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Hardly a psychiatrist of any orientation would disagree that it is therapeutically beneficial to allow someone who is emotionally uncomfortable to express himself. That emotional support and emotional ventilation afforded to someone verbalizing about his emotional problems as he sees them can at times be dramatically therapeutic. Few would disagree that what is basically involved between the verbalizer and his listener is an emotional process and that the therapeutic result obtained is less due to any advice, counsel, interpretation, or intellectualization by the listener than the act of simply listening. The act of listening has been presented as meeting the oral dependency need; this basic need of man, so often disguised, becomes greater the more the oral need is consciously or unconsciously perceived as frustrated. When the perceived circumstances of life of any individual frustrate the oral need, and the omnipotence that gratification tends to give a person, there is then a need to draw more oral dependency need gratification, as well as to express more of the anger from those perceived frustrations.
Though man may well be the most intelligent animal, he is, by far, the most emotional as well. This contradiction is particularly evident in the emotionally uncomfortable where it often seems all too obvious that man's intellect is superceded by his emotions in determining his behavior. Only by decreasing his emotional uncomfortableness does he become emotionally comfortable and, though this is done by an emotional process, the intellect invariably takes the credit. In this light, the transference should be seen as an emotional phenomenon, where its emotional aspects enormously supercede its intellectual aspects, which are probably more rationalizations than actual.
The concept of the transference, which is periodically reviewed in analytic literature, has slowly changed with and since Freud. It has been only recently emphasized though that any verbalizing to a listen