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For Mario Rendon, the concept of transference splays forth variously and ambiguously. Transference is problematized in its being both metaphor and metonymy, displacement and condensation, resistance and instrument of therapeutic effectiveness, conjecture and distortion; as hermeneutic and compassionate, genetic and here-and-now, and “broad” and “narrow.”

Rendon sketches the contributions to the ambiguity of transference, considering Ferenczi, Sullivan, Horney, Klein, and later pioneers. With the shift in recent decades in curative focus from ego enhancement to self-realization through relationship, there has been a corresponding shift from emphasis on the transference to the transference-countertransference amalgam—enriching the concept of transference still further. In Rendon's view, the Piagetian model of cognition lends still further texture to our comprehension of transference. Yet it is in Lacan's linguistic perspective, with its explicit foundation in Hegel, that Rendon locates the most likely thread unifying the many perspectives on transference: the need of the patient for recognition. It seems likely that discovering in just what that recognition consists may comprise much of the work of clinical analysis.

Although Uri Hadar is as deeply concerned with the analytic relationship as Rendon, his point of view leads decisively away from consideration of transference. What we have instead is a penetrating analysis of the relational asymmetries of clinician and patient. Hadar's perspective would seem to hold that transference participates invisibly in the legitimation of a culturally conservative construction of the analytic relationship. By this reading of Hadar's paper, if we accept the concept of transference, however ambiguously conceived, we unknowingly subvert deeper efforts to understand how the traditional model of the analytic relationship distributes truth, meaning, and power. Hadar's conclusions are striking and, perhaps for some, disturbing. His paper i