychodynamics, contributes to a number of different typical kinds of schizophrenic communications. (1) The indirect communication, (2) Self-contradictory verbal and nonverbal communications, and (3) Verbal communications in which there is a split between content and vocal feeling-tone.
In assessing the meaning of such communications, one soon learns to brush aside the content and attend to the feeling-tone - o r, in still, more complex instances, tones - in which the words are said.
Incidently, a patient sometimes evidences a quite accurate grasp of the true import of such communications that they come from the therapist. at the end of each of the maddening points or the enduring intervals of times of silence. After this had happened several times dawning upon that which he was very accurately expressing the covert message contained in the parting comment to him, as to the (4) No-verbal expression of a feeling contrarily enacted to the one being verbalized? And (5) Expression of contradictory feeling at an entirely nonverbal level.
The archaically harsh, forbidding superego of the patient is another basic factor that helps to account for his heavily disguised and often fragmentary communications.
I can only surmise that there is a companion evolution of reality relatedness between parent and the therapist, concomitant with such a transference evolution, it is only when the real possibilities relatedness between patient and therapist has reached, of a final and after man a depth intensity that there is now emerging, in the form of a transference development a comparable intense and long-represented direction in the fondness for the mother. However, this brings us back to other topics comprising the overall course of psychotherapy as a chronically schizophrenic person, a person preceding in the complex individuality extended to dynamical events of clinical work.
The quality of the transference remittances is to a great extent deepened on the quantity of other remittances. Remittances have the tendency to accumulate wherever there is a favourable opportunity to withstand the analysis. In most cases the transference offers the best opportunity, for example, we see the resistance coming from the conscious repetition, from the unconscious feeling of guilt and from the resistance by repression, takes part of building up the transference resistance. Freud speaks of the transference of resistance into a negative, hostile transference: It is on account of this transformation that the dissolution that transference remittances so often because the chief task of the therapeutics work. In the case of our patient the analysis finally showed the development of anxiety in the transference to b e castration anxiety that had arisen from infantile masturbation with accompanying incestuous wishes toward the mother and the hared and castration wishes toward the father. In the analysis, if the resistance resulting factors in the development of anxiety in the analysis. If the resistance result from this anxiety is analysis the addition of other remittances, then the final resistance in the analysis cannot be considered as an index to the amount of the genuine infantile anxiety for the anxiety resulting from infantile masturbation, on account of the genuine infantile anxiety: For the anxiety resulting from infantile masturbation on account of its anxiety resulting from infantile masturbation, on account of its particular capacity for being used as a resistance in analysis, becomes the nucleus of crystallisation or the basis for the addition of all the other remittances. In a footnote to his paper "The Dynamics of th Transference," this idea was alluded to by Freud, that, ‘Over and over again, when one draws near to a pathogenic complex, that part of it that is first thrust forward into consciousness will be some aspect of it that can be transferred, having been so, it will then be defended with the utmost obstinacy by the patient’. The footnote says: ‘From which however one need not infer in general any very particular pathogenic importance in the point selected for resistance by transference. In warfare, when a bitter fight is raging over the possession of some little chapel or a single farmhouse, we do not necessarily assume that the church is a national monument, or that the barns contain the military funds. Their value may be merely tactical; in the next onslaught they will very likely be of no importance’.
The dissolution of the transference resistance means then not only the dissolution of the resistance resulting from the genuine infantile castration anxiety but a liberation of the supporting resistance that often can only later be separately dissolved, because during the phase of the violent acting-out in the transference these remittances are not accessible to interpretation and dissolution.
For what is said about the psychology of metaphor is analogous to the transformational aspects of developed transferences and steadfast interpretations that both facilitate and organize them as transferences. Allowing that these transferences and ‘remembered’ experiences come into existence over a period of time, nothing that is identical with them has ever before been enacted, and nothing identical with them will ever be enacted again. They are creations that may be fully achieved only under specific analytic conditions. For example, at the time of his childhood scene with his father, the young man of the clinical example, could not have had the specific experience as recounted. strictly speaking, he was not reliving that moment. As a bo y, he must have experienced some of the main precursors and constituents of his present mode of experience, but he could not have done so in the present articulated and integrated manner. That present manner was the basis of his anguished outcry. words like re-creating, but re-experiencing and reliving simply do not do justice to the phenomena. In the way he was doing it, he was living that moment for the first time.
By making this claim, there is no constricting some of our well-established ideas about interpretation and insight, for example, disputing point that insight refers to more than the recovery of lost memories, and takes in, as well, a new grasp of the significance and interrelations of events one has always remembered. The latter connections that the analysand will say, as Freud pointed out, "As a matter of fact I’ve always known it, only I’ve never thought of" (1914). In fact, it is to develop that points further to say that the young child simply does not have the means of fully defining what we later regard as its own life experiences. It takes an adult to do that, especially with the help of an analyst. It was, after all, Freud’s analysis that made it possible to define infantile psychosexuality. in this respect, but without disrespect, child analysis retains a quality of applied psychoanalysis. The adult definition of infantile psychosexuality is ‘artificial’ in the same way that the interpreting transference neurosis is: Both are ways of describing as true something that was not truer in quite that way as, at the time of its greatest development significance. this apparent paradox about ‘remembering’ as a form of creating goes a long was, that saying, what it is this distinctive about psychoanalytic interpretation.
In steadfastly and perspicaciously making transference interpretation, the analyst helps constitute new modes of experience and new experiences. This newness characterizes the experience of analytic transference in them. Unlike extra-analytic transference, they can no longer be sheerly repetitive or merely new editions. Instead, they become repetitively new editions understood as such because defined as such by the simplification and steadfast transference interpretation, instead of responding to the analysand in kind, Which would actualize the repetition, the analyst makes an interpretation. This interpretation does not necessarily or regularly match something the analysand does often seem to have always represented often, but he does not seem to have done so at all. To think otherwise about this would, in effect, to claim that, unconsciously, every analysand is Freud or a fully insightful Freudian analyst. And that claim is totally absurd.
It would be closer to the truth to say this: Unconsciously, the analysand already knows or has experienced fragmentary, amorphous, uncoordinated constituents of many of the transference interpretations. Alternatively, one may say that, implicitly, the analysand has been insisting on some as yet unspecified certainties and, in keeping with this, following some set of as yet unspecified rules in his actions, these the transference interpretations now organize explicitly. Each transference interpretation thus refers to many things that have already been defined by the analysand, and it does so in a way that transforms them. That’s why one may call it interpretation. Otherwise, it would be mere repeating or sterile paraphrasing. Interpretation is a creative redescription that implicitly has the structure of a simile. It says, "This is like it," Each interpretation does, therefore, add new actions to the life the analysand has already lived.
Technically, redescription in the terms of transference-repetition is necessary. This is so because, up to the time of interpretation and working through, the analysand has been, in one sense unable and, in another sense, unconsciously and desperately unwilling, to conduct his life differently, in and of them, the repetitions cannot after the symptoms, the subjective distress, the wasting of one’s possibilities rather they can only perpetuate a static situation by repeatedly confirming its necessity. They prove once again, the unconsciously maintained damaging certainties. But once they get to be viewed as historically grounded actions and subjectively defined situations. As they do upon being interpreted and worked through, they appear as having always been, in crucial respects, inventions of the analysand’s making and, so, as his responsibility. in being seen as versions one’ past life, they may be changed in significant and beneficial ways. Less of all, are they presented as purely inevitable happenings, as a fixed fate or as the well-established way of the world. However, we encounter a second paradox that goes to the heart of psychoanalysis interpretation, namely, that responsible, insightful change is possible through psychoanalysis just because, as a child the analysand mistakenly assumes and then denied responsibility for much that he encountered in the early formative environment and during maturation.
One major point remains to be made about the logic of viewing transference interpretation as simplifying yet innovative redescription. This point is that the interpretations bring about a coordination of the terms in which to state both the analysand’s current problems and their life-historical background. The analysand’s symptoms and distress are described as actions and modes of action, with due regard for the principle of multiple function or multiple meaning: In coordination with that description, the decisive developmental situation and conflicts are stated as actions and modes of action. Continuity is established between the childhood constructions of relationships and the self and the present constructions of these interpretations of transference shows who both are part of the same set of practices, that is, how they follow the same set of rules. Past and present are coordinated to show continuity rather than arranged in a definite sequence.
In the same way, the form of analytic behaviour and the content of association are given co-ordinated descriptions, say, as being defiant, devouring, or reparative. Or, in the case of depression, the depressive symptoms, the depressive analytic transference, the themes of present and past loss, destructiveness and helplessness, all will be redecribed under the aspect of one continuously developing self-presentation. And this coordination will be worked out in that hermeneutically circular fashion in which the analyst defines both th facts to be explained and the explanations to be applied to these facts. In the end, as is well known, both the paramount issues of the analysis and the leading explanatory account of them are likely to be significantly different from the provisional versions of them used at the beginning of the analysis.
The increasing influence of the modernist version of transference and its interpretation represents an adaptation to several long-term philosophical, scientific, and cultural shifts we can now recognize. this changing view of transference is also the most visible emblem of the deep changes in psychoanalytic theory that are now quietly taking place, and of their theoretical pluralism that is so prevalent today (Cooper, 1985).
One of these long-term changes in the climate in which psychoanalysis dwells results from a large philosophical debate concerning the nature of history, veridicality, and narrative. Kermode (1985) has written of the change during this century in our modes of understanding and interpreting the past and the present, "Once upon a time it seemed obvious that you could best understand how things are by asking how they got to be that way. Now attention [is] directed to how things are in their immediate plexuities. There is a switch to use the linguistic expressions, from the diachronic to the synchronic view. Diachrony, roughly speaking, studies things in their synchrony to be as they are, synchrony concerns itself with things as they are and ignores the question, how they got that way. This distinction, put forth by de Sasussure (1915), has achieved philosophical dominance today and is the clear source of the hermeneutic view so prevalent in psychoanalysis, proposed by Ricoeur (1970). From here, it is a short distance to Schafer (1981), and Gill (1982), or Spence (1982) who in varying ways adopt the synchronic view. In this view, the analytic task is interpretation, with the patient, of the events of the analytic situation - usually broadly labelled transference - with a construction rather than a reconstruction of the past. In effect, while there is a past of ‘there and then’ it is knowable only through the filter of the present, of ‘here and now’. There is no other past than the one as we construct, and there is no way of understanding the past but through its relation to the present.
Psychoanalysis, like history but unlike fiction, does have anchoring points, for history’s anchoring points are the evidences that events really did occur, There was a Roman empire, it did have dates, actual persons lived and died. These ‘facts’ place a limitation for the narratives an interpretations that may seriously be entertained. Psychoanalysis is anchored in its scientific developmental psychology and in the biology of attachment and affects. Biology confers regularities and limits on possible histories, and our constructions of the past must accord with this scientific knowledge. constructions of childhood that are incompatible with what we know of developmental possibilities may open our eye’s to new concepts of development, but more likely they alert us to maimed childhoods that have led our patients to usual narrative constructions in the effort to maintain self-esteem and internal coherence. A second, far less secure, anchorage is the enormous amount of convergent data that accumulate during the course of an analysis, which are likely to give the analyst the impression that he is reconstructing rather than constructing the figures and the circumstances of his patient’s past. While a diachronic view may no longer suffice, it may also not be fully dispensable if our patient’s histories are to maintain psychoanalytic coherence, rooted in bodily experience, and the loving, hating and terrifying affects accompanying the fantastic world of infantile psychic reality. Not all analysis are yet as ready as Spence, for example, to give up all claim to the truth value explanatory power of the understanding of the past, even if it is limited to knowing past constructions of the past. Nevertheless, the change in philosophical outlook during our century is profound and contributes to our changing view of the analytic process is exemplified in the transference and its interpretation.
Approaching the same issue from an entirely different vantage point, Emde (1981) speaking for the ‘baby-watchers’ and discussing changing models of infancy and early development, details a second source of the major change of climate to which he writes, The models suggest that what we reconstruct, and what may be extraordinarily helpful to the patient in making a biography, may never have happened. The human being, infant child, is understood to be fundamentally active in constructing his experience. Reality is neither given nor is it necessarily registered in an unmodified form. Perhaps it makes sense for the psychoanalysis to place renewed emphasis on recent and current experiences - first, as a context for interpreting early experience - first, as a context for interpreting the potential amelioration, . . . Psychoanalysts are specialists in dealing with the intrapsychic world not only particular with the dynamic unconscious, but we need to pay attention not only to the intrapsychic realm. conflicting-laden and conflict-free, but also to the interpersonal realm. He concludes, . . . we have probably placed far to much an emphasis on early experience itself as opposed to the process by which it is modified or made use of by subsequent experience.
This view of psychic developments, discarding the timeless unconscious and so powerful at odds with the views that were held by psychoanalysts during the time when most of our ideas of transference interpretation were formed, clearly suggests the modernist model of transference interpretation.
A change in the cultural environment of psychoanalysis provides a third source for the changing model of transference interpretation. Valenstein describes oscillations in psychoanalytic outlook between an emphasis on cognition at one end, and on affect at the other. One might see these as differences between old-fashioned scientific and romantic world views. Surely the period of ego psychology, perhaps reflected in the English translation of Freud, and certainly reflected in the effect to insist on the libidinal energetic point of view, represented the attempt to see psychoanalysis as Freud usually did, as an objective science in the nineteenth century style, with hypotheses created out of naïve observations. It accorded with that view to see the transference as an objective reflection of history. We are currently in one of our more romantic periods. It is consonant with that view to see transference as an activity - stormy, romantic, active, affective - a kind of adventure from which the two individuals emerge changed and renewed. In this romantic view, interpretation of the transference are intended to remove obstacles interfering with the heightening and intimacy of the experience, with the implication that self-knowledge and change will result from their encounter. A romantic figure, the patient and analyst set forth on a quest into the unknown, and whether or not one of them returns with a Holy Grail, they return with many new stories to tell and a new life experience - the analysis. Gardner’s (1983) book, "Self Inquiry" epitomizes this romantic view of analyst and patient as a poet-pair engaged in mutual self-inquiry. It is clear that many analysis would rather be artistic than scientist. By contrast, the older, cognitive view of the transference is of an intellectual journey, emotionally loaded of course, but basically a trip back in history, seeking truth and insight.
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