Discussion

When I received the invitation to discuss Dr. Sheiner's paper, I accepted in the belief that it would be a paper in which she would expound on the evolution and maturation of her own thoughts and ideas on the change of the psychoanalytic relationship, based on her experiences and emotional participation in her extensive work with patients, particularly with schizophrenic patients. After all, she gave us some taste of it in her previous papers and lectures. Therefore, my main objection is that her paper consists of so many quotations from other authors and that Dr. Sheiner brought so little of herself into the paper.

Dr. Sheiner made in the main an attempt to follow historically the evolution of the changing image of the psychoanalytic relationship. In doing so, Dr. Sheiner, however, concentrated on the ideas of a few, touching only marginally on other authors who made significant contributions to this change, without mentioning their names specifically. This gives a somewhat one-sided and incomplete picture of the development. Therefore, I have to digress into the past.

The change in the “Transference” situation started during Freud's lifetime when Ferenczi no longer played the dispassionate role of the analyst but became very much emotionally involved with his patients. Not that Freud condoned Ferenczi's ways, but a beginning was made towards non-conformity. Next came the “mirror image” as demonstrated by Wilhelm Reich's attitudes toward the patient in his Character Analysis. Yet, the transference was still seen on a purely libidinous basis and the analyst maintained his highly authoritarian position. Ferenczi's tradition lived on in his pupil and disciple Clara Thompson who, however, went beyond her teacher's thinking. She saw that “the patient-analyst situation was not as simple as Freud originally thought,” and recognized that the attitudes transferred to the analyst were not only erotic and oedipal but were also from other periods of his past and present. She gra