These remarkable observations, in conveying a sense of deep conviction that could arise, one feels, only from Freud’s own hard-won inner experience, that nowhere is there a suggestion that transference is a mere technical matter. Far from it, as Freud announces that he has come upon as new and exciting kind of mental function, or, as it is to believe, that a new and exciting kind of ego function.
Very quickly, however, Freud’s conviction sees to have failed him. Nothing he wrote afterwards about transference was at this level, and most of his later references were a retreat from it, for instance, he never did develop the promising idea that the mind constantly creates new editions of the original neurosis and meaningfully incline the minded inclusion in them, an ever-changing series of persons. Instead, he tended to become less specific, even referring to transference at times in a broad terms as if it were no more than rapport between patient and analysts, or as if it was an interpersonal or psychosocial relationship, concepts which, of course, a great many analysts have since adopted, but which were not part of Freud’s original ideas.
Perhaps his most persistent deviation was an on-and-off tendency to regard transference merely as a technical matter, often writing of it as an asset to analysis when positive and a liability when negative.
Significantly, because it indicated that an active struggle was still going on within him, Freud occasionally expressed once again, even though briefly his earlier insights, particularly his ideas that transference is an essential although unexplored part of mental life. An example of this appears in his alternative obtainments such that is gainfully to appear of as quality of being pleasant or agreeable to a feature that makes for pleasantness or ease, among the amenities of the central geniality, otherwise, the prevailing indifference account for the transference in ‘An Autobiographical Study’ (1925). Transference, he says, ‘is a universal phenomenon of the human mind. And in fact dominated the whole of each person’s relations to his human environment. In these few words’ Freud again made the point, and in declarative fashion, that transference is a mental structure of the greatest magnitude, but he never really followed it up.
Rather extensive evidence of his departure from the original concept and his continuing struggle with that concept is seen most clearly, wherein, the ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ is much more than a courageous, brilliant, and pessimistic, appraisal of the difficulties and limitations of analysis, although transference is briefly mentioned in its content, yet a great deal about it comes through, some quite directly, some by easy inference. When looked at in this way, two themes stand out: Freud’s personal frustration with the enigmas of transference and his tacit placing of transference in the centre of success and failure in analysis, both as a therapy and as a developing science. What also comes through, is the perplexing realization of how far Freud had, by now, seemingly moved away from his original concepts. Or had he?
All the same, even if it is insufficient for exclusive reliance in relations to the complicated neurosis, for which it would be fallacious to assign to the recall and reconstruction of the past an exclusively explanatory value (in the intellectual sense), important though that functions be, and difficult as its full-blown emotional correlate may be to come by. There is no doubt that, even in complicated neurosis, equivalently complicated transference neurosis, the genuine complex and complicated transference neurosis, the genuinely experienced linking of the past and present can have, at times, a certain uniquely specific dynamic effect of its own, a type of telescoping or merging of common elements in experience, which must be connected with the meaninglessness of time in unconscious life, compared with its stern authority in the life of consciousness and adaptation to everyday reality. Contributing decisively to such experiences as to whatever degree it occurs, is of course, the vivid currency of the transference neurosis, and central in this, the reincarnations of old objects in an actual person, the analyst.
Thus, an allied problem in the general sphere of transference is the fascination and often enigmatic interplay of past and present. If one wishes to view this interplay in terms of a stereotyped formulation, the matter can remain relatively uncomplicated - as a formulation. Unfortunately. , This is too often the case. The phenomenon, however, retains some important obscurities, which cannot thoroughly dispel, but to which I would like to call attention. To concentrate on the dimension of time, it seems in reference to the complication and immediate aspects of technique, nonetheless, essential. For example, we can assume that the transference neurosis re-enacts the essential conflicts of the infantile neurosis in a current setting. If a reasonable degree of awareness of transference is established, the next problem is the genetic reduction of the neurosis to its elements in the past, through analysis of the transference resistance and allied intrapsychic resistances, ultimately genetic interpretations, recollections and reconstructions and working through. Such that the transference is related to its genetic origins, the analyst thereby emerges in his true, i.e., real, identity to the patient, the transference is putatively ‘resolved’. To the extent that one follows the traditional view that all resistances, including the transference itself, is ultimately directed against the restoration of early memories as, this is a convincing formulation. Is that, only to say, that in his own right as such as having to a certain tightly logical quality? However, we know that it this is not so readily accomplished, apart from the special intrapsychic considerations described afterward by Freud in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’. Although in a favourable case, much of the cognitive interpretative work can be accomplished, there remains the fact that cognition responsibility, in its bare sense, does not necessarily lead to the subsidence of powerful dynamism, to the withdrawal of ‘cathexes’ from importantly real objects. For, as mentioned, a short while ago, the analyst is a real and living object, apart from the representations with which the transference invests him, and which are interpretable as such, for which there is no, at any time a seldom, a confusing interrelations and commonly of the emergent responses, due to the same old seeking, and this is directed toward a new individual in his own right, both are important, furthermore, there are large and important ones of overlapping. Apart from such considerations, even the explicitly incestuous transference is currently experienced (as, at least in good part) by a full-grown adult (like the original oedipus), instead of a totally and actually helpless child. To be sure, the latter state is reflected in the emergent transference elements of instinctual striving, but it is subject to analysis, and the residual is something significant, if not totally different. It is these residual sexual wish, presumably directed toward the person of the analyst, as such, which must be displaced to others, if, as generally agreed, the revival of infantile fantasies and strivings in the biologically mature adolescent presents a new and special problem, one must assume distinctiveness of experience for the adult, although it is true that in the majority of instances, adequate solution is favoured by the adult state. There is, in any case, a residual relationship between persons who have worked together in a prolonged, arduous and intimate relationship, which, strictly speaking, are reversibly disconnected or divorced of services, in that the transference merely ushers out the retirement for which its rendering retreat of that state of mind or feeling by an inner avoidance of something usually felt as unpleasant or pronounced for it’s adverse but mutual colouration. Blending to some confusion between the two spheres of feeling. The general tendency is that both components are fully gratified to some degree. But, there is the ubiquitous power of the residual primordial transference, yet, argue to cling to an omnipotent partisan to resist the displacement of its ‘sublimated’ anaclitic aspects, even if the various representation of the wishes for bodily intimacy has been thoroughly analysed and successfully displaced. The outcome is largely the transference of the transference, as mentioned earlier, in a different context. For everyday reality can provide no actual answer to such cravings. In this connection, note, Freud’s genial envy of Pfister. If the man of faith finds this gratification in revealing religion, others in a wide range of secular beliefs and ‘leaders’ the modern rational and sceptical intellectual is less fortunate in this respect. Presumably free, he is prone to invest even intellectual disciplines or the proponents with inappropriate expectations and partisan passions, but, least of mention, that within these fields of analytical and theoretical thought, is not to provide exceptions to this tendency.
Though if one is to maintain and beneficially confine its bothering of reservations about the clarity of conceptualization, the explanatory discussion of Kohut and Seitz, is a very useful contribution to the direct complication or which by some understanding the awkwardness of oneself. Both Loewald and Kohut have deliberately associated a special but the different use of one of Freud’s three conceptions of transference, i.e., the transference from the unconscious to the preconscious.
Yet, to furthering comments on primordial transference, at least potentially, are largely psychological (mental) component, the concept of ‘transference of the transference’ would be applicable to this component. For it does appear that certain aspect of the search for the omnipotent and omniscient caretaking parents are implicitly practical as virtually capable for being turned to use or account for its functional practicability for something of a process or the procedure for being all but the essential purpose to come to or tend toward a common point, for which are the knowledgeable information or ideas, is nothing but causative effectuality. As suggested earlier, there are important qualitative and quantitative distinctions in the mode of persistence and such strivings, however, even to the extent that they are detached from the analyst and carried into some reasonably appropriate expression in everyday life, they retain at least a subtle quality which contravenes reality, one which derives from earliest infancy, and remains - to this extent - a transference. ‘Santa Claus’ lives on, where one might least expect to meet him, whether as a donor of miracle drug or of far more complex panaceas.
If one prescribes to this parasymbiotic transference drive, a true primordial origin, it is necessary to take cognizance of certain important concepts dealing with the earliest period of life. If we assume a powerful original organismic drive toward an original ‘object’, a striving to nullify separation from the beginning, how does this make something legally valid or operative usually by formal approval or sanctioned with concepts such as ‘primary narcissism’ or the ‘objectless phase’ or ‘the primary psycho physiological self’ (We note in passing that there are those who do not accept these as usually construed in the technique of Balint), for example, or Fairbairn or - conspicuously - Melanie Klein. These are states, variously defined or conceived, which apply to the earliest neonatal period, in which life, to state more simply, exists only as the potential in physiological processes. Since there is (we postulate) no clear awareness of self-withdrawal from the mother, there can be no ‘mentally’ represented or experienced drive to obliterate the separation (concerning oneself and object, conceiver of as separate, in a continuing sense). There are, of course, discharge phenomena, the precursors of purposive activity, and there are urgent physiological needs, directed toward fulfilment or relief, rather than toward an object as such. However, in relation to these physiological needs as archaistic precursors of object relationships, it must be noted that in all, except respiration and spontaneous sphincter relief (even in these instances, not without exception or reservation), the need fulfilment must be mediated by the primordial object (or her surrogate). There is also, of course, the uniquely important requirement for ‘holding’, in a literal expression, from the outset. The material partner in human symbiosis which supplies what the neonate cannot seek by ‘clinging’, as for Bowlty and Murphy, in the sense that must be experienced to the physiological ebb and flow of tension, even if restricted to the kinaesthetic, connected with a peripheral sensory registration, which is the protophase of the recognition of separation from the object or nonpresence of the object, as a painful instance of, her presence in apposition the converse? That the general context may be only in which the sense of unity is preponderant, or, more accurately, that there is no general awareness of ‘separation’ as such, means that the drive for union does not exist in a general psychological sense. It is, so to speak, satisfied. That object constancy, with its cognate ‘longing’, is quite a different experience from the urgencies of primitive need fulfilment is true, however, regardless of what may be added by maturational and developmental considerations, instinctual and perceptual, there is no reason to assume other than a core of developmental continuity from the earliest needs and their fulfilment to the later state, and some continuing degree of contingency based on them.
There is a very rough parallel in the way certain analytic patients, before a firm relationship with the analyst is established, signal certain primitive experiences and tendencies in special reactions to the end of the hour, to the nonvisibility of the analyst, to interruption of their association, to failure of the analyst to talk, and similar matters. We must note that in the basic formation of the ego is evident amongst the primitive reactions and beyond to separations, in the form of very early identifications as based on care taking functions. Certainly in the very development of autonomous ego of the mother’s investment in the, have a decisive role in the character of the their development. And in the case of object constancy, in its connotation of libidinal cathexis, where is no need whatsoever (emotional or otherwise) is needed for prolonged periods. The importance of the object is, to put it mildly, liable to deteriorate, or to differ complicating aggressive change. Probably the characteristic feature of later developing relations to the object (love and the wish for love), as separate if not always separated from demonstrable primitivity, in the need fulfilment, have a special relationship to those ‘ancillary’ aspects of neonatal nurture, whose lack has been shown to be an actual threat to life in some instances, not to speak of sound emotional development. So that from the first, regardless of the assumed state of libidinal (and aggressive) economy, or the assumed state of psychological nondifferentiation between self and potential object, there are critical percussive phenomena, objectively observed, and probably prototypic subjective experiences of separation, which are the forerunners of all subsequent experiences of the kind. One may generalize to the effect that, with maturation and development, secondary identifications, and the various other processes of ‘internalization’ in its broadest sense, the problem of separation and its mastery becomes correspondingly more complex, and changes with the successive phase of life, but never entirely disappears.
In the view of the psychoanalytic situation described earlier, the latent mobilization of experiences of separation stimulated by the situational structure awakens the driving primordial urge to undo or to master the painful separations which it represents, usually embodied in the various forms of clinical transference that which we are familiar. One legitimate gratification which tends to mitigate superfluous transference regression is the transmission of understanding that at times, are thought that by the ‘mature transference’, in effect, the ‘therapeutic alliance’ or a group of mature ego functions which enter into such an alliance. Now, there is one blurring and overlapping at the conceptual edges in both instances, but the concept as such is largely distinct from either one, as it is from the primitive transference, which we have been discussing. Whether the concept is thought by others to comprehend a demonstrable actuality, which is a further question. This question, of course, can only follow on conceptual clarity. This in saying, of a nonrational urge, not directly dependent on the perception of immediate clinical purposes, a true transference in the sense that it is displaced (in currently relevant form) from the parent of early childhood to the analyst. Its content is not anti-sensational, but largely non-sensual of sometimes transitional, as the child’s pleasure in the assemblages of ‘dirty words’ and encompasses a special and not minuscule sphere of the object relationship: The wish to understand, and to be understood, the wish to be given understanding, i.e., teaching, specifically by the parent (or later surrogate); the wish to be taught to use ingenuity in making or doing o r achieving an end through the actions in a nonpunitive way, corresponding to the growing perception of hazard and conflict and very likely the implicit wish to be provided with and taught channels of substitutional drive discharge. With this, there may well be a wish, corresponding to that element in Loewald’s description of therapeutic process, to be seen in terms of one’s developmental potentialities by the analyst. No doubt, the list could be extended into many subtleties, details, and variations. However, one should not omit to specify that, in its peak development, it would include the wish for increasingly accurate interpretations and the wish to facilitate such interpretations by providing adequate material ultimately, of course, by identification, to participate in, or even be the author of the interpretations. The childhood system of wishes which underlies the transference is a correlate of biological maturation, and the latent (i.e., teachable) autonomous ego function, appearing with it, however, there is a drive-like quality in the participation phenomena, which disqualifies any conception of the urge’s identical with the functions. No one who has ever watched a child importune a parent with questions, or experiment with new words, or solicit her interests in a new game, or demand a storytelling or reading, can doubt this. That this powerful support and integration in the ego identification with a loved parent is undoubtedly true, just as it is true of the identification with an analyst toward whom a positive relationship has been established. That ‘functional pleasure ‘ inscribes the part, where certain specific ego energies, perhaps very likely the ego’s own urge to extend its hegemony in the personality. However, it can be stressed in the derive element, even the special phase configurations and colourations, and with its importance of object relations, libidinal and aggressive, for a specific reason. For just as the primordial transference seeks to undo separation, in a sense to obviate object relationships as we know them, the ‘mature transference’, tends toward separation and individuation, and increasing contact with the environment, optimally with a large affirmative (increasing neutralized) relationship toward the original object toward whom (or her surrogates) a different dynamic of demands is now increasingly directed. The further considerations which has led to the emphasis that the drive-like element in these attitudes are integrated phenomena, as examples of ‘multiple functional’ rather than the discrete exorcise of function or functions, is the conviction that there is a continuing dynamic relation of relative interchangeability between the two series, at least based on the response to gratifications in a significant zone of complicated energetic overlap, possibly including the phenomenon of neutralization. That the empirical ‘interchangeability’ is limited, and that goes without saying, that in no way diminishes its decisive importance. The linguistic communications as in mention, that the excessive transference neurosis regression, which can seriously vitiate the affirmative psychoanalytic process, finds a prototype in the regressive behaviour and demands of certain children, who do not receive their share of teaching, ‘attention’, play, nonseductive, affectionate demonstration, as to use the quality of being appropriate or valuable to some end, even the act or practice of using something or the state of being used to which of responsible interests in development, and similar matters, from their parents. In the psychnalytic situation, both the gratifications offered by the analyst and the freedom of expression by the patient, are diversely limited and concentrated, practically entirely (in the every day demonstrable sense) in the sphere of linguistic expression, on the analyst’s side, further, in the transmission of understanding.
Whereas, the primordial transference exploits the primitive aspects of linguistic communication, by expressing the mature transference as to advocate the seeking mastery of the outer and inner environments, a mastery to which the mature elements in speech contribute importantly, for which these are stressed upon the clear-cut genetic prototype for the free associating its interpretative dialogue is the original learning and teaching of speech, the dialogue between child and mother. It is interesting to note that just as the profundities of interests between people who often include - in the service of the ego - transitory introjection and identifications, of the very word ‘communication’, representing the central ego function of speech, from which is a closely intimate relation to the etymologically certain, in actual usages, to the word chosen for that major of religious sacrament for that which is the physical ingestion of the body and blood of the Deity. Perhaps, this is just another suggestion that the oldest of individual problems does, after all, continue to seek its solution, in its own terms if only in a minimal sense, and in channels so remote as to be unrecognizable.
The mature transference is a dynamic and integral part of the therapeutic alliance, alone with the tender aspect of the erotic transference, even more attenuated (and more dependable) friendly feeling of adult type, and the ego identification with the analyst. Indispensable, of course, are the genuine adult need for help, the crystallizing rational and intuitive appraisal of the analyst, the adult sense of confidence in him, and innumerable other nuances of adult thought and feeling. With these, giving a driving momentum and power to the analytic process, but always, by its very nature, a potential source of resistance, and always requiring analysis, is the primordial transference and its various appearances in the specific therapeutic transference. That it is, if well managed, not only a reflection of the repetition compulsion in its menacing sense, but a living presentation from the id, seeking new solutions, and trying again, so to speak, to find a place in the patient’s conscious and effective life, has important affirmative potentialities. This has been specifically emphasized by Nunberg, Lagache and Loewald among others. Loewald has recently elaborated very effectively the idea of ‘ghosts’ seeking to become ‘ancestors’ based on an early figure of speech of Freud. The mature transference, in its own infantile right, provides some of the unique qualities of propulsive force, which comes from the world of feeling, rather than the world of thought. If one views it in a purely figurative sense, that fraction of the mature transference which derives from ‘conversion’ is somewhat like propulsive fraction as the wind in a boats sailing to windward currents into motion, the strong headwind, the ultimate source of both resistance and propulsion, is the primordial transference. This view, however, should not displace the original and independent, if cognate, a favourable tide or current would also be required. It is not that the mature transference is itself entirely exempt from analytic clarification and interpretation. For one thing, in common with other childhood spheres of experience, there may have been traumas in this sphere, punishments, serious defects or lacks of parental communication, Listening, attention or interest. In general, this is probably far more important than has hitherto appeared in our prevalent paradigmatic approach to adult analysis, even taking into account the considerable changes due to the growing interest in ego psychology. ‘Learning’ in the analysis can, of course, be a troublesome intellectualizing resistance. Furthermore, both the patient’s communications and his receptions and utilization of interpretations may exhibit only too clearly, as sometimes in the case of other ego mechanisms, their origin in and tenacious relation to instinctual or anaclitic dynamism; the longing implement out of silence for which the analyst is to override the uncritical acceptance (or rejection) of interpretations, in that the patient revealingly is to mention the unmindful assimilation, fluently, rich, endlessly detailed associations without spontaneous reflection or integration. In the direct demands for solution of moral and practical probability for an entirely intellectual scope, and a variety of others. It may and always be easy to discriminate between the utilization of speech by an essentially instinctual demand, and an intellectual or linguistic trait or having to be determined by specific factors in their own developmental sphere, however, the underlying and essentially genuine dynamism which have to continue to be placed for a notable time interval or remain to an arbitrary or conventional character most favoured to the purposes of processes of analysis, as it was to the original processes of maturational development, communication, and benign separation. Lagache, on the desirability of separating the current unqualified usage, ‘positive’ and ’negative’ transference, as based on the patient‘s immediate state of feeling, from a classification based on the essential effect on analytic processes. Yet, the later of mature transference is, in general, a ‘positive transference’.
Concerning considerations in the transference neurosis, and the problem of transference interpretation, may be offered at this point. The whole situational structure of analysis (in contrast with other personal relationships), its dialogue of free association and interpretation, and its deprivations as to most ordinary cognitive and emotional interpersonal drives that tend toward the separation of discrete transferences from their synthesis with one another and with defences in character or symptoms, and with deepening regression, toward a contuative enactment of the essential of the infantile neurosis, in the transference neurosis. In other relationships, the ‘give and take’ aspects - gratifying aggressive, punitive or otherwise actively responsive, and the open mobility of searching for alternative or greater satisfaction - exert a profound dynamic and economic influence, so that only extraordinary situations, or transference of pathological character, or both, occasion to comparable regression.
It is a curious fact, whereas the dynamic meaning to the importance of the transference neurosis have been well established since Freud gave this the phenomenon a central position in his clinical thinking, the clinical reference, when the term is used, remains variable and somewhat ambiguous. For example, Greenson, in his excellent recent paper, speaks of it as appearing, ‘when the analyst and the analysis become the central concern in the patient’s life’. However, previous remarks in this connection, for which it is worthwhile to specify certain aspects of Greenson’s definition, for the term ‘central’ is somewhat ambiguous, as to its specific reference. Certainly, the term could apply to the symbolic position of the analyst in relation to the patient’s experiencing ego and the symbolically decisive position which he correspondingly assumes in the relation to the other important figures in the patient’s current life. However, while the analysis is in any case, and for multiple reasons, exceedingly important the seriously involved patient, there is a free observing portion of is ego, also involved, not in the same sense as that involved in the transference regression and revived in infantile conflicts. And here is here being, of course, always the integrated adult personalty, however diluted in may seem at times, of its rarity, although certainly does occur, that the analysis actually exceeds the quality or state of being of notable worth or influence that the other major concerns, attachments, and responsibilities of the patient’s life, nor is it desirable that his should occur, on the other hand, if construed with proper attention to the economic considerations as mentioned, the concept is important, both theoretically and clinically. In the theoretical direction to the assumption that there is a continuing system of object relationships and conflict situations, most important in the unconscious representations, but participating to some degree in all others, deriving in a successive series of transference from the experiences of separation from the original object, the mother. In this sense, the analyst’s applicability to a uniquely important portion of the patient‘s personality, the portion that ‘never grew up’, to maintain a central figure. In the clinical sense, to call or direct attention especially to a supposed cause, source, or to refer to the importance of the transference neurosis as outlining for the essential and central analytic task, providing by its very currency and demonstrability a relatively secure cognitive base for procedural duties. By its inclusion of the patient’s essential psychopathological processes and tendencies, in their original functional connection, it offers, in its resolution or marked reduction, the most formidable level for analytic cure. Nonetheless, transference neurosis must be seen in its interweaving with the patient’s extra-analytic system of personal contacts. The relationship to the analyst may influence the course of relationships to others, in the same sense that the clinical neurosis did, except that the former is alloplastic, relatively exposed, and subject to constant interpretation. It is also an important fact that, except in those rare instances where the original dyadic relationship appears to turn, the analyst, even in the strict transference sphere, cannot be assigned all the transference role simultaneously. Other actors are required. He may at times oscillate with confusing rapidity between the status of mother and father, but he is usually predominantly in one of the roles for long periods, someone else representing the other. Furthermore, apart from ‘acting out’, complicated and mutually inconsistent attitudes of the anterior apprehensions for realizing often about something not generally realized in the verbalization, may require the seeking of other transference objects, i.e., The husband or wife, friend, another analyst and so forth. Children, even the patient’s own children, may be invested with strivings of the patient, displaced from the analysis, even experience the impulses which they would wish to call forth in the analyst. The range is extensive, varied, and complicated, requiring constant alertness. Transference interpretation therefore often has a necessarily paradoxical inclusiveness, which is an important reality of technique. There is another aspect, and that is the dynamic and economic impact of the intimate and actual dramatist personate of the transference neurosis in the progress of the analysis as such, and on the patient ‘s motivation, as well as his real lifer avenues for recovery. For the persons in his milieu may fulfill their ‘positive’ or ‘negative ‘ roles in transference drama, which may facilitate or impede interpretative effectiveness, they provide the substantial and dependable real life gratification which ultimately facilitate the analysis of the residual analytic transference, or their capacities or attitudes may occasion overload of the anaclitic and instinctual needs in the transference which renders the same process far more difficultly. In the most unhappy instances, there can be a serious undercounting of the motivation for basic change.
There is also the fundamental question of the role of the transference interpretation. At the Marienbad Symposium most of Strachey’s colleagues appeared to accept the essential import of his contribution and thus unique significance of the transference interpretations, despite the various reservations as to detail and emphasis on other important aspects of the therapeutic process. Nevertheless, there are still many who, if not in doubt regarding the great value of transference interpretations are inclined to doubt their uniqueness, and to stress the importance of economic considerations in determining the choice as to whether transference or extratransference interpretations may be indicated. Now, apart from the realistic considerations mentioned in the preceding passage (in a sense the necessarily ‘distributed’ character of a variable fraction of transference interpretation). There is in fact that the extra-analytic life of the patent often provides indispensable data fo the understanding of detailed complexities of his psychic functioning, because of the sheer variety of its references, some of which cannot be reproduced in the relationship to the analyst. For example, there is no repartee (in the ordinary sense ) in the analysis. The way the patient handles the dialogue with an angry employee may be importantly revealing. The same may be true of the quality of his reaction to a real danger of dismissal. There is not only the realities, but the ‘formal’ aspects of this responses. These expressions of personality remain important, even though his ‘acting out‘ of the transference (assuming this was this was the case) may have been more important, and, of course, requiring transference interpretation. Furthermore, they remain useful, if discriminatingly and conservatively treated, even if they are inevitably always subject that epistemological reservations, which haunts so much of analytic data. Of course, the ‘positive’ transference has a role in the utilization of such interpretations that what enables the patent to listen to them and them seriously.
In an operational sense, it would seem that extratransference interpretations cannot set aside, or underestimated in importance, but the unique effectiveness of transference interpretations is not thereby disestablished. No other interpretation is free, within reason, of the doubt introduced by not really knowing the ‘other person’s’ participation in love, or quarrel or criticism or whatever the issue. And no other situation provides the patient the combined sense of cognitive acquisition, with the experience of complete personal tolerance and acceptance, that is implicit in an interpretation by an individual who is an object of the emotion, drive, or even defences, which are active at the time. There is no doubt that such interpretations must not only (in common with all others) include personal tact, but must be offered with special care as to their intellectual reasonability, in relation to the immediate context, lest they defeat their essential purpose. It is not too often likely that a patient who has just been jilted in a long-standing love affair, and suffering exceedingly, will find an immediate interpretation that his suffering is due to the fact that the analyst does not reciprocate his love, even though a dynamism in this general sphere may be ultimately demonstrable, and acceptable to the patient. On the other hand, once the transference neurosis is established, with accompanying subtle (sometime gross) colouration of the patient’s life, th n more far-reaching anticipatory, transference interpretations are indicated, for, if all of the patient’s libidinal and aggression is not, in fact, invested in the analyst, he has at least an unconscious role in all important emotional transactions, and, if the assumption is correct that the regressive drive, mobilized by the analytic situation, is in the direction of restoration of a single all-encompassing relationship, specified pragmatically in the individual case by the actually attained level of development, then there is a dynamic factor at work, importantly meriting interpretation as such, to the extent that available material supports it. This would be the immediate clinical application on the material regarding the ‘cognitive lag’ or ‘cognitive fall-back’.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, resides in a mental illness that some people develop after experiencing traumatic or life-threatening events. Such events include warfare, rape and other sexual assaults, violent physical attacks, torture, child abuse, natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, and automobile or aeroplane crashes. People who attest of the traumatic events may also develop the disorder.
Post-traumatic stress disorder in war veterans is sometimes called shell shock or combat fatigue. In victims of sexual or physical abuse, the disorder has been called rape trauma or battered woman syndrome. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) adopted the current name of the disorder in 1980.
In the late 1960's and early 1970's, mass demonstrations erupted throughout the United States protesting US involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975). Thousands of veterans joined together in a national organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, that supported and influenced the antiwar movement. In this transcript from an April 22, 1971, hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, committee chairman Senator J. William Fulbright indicated his sympathy for the antiwar movement. Fulbright’s comments were followed by the testimony of Vietnam veteran John Kerry, who called for an end to the war. Kerry also detailed what he believed to be the war’s negative effect in both Vietnam and the United States. Kerry became a Democratic senator from Massachusetts in 1985.
People with this disorder relive the traumatic event again and again through nightmares and disturbing memories during the day. They sometimes have flashbacks, in which they suddenly lose touch with reality and relive images, sounds, and other sensations from the trauma. Because of their extreme anxiety and disruptive opposition to events, they try to avoid anything that reminds them of it. They may seem emotionally numb, detached, irritable, and easily startled. They may feel guilty about surviving a traumatic event that killed other people. Other symptoms include trouble concentrating, depression, and sleep difficulties. Symptoms of the disorder usually begin shortly after the traumatic event, although some people may not show symptoms for several years. If left untreated, the disorder can last for years.
Post-traumatic stress disorder can severely disrupt one’s life. Besides the emotional pain of reliving the trauma, the symptoms of the disorder may cause a person to think that he or she is ‘going crazy.’ In addition, people with this disorder may have unpredictable, angry outbursts at family members. At other times, they may seem to have no affection for their loved ones. Some people try to mask their symptoms by abusing alcohol or drugs. Others work very long hours to prevent any ‘down’ periods when they might relive the trauma. Such actions may delay the onset of the disorder until these individuals retire or become sober.
Studies have set or to bring into a new found control from 1 to 14 percent of people that suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder at some point during their lives. The findings vary widely due to differences in the populations studied and the research methods used. Among people who have survived traumatic events, the prevalence appears to be much higher. The disorder may be particularly prevalent among people who have served in combat. For example, one study of veterans of the Vietnam War (1959-1975) found that veterans exposed to a high level of combat were nine times more likely to have post-traumatic stress disorder than military personnel who did not serve in the war zone of Southeast Asia.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is an extreme reaction to extreme stress. In moments of crisis, people respond in ways that allow them to endure and survive the trauma. Afterward those responses, such as emotional numbing, may persist even though they are no longer necessary.
Not everyone who experiences a traumatic event develops post-traumatic stress disorder. Several factors influence whether people develop the disorder. Those who experience severe and prolonged trauma are more likely to develop the disorder than people who experience less severe trauma. Additionally, those who directly witness or experience death, injury, or attack are more likely to develop symptoms.
People may also have been existing biological and psychological vulnerabilities that make them more likely to develop the disorder. Those with histories of anxiety disorders in their families may have inherited a genetic predisposition to react more severely to stress and trauma than other people. In addition, people’s life experiences, especially in childhood, can affect their psychological vulnerability to the disorder. For example, people whose early childhood experiences made them feel that events are unpredictable and uncontrollable have a greater likelihood than others of developing the disorder. Individuals with a strong, supportive social network of friends and family members seem somewhat protected from developing post-traumatic stress disorder.
Treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder may involve psychotherapy, psychoactive drugs, or both. Psychotherapists help individuals confront the traumatic experience, work through their strong negative emotions, and overcome their symptoms. Many people with post-traumatic stress disorder benefit from group therapy with other individuals suffering from the disorder. Physicians may prescribe antidepressants or anxiety-reducing drugs to treat the mood disturbances that sometimes accompany the disorder.
At the arriving considerations that are marked and noted, through which the essence of functional dynamics as based of the transference in the psychoanalytic process or the basic underlying the most basic of beliefs that in politics there is neither good nor evil, however, in that something that forms part of the minimal body, character or structure of that thing predetermines the properties to the good life. Nonetheless, most psychoanalysts maintain that schizophrenic patients cannot be treated psychoanalytically because they are too narcissistic to develop with the psychotherapist as interpersonal relationship that is sufficiently reliable and consistent for psychoanalytic work. Freud, Fenichel and others have recognized that a new technique of approaching patients psychoanalytically must be found if analysts are to work with psychotics. Among those who have worked successfully in recent years with schizophrenics, Sullivan, Hill, and Karl Menninger and his staff have made various modifications of their analytic approach. The techniques that are in use with psychotics is different from our approach to psychoneurotics. This is not a result of the schizophrenic’s inability to build up a consistent personal relationship with the therapist but due to his extremely intense and sensitive transference reactions.
Let us see first what the essence of the schizophrenic’s transference reactions are and how we try to meet these reactions.
We think of a schizophrenic as a person who has had serious traumatic experiences in early infancy at a time when his ego and its ability to examine reality were not yet developed. These early traumatic experiences seem to furnish the psychological basis for the pathogenic influence of the flustrations of later years. At this early time the infant lives grandiosely in a narcissistic world of his own. His needs and desires seem to be taken care of by something vague and indefinite which he does not yet differentiate. As Ferenczi noted, they are expressed by gestures and movements since speech is as yet undeveloped. Frequently the child’s desires are fulfilled without any expression of them, a result that seems to him a product of his magical thinking.
Are a person’s characteristics primarily shaped by early influences, remaining relatively stable thereafter throughout life? Or does change spontaneously occur continuously throughout life? Many people believe that early experiences are formative, providing a strong or weak foundation for later psychological growth. This view is expressed in the popular saying ‘As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.’ From this perspective, it is crucial to ensure that young children have a good start in life. But many developmental scientists believe that later experiences can modify or even reverse early influences; studies show that even when early experiences are traumatic or abusive, considerable recovery can occur. From this vantage point, early experiences influence, but rarely determine, later characteristics.
Traumatic experiences in this early period of life will damage a personality more seriously than those occurring in later childhood such as are found in the history of psychoneurotics. The infant’s mind is more vulnerable the younger and less used it has been, further, the trauma has quickened the infant ‘s egocentricity. In addition early traumatic experiences shortens the only period in life in which an individual ordinarily enjoys the most security, thus endangering the ability to store up as it were a reasonable supplies of assurance and self-reliance for the individual’s later struggles through life. Thus, as such, a child sensitized considerably more toward the frustrations of later like than by later traumatic experiences. hence many experiences in later life which would mean little to a ‘healthy’ person and not much to a psychoneurotic, mean a great deal of pain and suffering to the schizophrenic. His resistance against frustration is easily exhausted.
Once he reaches his limit of endurance, he escapes the unbearable reality of his present life by attempting to reestablish the autistic, delusional world of the infant, but this is impossible because the content of his delusions and hallucinations are naturally coloured by the experiences of his whole lifetime.
How do these developments influence the patient’s attitude toward the analyst and the analyst’s approach to him?
Due to the very damage and the succeeding chain of frustrations which the schizophrenic undergoes before finally giving in to illness, he feels extremely suspicious and distrustful of everyone, particularly of the psychotherapist ho approaches him with the intent of intruding into his isolated world and personal life. To him the physician’s approach means the threat of being compelled to return to the frustrations of real life and to reveal his inadequacy to meet them or, - still worse – a repetition of the aggressive interference with his initial symptoms and peculiarities which he has encountered in his previous environment.
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. Ours 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 it is 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 is 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 to conclude 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 one’s self 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 just like it 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 much than 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 position 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 have 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 a mutative interpretation have been effected. The analyst’s power as auxiliary super-ego may be for two very different reasons. It may be that the id-impulses was trying to bring out were 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 towards 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 real 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 first encourages 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 shall 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 - in as 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.
In the classical conception of transference the patient was really concerned with the major persons in his childhood when addressing the analyst. More recently, the patient has come to be viewed as apt to be unconsciously engaged with the analyst while ostensibly absorbed in somebody else. To be sure, it may then be taken for granted that the analyst, inturn, stands for, say, a parent. But usually that point is not stressed, and the reaction which is interpreted is not one where the reaction does displace toward the analyst, but instead, away from him. Formerly, the perceptiveness of the analyst was to reveal the parent behind himself; now he may discover himself behind the parent or spouse. A typical contemporary case is a patient with ‘a disposition to pick quarrels with her husband because of his silence’, a conduct which ‘diverted a problem from the couch, where she did not verbalize her complaints about the analyst’s silence’. The analyst may thus always be present though never in the patient’s conscious mind’. ‘The quarrels with the husband became . . . the sole preoccupation of the patient’s and the sole content of the analytic sessions (Kanzer, 1961). Thus they were filled with what may be called as the ‘reactions of disguised transference’.
Of course, both interpretations of the transference in the here and now and genetic transference interpretation are valid and constitute a sequence. We presume that a resistance to the transference ultimately rests on the displacement onto the analysts of attitudes from the past.
Because Freud’s case histories focus much more on the yield of analysis than on the details of the process, they are readily but perhaps incorrectly construed as emphasizing work outside the transference much more than work within the transference, and, even within the transference, emphasizing genetic transference interpretations much more than work with the transference in the here and now (Muslin and Gill, 1978). The example of Freud’s case reports may have played a role in what is to be considered as the common maldistribution of emphasis in these two respects - not enough on the transference and, within the transference, not enough on the here and now.
Transference interpretations in the here and now and genetic transference interpretations are, of course, exemplified in Freud’s writings and are in the repertoire of every analyst, but they are not distinguished sharply enough.
Both participants in the analytic situation are motivated to avoid these interactions. Flight away from the transference and to the past can be a relief to both the patient and the analyst.
These aligning measures have been divided into five categorical divisions and placed into the following parts: (1) The principle that the transference should be encouraged to expand as much as possible within the analytic situation because the analytic work is best done within the transference. (2) the interpretation of disguised allusion to the transference as a main technique for encouraging the expansion of the transference within the analytic situation, (3) the principle that all transference has a connection with something in the present actual analysis situation, (4) how the connection between transference and the actual analytic situation is used in interpreting resistance to the awareness of transference, and (5) the resolution of transference within the here and now and the role of genetic transference interpretation.
The importance of transference interpretations will surely be agreed to by all analysts, the greater effectiveness of transference interpretations than interpretations outside the transference will be agreed to by many, but what of the relative roles of interpretation of the transference and interpretation outside the transference?
Freud can be read either as saying that the analysis of the transference in auxiliary to the analysis of the neurosis or that the analysis of the transference is equivalent to the analysis of the neurosis. The first position is stated in his saying (1913) that the disturbance of the transference has to be overcome by the analysis of transference resistance in order to get on with the work of analysing the neurosis. It is also implied in his reiteration that the ultimate task of analysis is to remember the past, to fill in the gap in memory. The second position is stated in his saying that the victory must be won on the field of the transference (1912) and that the mastery of the transference neurosis ‘coincide with getting rid of the illness which was originally brought to the neurosis (1917). In this second view, he says that after the resistance are overcome, memories appear relatively without difficulty.
It can be agreed that his principal emphasis fails on the second position. He wrote once, in summary, ‘Thus our therapeutic work falls into two phases in the first, all the libido is forced from the symptoms into the transference and concentrated there, in the second, the struggle is waged around this new object and the libido is liberated from it`(1912).
The detailed demonstration that he advocated that the transference should be encouraged to expand as much as possible within the analytic situation lies in clarification that resistance is primarily expressed by repetition, and repetition takes place both within and outside the analytic situation, but that the analyst seeks to deal with it primarily within the analytic situation, that repetition can be not only in the motor sphere (acting) but also in the psychical sphere, and that the psychical sphere is not confined to remembering but includes the present, too.
Freud`s emphasis that the purpose of resistance is to prevent remembering can obscure his point that resistance shows itself primarily by repetition, whether inside or outside the analytic situation. `The greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition)replace remembering`. Similarly in `The Dynamics of Transference` Freud said that the main reason that the transference is so well suited to serve the resistance is that the unconscious implies do not want to be remembered . . . but endeavour to reproduce themselves . . . (1918), the transference is a resistance primarily insofar as it is a repetition.
The point can be restated in terms of the relation between transference and resistance. The resistance expresses itself in repetition, that is, in transference both inside and outside the analytic situation. To deal with the transference. Therefore, is equivalent to dealing with the resistance. Freud emphasized transference within the analytic situation so strongly that it has come to mean only repetition within the analytic situation, even though, conceptually speaking, repetition outside the analytic situation is transference too, and Freud once used the term that way. `We soon perceive that the transference is itself only a piece of repetition and that the repetition is a transference of the forgotten past not only onto the analyst but also onto all the other aspects of the current situation. We . . . find . . . the compulsion to repeat, which now replaces the impulsion to remember, not only in his personal attitude to his analyst but also in every other activity and relationship which may occupy his life at the time . . . (1914).
It is important to realize that the expansion of the repetition inside the analytic situation, whether or not in a reciprocal relationship to repetition outside the analytic situation, is the avenue to control the repetition: `The main instrument . . . for curbing the patient`s compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference. We render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field`(1914).
Kanzer has discussed this issue well in his paper on ‘The Motor Sphere of the Transference’ (1966). He writes of a ‘double-pronged stick-and-carrot’ technique by which the transference is fostered within the analytic situation and discouraged outside the analytic situation. The ‘stick’ is the principle of abstinence as exemplified in the admonition against making important decisions during treatment, and the ‘carrot’ is the opportunity afforded the transference to expand within the treatment, ‘in almost complete freedom’ as in a ‘playground’ (Freud, 1914). As Freud put it, ‘Provided only that the patient shows compliance enough to respect the necessary conditions of the analysis, we regularly succeed in giving all the symptoms of the illness a new transference meaning, and in replacing his ordinary neurosis by a ‘transference neurosis’ of which he can be cured by the therapeutic work’ (1914).
The reason it is desirable for the transference to be expressed within the treatment is that there, it `is at every point accessible to our intervention`(1914). In a later statement he made the same point this way. `We have followed this new edition - the transference-neurosis - of the old disorder from its start, we have observed its origin and growth, and we are especially well able to find our way about in it since, as its object, we are situated at its very centre, (1917), it is not that the transference is forced into the treatment, but that it is spontaneously but implicitly present and is encouraged to expand there and become explicit
Freud emphasized acting in the transference so strongly that one can overlook the repetition in the transference does not necessarily mean it is enacted. Repetition need not go as far as motor behaviour, it can also be expressed in attitudes, feelings, and intentions, and, indeed, the repetition often does take such form rather than motor action. The importance of making this clear is that Freud can be mistakenly read to mean that repetition in the psychical sphere can only mean remembering the past, is when he writes that the analyst as prepared for a perpetual struggle with his patient to keep in the psychical sphere all the impulses which the patient would like to direct into the motor sphere, and he celebrates it as a triumph for the treatment if he can bring it about that something the patient wishes to discharge in action is disposed if through the work of remembering (1914).
It is true that the analysts efforts is to convert acting in the motor sphere into awareness in the psychical sphere, but transference may be in the psychical sphere to begin with, albeit disguised. The psychical sphere includes awareness in the transference as well as remembering.
One of the objections one hears, from both analysts and patient, to a heavy emphasis on interpretation of associations about the patient`s real life primarily in terms of the transference is that it means the analyst is disregarding the importance of what goes on in the patient`s real life. The criticism is not judiciable. To emphasize the transference meaning is not to deny or belittle other meanings, but to focus on the one of several meanings of the content that is the most important for the analytic process, for the reasons of positing the addition for one coming to any falsifiable conclusion.
Another way in which interpretations of resistance to the transference can be, or at lease appear to the patient to be, a belittling of the importance of the patient`s outside life is to make the interpretation as though the outside behaviour is primarily an acting out of the transference. The patient may undertake some actions in the outside world as an expression of and resistance to the transference, that is, acting out. But the interpretation of associations about actions in the outside world as having implications for the transference need mean only that the choice of outside action to figure in the associations is co-determined by the need to express a transference indirectly. It is because of the resistance to awareness of the transference that the transference to be disguised. When the disguise is unmasked by interpretation, it becomes clear that, despite the inevitable differences between the outside situation and the transference situation, the content is the same for the analysis of the necrosis that coincide (Freud wrote that the mastering of the transference neurosis only coincides with getting rid of the illness which was originally brought to the treatment (1917)).
The analytic situation itself fosters the development of attitudes with primary determinants in the past, i.e., transference. The analyst’s reserve provides the patient with few and equivocal cues. The purpose of the analytic situation fosters the development of strong emotional responses, and the very fact that the patient has a neurosis means, as Freud said, that’ . . . it is a perfectly normal and intelligible thing that the libidinal cathexis [we would now add negative feelings] of someone who is partly unsatisfied, a cathexis which is held ready in anticipation, should be directly as well to the figure of the analyst (1912).
While the analytic setup itself fosters the expansion of the transference within the analytic situation, the interpretation of resistance to the awareness of transference will further this expansion.
There are important resistances on the part of both patient and analyst to awareness of the transference. On the patient’s part, this is because of the difficulty in recognizing erotic and hostile impulses toward the very person to whom they have to be disclosed. On the analyst’s part, this is because the patient is likely to attitude the very altitudes to him which are most likely to cause him discomfort. The attitudes the patient believes the analyst has toward him are often the ones the patient is least likely to voice, in a general sense because of a feeling that it is impertinent for him to concern himself with the analyst’s feelings, and in a more specific sense because the altitudes the patient ascribes to the analyst are often attitudes the patient feels the analyst will be comfortable about having ascribed to him. It is for this reason that the analyst must be especially alert to the attitudes the patient believes he has, not only to the attitudes the patient does have toward him. If the analyst is able to see himself as a participant in an interaction, as he will become much more attuned to this important area of transference, which might otherwise escape him.
The investigations of the altitudes ascribe to the analyst makes easier the subsequent investigation of the intrinsic factors in the patient that played a role in such ascription. For example, the exposure of the fact that the patient ascribes sexual interests in him to the analyst, and generally to the patient, makes easier the subsequent exploration of the patient’s sexual wish toward the analyst, and genetically the parent.
The resistance to the awareness of these altitudes are responsible for their appearing in various disguises in the patient’s manifested associations and for the analyst’s reluctance to unmask the disguise. The most commonly recognized disguise is by displacement, but identification is an equally important one. In displacement, the patient’s altitudes are narrated for being toward a third party. In identification, the patient attitudes to himself attitudes he believes the analyst has toward him.
To encourage the expansion of the transference within the analytic situation, the disguises in which the transference appears has to be interpreted in the case of displacement the interpretation will be of allusions to the transference in association not manifestly about the transference. This is a kind of interpretation every analyst often makes. In the case of identifications, the analyst interprets the attitude the patient ascribes to himself as an identification with an attitude he attitudes to the analyst. Lipton (1977) has recently described this form of disguise allusion in the transference with illuminating illustration.
In his autobiography, Freud wrote, ‘The patient remains under the influence of the analytic situation even though he is not directing his mental activities onto a particular subject. Justly in assuming that nothing will occur to him that has not some reference to the situation (1925). Since associations are obviously often not directed about the analytic situation, the interpretation of Freud’s remark rests on what he meant by the ‘analytic situation’.
It is believed that Freud’s meaning can be clarified by reference to a statement he made in, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. He said that when the patient is told to say whatever comes into his mind, his associations become directed by the ‘purposive ideas inherent in the treatment’ and that there are two such inherent regressive themes, one relating to the illness and the other - concerning which, Freud said, the patient has ‘no suspicion’; - relating to other analyst’s (1900), if the patient has ‘’no suspicion’ of the theme relating to the analyst (1900). If the patient has ‘no suspicions’ - relating to the analyst (1900). If the patient has ‘no suspicions’ of the theme relating to the analyst, such that the theme appears only in disguise, the patient‘s associations, it is contended that Freud’s remark not only specifies the themes inherent in the patient ‘s identifications’, but means that the associations are simultaneously directed by these two purposive ideas, not something by one and sometimes by the other.
One important reason that the early and continuing presence of the transference is not always recognized in that it is considered to be absent in the patient who is talking recognized is that it is considered to be absent in the patient who is talking freely and apparently without resistance. As (Muslin and Gill, 1976) pointed out in a paper on the early interpretation of transference resistance, to the transference is probably present from the beginning, even if the patient is talking apparently freely. The patient may well be talking about issues not manifestingly about the transference which are nevertheless, also allusions to the transference, but the analyst has to be alert to the pervasiveness of such allusory discernment about them.
The analyst should progress on the working assumption, that the patient’s associations have transference implications pervasively, that with which this assumption is not to be confused with denial or neglect of the current aspects of the analytic situation. It is theoretically always possible to give precedence to a transference interpretation if one can only discern it through its disguise by resistance. This is not to dispute the desirability of learning as much as one can about the patient, if only to be a position to make more correct interpretations of the transference. One therefore, does not interfere with an apparently free flow of associations, especially early, unless the transference threatens the analytic situation to the point where its interpretation is mandatary rather than optional.
With the recognition that even apparently freely associating patient may also be showing resistance to awareness of the transference, this formulation should not interfere as long a useful information being gathered should relace Freud’s dictum that the transference should not be interpreted until it becomes a resistance (1913).
It can be argued that every transference has some connection to some aspect of the current analytic situation, in the sense that the past can exert an influence only insofar as it exists in the present. Of course, all the determinants of a transference are current in the sense that what I am distinguishing is the current reality of the analytic situation, that is, what actually goes on between patient and analyst in the situation from how the patient is currently constituted as a result of his past.
All analysts would doubtlessly agree that there are both current and transferential determinants of the analytic situation, and probably no analyst would argue that a transference of the analytic situation, and probably no analyst would argue that a transference idea can be expressed without contamination, as it were, that is, without any connection to anything current in the patient-analyst relationship. Nevertheless, the implication of this fact for technique are often neglected in practice, as my next point is only to argue for the connection.
Several authors, e.g., Kohut 1959 and Loewald 1960, have pointed out that Freud`s early use of the term transference, in `The Interpretation of Dreams, in a connection not immediately recognizable as related to the present day use of the term, reveals the fallacy of considering that transference can be expressed free of any connection to the present. That early use was to refer to the fact that an unconscious idea cannot be expressed as such, but only as it becomes connected to a preconscious o r conscious content. In the phenomenon with which Freud was then concerned, the dream transference took place from an unconscious wish to a day residue. In `The Interpretation of Dreams, `Freud used the term transference both for the general rule that an unconscious content is expressible only as it becomes transferred to a preconscious or conscious content and for the specific application of this rule to a transference to the analyst. Just as the day residue is the point of attachment of the dream wish, so must there be an analytic-situation residue, though Freud did not use that term, as the point of attachment of the transference.
Analysts have always limited their behaviour, both in variety and intensity, to increase the extent to which the patient‘s behaviour is determined by his idiosyncratic interpretation of the analyst’s behaviour. In fact, analysts unfortunately sometimes limit the behaviour so much, as compared with Freud’s practice, that they even conceptualize the entire relationship with the patient matter of technique, with no nontechnical personal relation, as Liptop (1977) has pointed out.
But no matter how far the analyst attempts to carry this limitation of his behaviour, the very existence of the analytic situation provides the patient with innumerable cues which can enviable become his rationale for his transference responses. In other words, the current situation cannot be made to disappear - that is, the analytic situation is real. It is easy to forget this truism in one’s zeal to diminish the role of the current situation in determining the patient‘s responses. One can try to keep past and present determinants relatively perceptible from one another, but one cannot obtain either ‘pure culture‘. As Freud wrote: ‘I insist on this procedure [the couch], however, for its purpose and result are to prevent the transference from mingling with the patient’s associations imperceptibly, to isolate the transference and to allow it to come forward in due course sharply defined as a resistance’ (1913). Even ‘isolate’ is too strong a word in the light of the inevitable intertwining of the transference with the current situation.
If the analyst remains under the illusion that the current cues he provides to the patient can be reduced to the vanishing point, he may be led into a silent withdrawal, which is not too distant from the caricature of an analyst as someone who does refuse to have any personal relationship with the patient. What happens then is that silence has become a technique rather than merely an indication that the analyst is listening. The patient’s responses under such conditions can be mistaken fo uncontaminated transference when they are in fact transference adaptions to the actuality of the silence.
The recognition, from which it takes its point of departure, as it were, has a crucial implications for the technique of interpreting resistance to the awareness of transference, in that, if, the analyst becomes persuaded of the centrality of transference and the importance of encouraging the transference to expand within the analytic situation, he has to find the presenting and plausible interpretation of resistance to the awareness of transference he should make. Is that, his most reliable guide is the cues offered by what is actually going on in the analytic situation? : On the one hand, the events of the situation, such as change in time of session, or an interpretation made by the analyst, and, on the other hand, how the patient is experiencing the situation as reflected in explicit remarks about it, however, fleeting these may be. This is the primary yield for technique of the recognition that any transference must have a link to the actuality of the analytic situation. The cue points to the nature of the transference, just as the day residue for a dream may be a quick pointer of the latent dream thoughts. Attention to the current situation for a transference elaboration will keep the analyst from making mechanical transference interpretation, in which he interprets that there are allusions to the transference in association not manifestly about the transference, but without offering any plausible bias for the interpretation. Attention to the current stimulation offers some degree of protection against the analyst’s inevitability whose tendency to project his own views onto the patient, either because of countertransference or because of a preconceived theoretical bias about the content and hierarchical relationships in psychodynamics.
The analyst may be very surprised at what in his behaviour the patient finds important or unimportant, for the patient’s responses will be idiosyncratically determined by the transference, the patient’s responses may seem to be something the patient as well as the analyst consider trivial, because, as in displacement to a trivial aspect of the day residue of a dream, displacement can better serve resistance when it is to something trivial. Because it is connected to conflict-laden material, the stimulus to the transference may be difficult to find. It may be quickly disavowed, so that its presence in awareness is only transitory. With the discovery of the disavowed, the patient may also gain insight into how it repeats a disavowed earlier in his life. In his search for the present stimuli which the patient is responding transferentially, as the analyst must therefore remain alert to both fleeting and apparently trivial manifested reference to himself as well as in the events of the analytic situation.
If the analyst interprets the patient’s attitudes in a spirit of seeing their possible plausibility in the light of what information the patient does have, rather than in the spirit of either affirming or denying the patient’s views, the way is open for their further expression and elucidation. The analyst will be respecting the effort to be plausible and realistic, rather than seeing him as manufacturing his transference attitudes out of whole bodied material.
Importantly, is to make a transference interpretation plausible to the patient in terms of as current stimulus that, if the analyst is persuaded that the manifest content has important implications for the transference but he is unable to see a current stimulus for the attitude, he should explicitly say so if he decides to make the transference interpretation anyway. The patient himself may then be able to say what the current stimulus is.
It is sometimes argued that the analyst’s attention to his own behaviour is a precipitant for the transference, will increase the patient’s resistance to recognizing the transference. That, on the contrary, that because of the inevitable interrelationship of the current and transferential determinants, it is only through interpretation that they can be disentangled.
It is also argued that one must wait until the transference has reached optimal intensity before it can be advantageously interpreted. It is true that too hasty and interpretation of the transference can serve as a defensive function for the analyst and deny him the information he needs to make a more appropriate transference interpretation. But it is true that delay in interpreting transference interpretation, but it is also true that delay in interpreting runs the risk of allowing an unmanageable transference to develop. It is also true that deliberate delay can be a manipulation in the service of abreaction rather than analysis, and, like silence, can lead to a response to the actual situation which is mistaken for uncontaminated transference. Obviously important, is assumed in the issues of timing are involved, whereas an important clue to when a transference interpretation is apt and which one to makes lies in whether the interpretation can be made plausibly in terms of the determinant, namely, as something in the current analytic situation. Such as, in the approaching transference in the spirit of seeing how it appears plausibly realistic to the patient, it paves the way toward its further elucidation and expression.
Freud’s emphasis on remembering as the goal of the analytic work implies that remembering is the principal avenue to the resolution of the transference. But the delineation of the successive steps in the development of the analytic technique (1920) makes clear that he saw this development as a change from an effort to reach memories directly to the utilization of the transference as the necessary intermediacy to reaching the memories.
In contrast to remembering as the way the transference is resolved, Freud also described resistance for being primarily overcome in the transference, with remembering following relatively easily afterwards, ‘From the repetitive reactions which are exhibited in the transference we are led along the familiar paths to the awakening of the memories, which appear without difficulty, as it were, after the resistance has been overcome’ (1914), and ‘This revision of the process of repetition can be accomplished only in part in connection with the memory traces of the process which led to repression. The decisive part of the work’s achieved by creating in the patient’s relation to the analyst - in the ‘transference‘ new editions of the old conflicts . . . Thus, the transference becomes the battlefield on which all the mutually struggling forces should meet one another’ (1917). This is the primary indication for which Strachey (1934) classified in his seminal paper on the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.
There are two main ways in which resolution of the transference can take place through work with the transference in the here and now. The first lies in the clarification of what are the clues in the current situation which are the patient‘s point of departure force a transference elaboration. The exposure of the current point of departure at once raises the question of whether it is adequate to the conclusion drawn from it. The relating of the transference to a current stimulus is, after all, part of the patient‘s effort to make, the transference attitude plausibly determined by the present. The reverse and ambiguity of the analyst’s behaviour is what increases the ranges of apparently plausible conclusions the patient may draw. If an examination of the basis for the conclusion makes clear that the actual situation to which the patient responds is subject to other meanings than the one the patient has reached, he will more reality consider his pre-existing bias, that is to say, in that of transference.
Another critic of an earlier version of this paper suggested that, in speaking of the current relationship and the relation between the patient’s conclusion and the information on which they seem plausibly based, such in some absolute conception of what is real in the analytic situation, of which the analyst is the final arbiter. That is not the case, that what the patient must come to see is that the information he has is subject to other possible interpretations implies the very contrary to an absolute conception of reality. In fact, analyst and patient engage in a dialogue in a spirit of attempting to arrive at a consensus about reality, not about some factious absolute reality.
The second way in which resolution of the transference can take place within the work with the transference in the here and now is that in the very interpretation of the transference the patient had a new experience. He is being treated differently from how he expected to be. Analysts seem reluctant to emphasize his new experience, as though it endangers the role of insight and argue for interpersonal influence as the significant factor in change. Strachey’s emphasis on the new experience in the mutative transference interpretation has unfortunately been overshadowed by his views on introjection, which have been mistaken to advocate manipulating the transference. Strachey meant introjection of the more benign superego of the analyst only as a temporary strep on the road toward insight. Not only is the new experience not to be confused with the interpersonal influence of a transference gratification, but the new experience occurs together with insight into both the patient’s biassed expectation and the new experience. As Strachey points out, what is unique about the transference interpretation is that insight and the new experience take place in relation to the very person who was expected to behave differently, and it is this which gives the work in the transference, its immediacy and effectiveness. While Freud did stress the effective immediacy of the transference, he did not make the new experience explicit.
It is important to recognize that transference interpretation is not a matter of experience, in contrast to insight, but a joining of the two together, both are needed to bring about and maintain the desired changes in the patient. It is also important to recognize that no new techniques of intervention are required to provide the new experience. It is an inevitable accompaniment of interpretation of the transference in the here and now. It is often overlooked that, although Strachey said that only transference interpretations are outside the transference.
Rosenfeld (1972) has pointed out that clarification of material outside the transference is often necessary to know what is the appropriate transference interpretation, and that both genetic transference interpretations and extratransference interpretation play an important role in working through. Strachey said relatively little about working through, but surely nothing against the need for it, and he explicitly recognize a role for recovery of the past in the resolution of the transference.
In taking positions, as to emphasis the role of the analysis of the transference in the here and now, both in interpreting resistance to the awareness of transference and in working toward its resolution by relating to the actuality of the situation. In that of opinion or purpose with the evidence that extratransference and genetic transference interpretation and, of course, working through are important too, that the matter is one of emphasis. Also, interpretation of resistance to awareness of the transference should figure in the majority of sessions, and that if this is done by relating the transference to the actual analytic situation, the very same interpretation is a beginning of work to the resolution of the transference. To justify this view more persuasively would require detailed case material.
The concern and considerations that the Kleinian annalists who, many analysts feel, are in error in giving the analysis of the transference too great if not even as exclusive role in the analytic process. It is true that Kleinians emphasize the analysis of the transference more, in their writing at least, than do the general run of analysts. As, Anna Freud (1968) complained that the concept of transference has become overexpanded seems to be directed against the Kleinians. One of the reasons the Kleinians consider themselves the true followers of Freud in technique is precisely because of the emphasis they put on the analysis of the transference. Hanna Segal (1967), for example, writes, `To say that all communications are seen as communications about the patient`s phantasy as well as current external life is equivalent to saying that all communications contain something relevant to the transference situation. In Kleinian technique, the interpretation of the transference is often more central than in the classical technique.
As this point of view or way of regarding that Freud and transference had accedingly connected by simulating observations that we can only offer, that Freud wrote briefly about transference, and did so, to sustain the way in which, are, as a whole, that his actions were justly taken in and around 1917. Another observation which can rarely be made about Freud’s works, and which everyone may not agree with, is that, with one or two exceptions, what he did write on transference did not reach the high level of analytical thought which has come to be regarded as standard for him. Some indication of what his contribution consist of is given by the editors of the Standard Edition, who list them in several places. One of the longer lists, in a footnote on page 431 of Volume 16, includes six references: ‘Studies of Hysteria’ with Breuer (1895), the Dora paper (1905), ‘The Dynamics of Transference’ (1912), ‘Observations on Transference-Love’ (1915), the chapter on transference in the Introductory Lectures (1917), and ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937). Although the editors, in no sense suggest that these six papers include everything Freud wrote on the subject. It does seem evident that, considering the essential importance of transference to analysis, he wrote, ‘The Dynamics of Transference’, ‘Transference-Love’, and the transference chapter in the Introductory Lectures, come across, as, perhaps, his least significant contribution.
Freud’s first direct mention of transference occurs on the ’Studies of Hysteria’ (1895), his first significant reference to it, however did not appear until five years later, when, in a letter to Fliess on April 16, 1900, he said (Freud, 1887-1902) he was ‘beginning to see that the apparent endlessness of the treatment is something of an inherent feature and is connected with the transference’. In a footnote to this letter the editors said that, ‘This is the first insight into the role of transference in psychotherapy.’
Despite these early references, it seems correct to say that yet another five years was to go by before the phenomenon of transference was actually introduced. Even so, the introduction was far from prominent, for it was tacked on like an afterthought as a four-page portion of a postscript to what was perhaps Freud’s most fascinating case history to date, the case of Dora (1905).
Using data from Dora’s three-month-long, unexpectedly terminated analysis, and especially from her dramatic transference reaction which had taken him quite unawares, Freud now gave to transference its first distinct psychological entity and for the first time indicated its essential role in the analytic process. His account, although in general more than adequate - in fact elegant and remarkably ‘finished’ - was brief, and almost to the point, and perhaps not an entirely worthy introduction so much more a truly great discovery. What was uniquely great was his recognizing the usefulness of transference. In his analysis of Dora he had noted not only that transference feelings existed and were powerful, but, much to his dismay, he had realized what a serious, perhaps, even insurmountable an obstacle that would be. Then, in what seems like a creative leap, Freud made the almost unbelievable discoveries that transference was in fact, the key to analysis, that by properly taking the patient’s transference and therapeutic force was added to the analytic method.
The impact on analysis of this startling discovery was actually much greater and much more significant than most people seem to appreciate. Although the role of transference as the sine quo non of analysis and is widely accepted, and was stated by Freud from the first, it has almost never been acclaimed for having brought about an entire change in the nature of analysis. The introduction of free association to analysis, a much lesser change, receives and still receives much more recognition.
One of the reasons for the relatively unheralded entry of transference into analysis may have been for circumstances of its discovery. Although Freud’s new ideas were recorded as if they arose as sudden inspiration during the Dora analysis, they may in fact have developed somewhat later. In the paper‘s precatory remarks, for instance, Freud said he had not discussed transference with Dora at all, and in the postscript, he said he had been unaware of her transference feelings. Also, pointing to a later discovery date is the extraordinary delay in the paper’s publication. According to the editor’s note, the paper had been completed and accepted for publication by late January 1901, but this date was then actually set back more than four and a half years until October 1905. The editors said, ‘We have no information as to how it happened that Freud, . . . deferred publication.’ It readily seems that for reasons to have been that only during those four and a half years, as a consequence to his own self-analysis, did he come to an understanding of the significance of the transference. Only then may it have been possible for him to turn again to the Dora case, to apply to it of what he had learned in himself, to write this essay as part of the postscript, and at last to release the paper for publication.
Freud’s self-analysis has been considered from many angles, but not significantly, as can be of valuing measure, in at least from the standpoint of transference. Opponents of the idea that there is such a thing as definite self-analysis, some of whom say it is impossible, generally an object on grounds that without any analyst there can be no transference neurosis. Freud clearly demonstrated, as, perhaps, that the situation that may be necessary to fill this need: Self-analysis may require that, at least a half-way satisfactory transference object. In Freud`s case, the main transference object at this time seems to have been Fliess, who filled the role rather well. As with any analysis, his `real`impact on Freud was slight, he was essentially a neutral figure, relatively anonymous and physically separate. All of this, and Fliess`s own reciprocal transference reactions, made it possible for Freud to endow Fliess with whatever qualities and whatever feelings were essential to the development of Freud`s transference, and, it should be added, his transference neurosis. In the end, of course, the transference was in part resolved. Freud`s eventual awakening of its self realization in its presence within him of such strange and powerful psychological forces must have come as a stupefied disilluionary dejection toward Fliess, however, his subsequent working out of some of these transference attachments must have been both an intellectual triumph and an immensely healing and releasing process.
In the years following this revolutionary discovery, the central role of transference in analysis increased in remarkable acceptance, and it has easily held this central position ever since. What the substance of this central position distinctfully contain of, that, of course, is something of a mystery, for, it seems as nothing about analysis and is of least to be, well known than how individual analysis actually use transference in their day-to-day work with patients. As a guess, as, perhaps¸ of each analysts concept of transference derives variable but significantly from his own inner experience, transference probably means many and varying differentiations to things as to different analysts.
In the same differentiated individuals, as that Freud’s own pupils must have differed on this issue, not only from him but from each other. Although some of their differences may have been slight, others, my have contributed significantly to later analytic developments. A question could be raised, for instance, whether differences in handling the transference which at first were the property of one analyst gradually develop into formal clinical methods used by many, and whether these clinical methods, after having been conceptualized, serve as the beginning of variously divergent schools of analysis. Such occurrences, consistent with certain beliefs that analytic ideas do arise in this way, primarily out of transference experiences in the analytic situation, would lead to the question whether the history of the ideological differences in what was actually said and done in response to transference reactions that to any other factor. Whatever the case, many differences and divergencies did occur among the early analysts, and all of that are supposed to have had to do in some major way with differences in the handling of the transference.
Strangely, Freud himself seems to have taken little part in influencing this rapid and divergent period of growth. Usually accused of being too dominating in such matters, Freud seems to have done just the opposite during the development of this most critical aspect of analysis, the process itself, and, for reasons unknown, detached himself from it.
What was needed, one might be inclined to say, was not leadership in the form of domination, but leadership in trying to provide what was lacking, and still lacking, namely an analytical rationale for transference phenomena. The question must be asked, of course, whether in fact this would have been a good thing at that particular time in psychoanalytic history. Perhaps not. The exercise of closure, which Freud’s structuring might have amounted to. But although adding to understanding and stability at ceratin theoretical levels, could at another level, so such closures have often done, have placed many obstacles in the way of further analytical developments. Thus, his leaving the matter of transference wide open, even though it led to confusion and uncertainty, may have been just as well.
In many ways the closest Freud ever came to establishing a formal analytical rationale for transference was his first attempt, in the postscript to the case of hysteria (1905). These few pages are and among the most important of all Freud’s writings, outweighing by far the paper to which they are appended. Yet, in the case of Dora has always been taught as an entity rather than the ancillary to the essay on transference. In that essay Freud was clear: His ideas revealed tremendous insights and promised more to come, and that, the powers of the neurosis are occupied in creating a new edition of the same disease. Just think of the analytic implications of his saying that this new edition consists of a special class of mental structures, for the most part unconscious, having the peculiar characteristic of being able to replace earlier persons with that of the person of the analyst, and in the fashion applying all components of the original neurosis to the person of the analytical at the present time. Surely as profound a statement as any he ever made.
He then goes on to say that there is no way to avoid transference, that this ‘latest creation of the desire must be combatted like all the earlier ones’, and that, although this is by far the hardest part of analysis, only after the transference has been resolved can a patient arrive at a sense of conviction of the validity of the connection which have been constructed during analysis.
He concludes by saying, ‘In psychoanalysis . . . all the patient’s tendencies, including hostile ones, are aroused, they are then turned to account for the purpose of the analysis by being made conscious, and in this way the transference is constantly being destroyed. Transference, which seems ordained to be the greatest obstacle to psychoanalysis, becomes its most powerfully . . .
These remarkable observations, in conveying a sense of deep conviction that could arise, one feels, only from Freud’s own hard-won inner experience, that nowhere is there a suggestion that transference is a mere technical matter. Far from it, as Freud announces that he has come upon as new and exciting kind of mental function, or, as it is to believe, that a new and exciting kind of ego function.
Very quickly, however, Freud’s conviction sees to have failed him. Nothing he wrote afterwards about transference was at this level, and most of his later references were a retreat from it, for instance, he never did develop the promising idea that the mind constantly creates new editions of the original neurosis and includes in them an ever-changing series of persons. Instead, he tended to become less specific, even referring to transference at times in a broad terms as if it were no more than rapport between patient and analysts, or as if it were an interpersonal or psychosocial relationship, concepts which, of course, a great many analysts have since adopted, but which were not part of Freud’s original ideas.
Perhaps his most persistent deviation was an on-and-off tendency to regard transference merely as a technical matter, often writing of it as an asset to analysis when positive and a liability when negative.
Significantly, because it indicated that an active struggle was still going on within him, Freud occasionally expressed once again, even though briefly his earlier insights, particularly his ideas that transference is an essential although unexplored part of mental life. An example of this appears in his otherwise quite indifferent account of transference in ‘An Autobiographical Study’ (1925). Transference, he says, ‘is a universal phenomenon of the human mind. And in fact dominated the whole of each person’s relations to his human environment. In these few words Freud again made the point, and in declarative fashion, that transference is a mental structure of the greatest magnitude, but he never really followed it up.
Rather extensive evidence of his departure from the original concept and his continuing struggle with that concept is seen most clearly, wherein, the ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ is much more than a courageous, brilliant, and pessimistic, appraisal of the difficulties and limitations of analysis, although transference is briefly mentioned in its content, yet a great deal about it comes through, some quite directly, some by easy inference. When looked at in this way, two themes stand out: Freud’s personal frustration with the enigmas of transference and his tacit placing of transference in the centre of success and failure in analysis, both as a therapy and as a developing science. What also comes through, is the perplexing realization of how far Freud had, by now, seemingly moved away from his original concepts. Or had he?
Even if it is insufficient for exclusive reliance in relations to the complicated neurosis, for which it would be fallacious to assign to the recall and reconstruction of the past an exclusively explanatory value (in the intellectual sense), important though that function be, and difficult as its full-blown emotional correlate may be to come by. There is no doubt that, even in complicated neurosis, with equivalently complicated transference neurosis, the genuinely complex and complicated transference neurosis, the genuinely experienced linking of the past and present can have, at times, a certain uniquely specific dynamic effect of its own, a type of telescoping or merging of common elements in experience, which must be connected with the meaninglessness of time in unconscious life, compared with its stern authority in the life of consciousness and adaptation to everyday reality. Contributing decisively to such experiences as to whatever degree it occurs, is of course, the vivid currency of the transference neurosis, and central in this, the reincarnations of old objects in an actual person, the analyst.
Thus, an allied problem in the general sphere of transference is the fascination and often enigmatic interplay of past and present. If one wishes to view this interplay in terms of a stereotyped formulation, the matter can remain relatively uncomplicated - as a formulation. Unfortunately. , This is too often the case. The phenomenon, however, retains some important obscurities, which cannot thoroughly dispel, but to which I would like to call attention. To concentrate on the dimension of time, it seems in reference to the complication and immediate aspects of technique, nonetheless, essential. For example, we can assume that the transference neurosis re-enacts the essential conflicts of the infantile neurosis in a current setting. If a reasonable degree of awareness of transference is established, the next problem is the genetic reduction of the neurosis to its elements in the past, through analysis of the transference resistance and allied intrapsychic resistances, ultimately genetic interpretations, recollections and reconstructions and working through. Such that the transference is related to its genetic origins, the analyst thereby emerges in his true, i.e., real, identity to the patient, the transference is putatively ‘resolved’. To the extent that one follows the traditional view that all resistances, including the transference itself, are ultimately directed against the restoration of early memories as such, this is a convincing formulation. Is that, only to say, that in his own right as having to a certain tightly logical quality? However, we know that it this is not so readily accomplished, apart from the special intra-psychic considerations described by Freud in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’. Although in a favourable case, much of the cognitive interpretative work can be accomplished, there remains the fact that cognition responsibility, in its bare sense, does not necessarily lead to the subsidence of powerful dynamism, to the withdrawal of ‘cathexes’ from importantly real objects. For, as mentioned, a short while ago, the analyst is a real and living object, apart from the representations with which the transference invests him, and which are interpretable as such, for which there is, not seldom, a confusing interrelation and commonly of the emergent responses, due to the same old seeking, and this is directed toward a new individual in his own right, both are important, furthermore, there are large and important ones of overlapping. Apart from such considerations, even the explicitly incestuous transference is currently experienced (as, at least in good part) by a full-grown adult (like the original oedipus), instead of a totally and actually helpless child. To be sure, the latter state is reflected subjectively in the emergent transference elements of instinctual striving, but it is subject to analysis, and the residual is something significant, if not totally different. It is these residual sexual wishes, presumably directed toward the person of the analyst, as such, which must be displaced to others, if, as generally agreed, the revival of infantile fantasies and strives in the biologically mature adolescent presents a new and special problem, one must assume distinctiveness of experience for the adult, although it is true that in the majority of instances, adequate solution is favoured by the adult state. There is, in any case, a residual relationship between persons who have worked together in a prolonged, arduous and intimate relationship, which, strictly speaking, is no transference, bu t there may be mutual colouration, blending and some confusion between the two spheres of feeling. The general tendency is that both components are fully gratified to some degree. But, there is the ubiquitous power of the residual primordial transference, yet, argue to cling to an omnipotent partisan to resist the displacement of its ‘sublimated’ anaclitic aspects, even if the various representations of the wishes for bodily intimacy has been thoroughly analysed and successfully displaced. The outcome is largely the transference of the transference, as mentioned earlier, in a different context. For everyday reality can provide no actual answer to such cravings. In this connection, note, Freud’s genial envy of Pfister. If the man of faith finds this gratification in revealing religion, others in a wide range of secular beliefs and ‘leaders’ the modern rational and sceptical intellectual is less fortunate in this respect. Presumably free, he is prone to invest even intellectual disciplines or the proponents with inappropriate expectations and partisan passions, but, least of mention, that within these fields of analytical and theoretical thought, are not to provide exceptions to this tendency.
Though if one keeps in mind the reservations about the clarity of conceptualization, the explanatory discussion of Kohut and Seitz, is a very useful contribution to the understanding of this complicated problem. Both Loewald and Kohut have deliberately differentiated upon the different use of one of Freud’s three conceptions of transference, i.e., the transference from the unconscious to the preconscious.
Yet, to furthering comments on primordial transference, at least potentially, are largely psychological (mental) component, the concept of ‘transference of the transference’ would be applicable to this component. For it does appear that certain aspects of the search for the omnipotent and omniscient care taking parent are, for practical purposes, inextinguishable. As suggested earlier, there are important qualitative and quantitative distinctions in the mode of persistence and such strivings, however, even to the extent that they are detached from the analyst and carried into some reasonably appropriate expression in everyday life, they retain at least a subtle quality which contravenes reality, one which derives from earliest infancy, and remains - to this extent - a transference. ‘Santa Claus’ lives on, where one might least expect to meet him, whether as a donor of miracle drug or of far more complex panaceas.
If one assigns to this pasrasymbiotic transference drive a true primordial origin, it is necessary to take cognizance of certain important concepts dealing with the earliest period of life. If we assume a powerful original organismic drive toward an original ‘object’, a striving to nullify separation from the beginning, how does this ratify with concepts such as ‘primary narcissism’ or the ‘objectless phase’ or ‘the primary psychophysiological self’ (We note in passing that there are those who do not accept these as usually construed (Balint), for example, or Fairbairn or - conspicuously - Melanie Klein. These are states, variously defined or conceived, which apply to the earliest neonatal period, in which life, to state more simply, exists only as the potential in physiological processes. Since there is (we postulate) no clear awareness of a self separate from the mother, there can be no ‘mentally’ represented or experienced drive t o obliterate the separation (referring to self and object, conceiver of as separate, in a continuing sense). There are, of course, discharge phenomena, the precursors of purposive activity, and there are urgent physiological needs, directed toward fulfilment or relief, rather than toward an object as such. However, in relation to these physiological needs as archaistic precursors of object relationships, it must be noted that in all, except respiration and spontaneous sphincter relief (even in these instances, not without exception or reservation), the need fulfilment must be mediated by the primordial object (or her surrogate). There is also, of course, the uniquely important requirement for ‘holding’, in a literal expression, from the outset. (The material partner in human symbiosis which supplies what the neonate cannot seek by ‘clinging’. (Bowlty , Murphy) in the sense, from the very beginning, the must be experience of physiological ebb and flow of tension (even if restricted to the kinaesthetic), connected with a peripheral sensory registration, which is the protophase of the recognition of separation from the object (or nonpresence of the object) as a painful experience, her presence in apposition the converse. That the general context may be only in which the sense of unity is preponderant, or, more accurately, that there is no general awareness of ‘separation’ as such, means that the drive for union does not exist in a general psychological sense. It is, so to speak, satisfied. That object constancy, with its cognate ‘longing’, is quite a different experience from the urgencies of primitive need fulfilment is true, however, regardless of what may be added by maturational and developmental considerations, instinctual and perceptual, there is no reason to assume other than a core of developmental continuity from the earliest needs and their fulfilment to the later state, and some continuing degree of contingency based on them.
There is a very rough parallel in the way certain analytic patients, before a firm relationship with the analyst is established, signal certain primitive experiences and tendencies in special reactions to the end of the hour, to the nonvisibility of the analyst, to interruption of their association, to failure of the analyst to talk, and similar matters. We must note that in the basic formation of the ego itself, there is evidence of primitive reactions to separations, in the form of very early identifications as based on care taking functions. Certainly in the very development of autonomous ego of the mother’s investment in the, have a decisive role in the character of the their development. And in the case of object constancy, in its connotation of libidinal cathexis, where is no need whatsoever (emotional or otherwise) is needed for prolonged periods. The importance of the object is, to put it mildly, liable to deteriorate, or to differ complicating aggressive change. Probably the characteristic feature of later developing relations to the object (love and the wish for love), as separate if not always separated from demonstrable primitivity, in the need fulfilment, have a special relationship to those ‘ancillary’ aspects of neonatal nurture, whose lack has been shown to be an actual threat to life in some instances, not to speak of sound emotional development. So that from the first, regardless of the assumed state of libidinal (and aggressive) economy, or the assumed state of psychological nondifferentiation between self and potential object, there are critical precursive phenomena, objectively observed, and probably prototypic subjective experiences of separation, which are the forerunners of all subsequent experiences of the kind. One may generalize to the effect that, with maturation and development, secondary identifications, and the various other processes of ‘internalization’ in its broadest sense, the problem of separation and its mastery becomes correspondingly more complex, and changes with the successive phase of life, but never entirely disappears.
In the view of the psychoanalytic situation described earlier, the latent mobilization of experiences of separation stimulated by the situational structure awakens the driving primordial urge to undo or to master the painful separations which it represents, usually embodied in the various forms of clinical transference that which we are familiar. One legitimate gratification which tends to mitigate superfluous transference regression is the transmission of understanding that at times, are thought that by the ‘mature transference’, in effect, the ‘therapeutic alliance’ or a group of mature ego functions which enter into such an alliance. Now, there is one blurring and overlapping at the conceptual edges in both instances, but the concept as such is largely distinct from either one, as it is from the primitive transference, which we have been discussing. Whether the concept is thought by others to comprehend a demonstrable actuality, which is a further question. This question, of course, can only follow on conceptual clarity. This in saying, of a nonrational urge, not directly dependent on the perception of immediate clinical purposes, a true transference in the sense that it is displaced (in currently relevant form) from the parent of early childhood to the analyst. Its content is not anti-sensual, but largely non-sensual (sometimes transitional, as the child’s pleasure in so-called ‘dirty words’) and encompasses a special and not minuscule sphere of the object relationship: The wish to understand, and to be understood, the wish to be given understanding, i.e., teaching, specifically by the parent (or later surrogate); the wish to be taught controls in a nonpunitive way, corresponding to the growing perception of hazard and conflict and very likely the implicit wish to be provided with and taught channels of substitutional drive discharge. With this, there may well be a wish, corresponding to that element in Loewald’s description of therapeutic process, to be seen in terms of one’s developmental potentialities by the analyst. No doubt, the list could be extended into many subtleties, details, and variations. However, one should not omit to specify that, in its peak development, it would include the wish for increasingly accurate interpretations and the wish to facilitate such interpretations by providing adequate material ultimately, of course, by identification, to participate in, or even be the author of the interpretations. The childhood system of wishes which underlies the transference is a correlate of biological maturation, and the latent (i.e., teachable) autonomous ego function, appearing with it, however, there is a drive-like quality in the participation phenomena, which disqualifies any conception of the urge’s identical with the functions. No one who has ever watched a child importune a parent with questions, or experiment with new words, or solicit her interests in a new game, or demand a story-telling or reading, can doubt this. That this powerful support and integration in the ego identification with a loved parent is undoubtedly true, just as it is true of the identification with an analyst toward whom a positive relationship has been established. That ‘functional pleasure ‘ inscribes the part, where certain specific ego energies, perhaps very likely the ego’s own urge to extend its hegemony in the personality. However, it can be stressed in the derive element, even the special phase configurations and colourations, and with its importance of object relations, libidinal and aggressive, for a specific reason. For just as the primordial transference seeks to undo separation, in a sense to obviate object relationships as we know them, the ‘mature transference’, tends toward separation and individuation, and increasing contact with the environment, optimally with a largely affirmative (increasing neutralized) relationship toward the original object toward whom (or her surrogates) a different dynamic of demands is now increasingly directed. The further considerations which has led to the emphasis that the drive-like element in these attitudes are integrated phenomena, as examples of ‘multiple functional’ rather than the discrete exorcise of function or functions, is the conviction that there is a continuing dynamic relation of relative interchangeability between the two series, at least based on the response to gratifications in a significant zone of complicated energetic overlap, possibly including the phenomenon of neutralization. That the empirical ‘interchangeability’ is limited, and that goes without saying, that in no way diminishes its decisive importance. The linguistic communications as in mention, that the excessive transference neurosis regression, which can seriously vitiate the affirmative psychoanalytic process, finds a prototype in the regressive behaviour and demands of certain children, who do not receive their share of teaching, ‘attention’, play, nonseductive, affectionate demonstration, nonexploitative interests in development, and similar matters, from their parents. In the psychnalytic situation, both the gratifications offered by the analyst and the freedom of expression by the patient, are diversely limited and concentrated, practically entirely (in the every day demonstrable sense) in the sphere of linguistic expression, on the analyst’s side, further, in the transmission of understanding.
Whereas, the primordial transference exploits the primitive aspects of linguistic communication, by expressing the mature transference as to advocate the seeking mastery of the outer and inner environments, a mastery to which the mature elements in speech contribute importantly, for which these are stressed upon the clear-cut genetic prototype for the free associating its interpretative dialogue is the original learning and teaching of speech, the dialogue between child and mother. It is interesting to note that just as the profundities of interests between people who often include - in the service of the ego - transitory introjection and identifications, of the very word ‘communication’, representing the central ego function of speech, from which is a closely intimate relation to the etymologically certain, in actual usages, to the word chosen for that major of religious sacrament for that which is the physical ingestion of the body and blood of the Deity. Perhaps, this is just another suggestion that the oldest of individual problems does, after all, continue to seek its solution, in its own terms if only in a minimal sense, and in channels so remote as to be unrecognizable.
The mature transference is a dynamic and integral part of the therapeutic alliance, alone with the tender aspect of the erotic transference, even more attenuated (and more dependable) friendly feeling of adult type, and the ego identification with the analyst. Indispensable, of course, are the genuine adult need for help, the crystallizing rational and intuitive appraisal of the analyst, the adult sense of confidence in him, and innumerable other nuances of adult thought and feeling. With these, giving a driving momentum and power to the analytic process, but always, by its very nature, a potential source of resistance, and always requiring analysis, is the primordial transference and its various appearances in the specific therapeutic transference. That it is, if well managed, not only a reflection of the repetition compulsion in its menacing sense, but a living presentation from the id, seeking new solutions, and trying again, so to speak, to find a place in the patient’s conscious and effective life, has important affirmative potentialities. This has been specifically emphasized by Nunberg, Lagache and Loewald among others. Loewald has recently elaborated very effectively the idea of ‘ghosts’ seeking to become ‘ancestors’ based on an early figure of speech of Freud. The mature transference, in its own infantile right, provides some of the unique qualities of propulsive force, which comes from the world of feeling, rather than the world of thought. If one views it in a purely figurative sense, that fraction of the mature transference which derives from ‘conversion’ is somewhat like propulsive fraction of the wind in a boat sailing close-hauled to windward, the strong headwind, the ultimate source of both resistance and propulsion, is the primordial transference. This view, however, should not displace the original and independent, if cognate, a favourable tide or current would also be required. It is not that the mature transference is in itself entirely exempt from analytic clarification and interpretation. For one thing, in common with other childhood spheres of experience, there may have been traumas in this sphere, punishments, serious defects or lacks of parental communication, Listening, attention or interest. In general, this is probably far more important than has hitherto appeared in our prevalent paradigmatic approach to adult analysis, even taking into account the considerable changes due to the growing interest in ego psychology. ‘Learning’ in the analysis can, of course, be a troublesome intellectualizing resistance. Furthermore, both the patient’s communications and his receptions and utilization of interpretations may exhibit only too clearly, as sometimes in the case of other ego mechanisms, their origin in and tenacious relation to instinctual or anaclitic dynamism; greediness for the analyst to talk (rarely the opposite), uncritical acceptance (or rejection) of interpretations, parroting without actual assimilation, fluent, rich, endlessly detailed associations without spontaneous reflection or integration, in the direct demands for solution of moral and practical probably entirely within the patient’s own intellectual scope, and a variety of others. It may and always be easy to discriminate between the utilization of speech by an essentially instinctual demand, and an intellectual or linguistic trait or having to be determined by specific factors in their own developmental sphere, however, the underlying and essentially genuine dynamism which having to remain of a character most favoured to the purposes of processes of analysis, as it was to the original processes of maturational development, communication, and benign separation. Lagache, on the desirability of separating the current unqualified usage, ‘positive’ and ’negative’ transference, as based on the patient ‘s immediate state of feeling, from a classification based on the essential effect on analytic processes. Yet, the later of mature transference is, in general, a ‘positive transference’.
Concerning considerations in the transference neurosis, and the problem of transference interpretation, may be offered at this point. The whole situational structure of analysis (in contrast with other personal relationships), its dialogue of free association and interpretation, and its deprivations as to most ordinary cognitive and emotional interpersonal drives that tend toward the separation of discrete transferences from their synthesis with one another and with defences in character or symptoms, and with deepening regression, toward the re-enactment of the essential of the infantile neurosis, in the transference neurosis. In other relationships, the ‘give and take’ aspects - gratifying aggressive, punitive or otherwise actively responsive, and the open mobility of searching for alternative or greater satisfaction - exert a profound dynamic and economic influence, so that only extraordinary situations, or transference of pathological character, or both, occasion to comparable regression.
It is a curious fact, whereas the dynamic meaning to the importance of the transference neurosis have been well established since Freud gave this the phenomenon a central position in his clinical thinking, the clinical reference, when the term is used, remains variable and somewhat ambiguous. For example, Greenson, in his excellent recent paper, speaks of it as appearing, ‘when the analyst and the analysis become the central concern in the patient’s life’. However, previous remarks in this connection, for which it is worthwhile to specify certain aspects of Greenson’s definition, for the term ‘central’ is somewhat ambiguous, as to its specific reference. Certainly, the term could apply to the symbolic position of the analyst in relation to the patient’s experiencing ego and the symbolically decisive position which he correspondingly assumes in the relation to the other important figures in the patient’s current life. However, while the analysis is in any case, and for multiple reasons, exceedingly important the seriously involved patient, there is a free observing portion of is ego, also involved, not in the same sense as that involved in the transference regression and revived in infantile conflicts. And here is here is, of course, always the integrated adult personalty, however diluted in may seem at times, of its rarity, although certainly does occur, that the analysis actually exceeds in importance the other major concerns, attachments, and responsibilities of the patient’s life, nor is it desirable that his should occur, on the other hand, if construed with proper attention to the economic considerations as mentioned, the concept is important, both theoretically and clinically. In the theoretical direction to the assumption that there is a continuing system of object relationships and conflict situations, most important in the unconscious representations, but participating to some degree in all others, deriving in a successive series of transference from the experiences of separation from the original object, the mother. In this sense, the analyst’s applicability to a uniquely important portion of the patient‘s personality, the portion that ‘never grew up’, to maintain a central figure. In the clinical sense, to call or direct attention especially to a supposed cause, source, or to refer to the importance of the transference neurosis as outlining for the essential and central analytic task, providing by its very currency and demonstrability a relatively secure cognitive base for procedural duties. By its inclusion of the patient’s essential psychopathological processes and tendencies, in their original functional connection, it offers, in its resolution or marked reduction, the most formidable lever for analytic cure. Nonetheless, th e transference neurosis must be seen in its interweaving with the patient’s extra-analytic system of personal contacts. The relationship to the analyst may influence the course of relationships to others, in the same sense that the clinical neurosis did, except that the former is alloplastic, relatively exposed, and subject to constant interpretation. It is also an important fact that, except in those rare instances where the original dyadic relationship appears to turn, the analyst, even in the strictly transference sphere, cannot be assigned all the transference role simultaneously. Other actors are required. He may at times oscillate with confusing rapidity between the status of mother and father, but he is usually predominantly in one of the roles for long periods,, someone else representing the other. Furthermore, apart from ‘acting out’, complicated nd mutually inconsistent attitudes, anterior to awarenend verbalization, may require the seeking of other transference objects; husband or wife, friend, another analyst and so forth. Children, even the patient’s own children, may be invested with early strivings of the patient, displaced from the analysis, even experience the impulses which they would wish to call forth in the analyst. The range is extensive, varied, and complicated, requiring constant alertness. Transference interpretation therefore often has a necessarily paradoxical inclusiveness, which is an important reality of technique. There is another aspect, and that is the dynamic and economic impact of the intimate and actual dramatist personate of the transference neurosis in the progress of the analysis as such, and on the patient ‘s motivation, as well as his real lifer avenues for recovery. For the persons in his milieu may fulfill their ‘positive’ or ‘negative ‘ roles in transference drama, which may facilitate or impede interpretative effectiveness, they provide the substantial and dependable real life gratification which ultimately facilitate the analysis of the residual analytic transference, or their capacities or attitudes may occasion overload of the anaclitic and instinctual needs in the transference which renders the same process far more difficult. In the most unhappy instances, there can be a serious under-cutting of the motivation for basic change.
There is also the fundamental question of the role of the transference interpretation. At the Marienbad Symposium most of Strachey’s colleagues appeared to accept the essential import of his contribution and thus th e unique significance of the transference interpretations, despite the various reservations as to detail and emphasis on other important aspects of the therapeutic process. Nevertheless, there are still many who, if not in doubt regarding the great value of transference interpretations are inclined to doubt their uniqueness, and to stress the importance of economic considerations in determining the choice as to whether transference or extratransference interpretations may be indicated. Now, apart from the realistic considerations mentioned in the preceding passage (in a sense the necessarily ‘distributed’ character of a variable fraction of transference interpretation). There is in fact that the extra-analytic life of the patent often provides indispensable data fo the understanding of detailed complexities of his psychic functioning, because of the sheer variety of its references, some of which cannot be reproduced in the relationship to the analyst. For example, there is no repartee: In the ordinary sense in the analysis. The way the patient handles the dialogue with an angry employee may be importantly revealing. The same may be true of the quality of his reaction to a real danger of dismissal. There is not only the realities, but the ‘formal’ aspects of this responses. These expressions of personality remain important, even though his ‘acting out‘ of the transference (assuming this was this was the case) may have been more important, and, of course, requiring transference interpretation. Furthermore, they remain useful, if discriminatingly and conservatively treated, even if they are inevitably always subject that epistemological reservations, which haunts so much of analytic data. Of course, the ‘positive’ transference has a role in the utilization of such interpretations it s what enables the patent to listen to them and them seriously.
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