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In this paper, I shall seek to reevaluate traditional concepts of transference and will include my own opinions concerning the phenomenon. Classical concepts from Freud to Fenichel to Greenson will be examined first. Then, some ideas of the cultural school, as represented by Sullivan and Horney, will be considered.
Transference is commonly described as the phenomenon in which a person feels and acts toward something or someone as though that person or thing is one that he encountered earlier in his life.
The classical point of view is that the patient is actually reliving a past object relationship. According to Freud, Fenichel, Greenson, and the other classicists, the patient is constantly looking for someone new who will gratify repressed, infantile, libidinal strivings which have not been satisfied by the original objects,† the parents. Repressed impulses are always exerting pressure upon the patient to obtain their gratification, and he unwittingly complies.1 It is under this pressure, and in the service of relief from it, that the patient mistakes the new for the old, the therapist for, say, his father. The need to fulfill instinctual strivings causes the patient to make a cognitive error, a mistaken identity. Freud also states that the transference is used by the patient as resistance, that when there is stoppage in associations, the next association will have its root in the transference, which has penetrated into consciousness ahead of other associations because it satisfies the resistance.
In this way, Freud proposed the genetics of transference and his idea of how it occurs so flagrantly in the analytical situation. Another reason for the strength of transference in analysis is proposed in a later paper,2 where, for the first time, Freud