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Though transference is one of the most scrutinized and analyzed topics in the literature, it has never been completely understood. It is a topic to which we regularly return; we repeat new editions of the old subject, much like transference itself. “The almost inexhaustible topic of transference” (Freud, 1912, p. 99), which demands regular analytic review and restudy, is now especially involved in developmental, structural, and technical contributions and controversies. Where Freud (1917) distinguished between transference neuroses and narcissistic neuroses, interest currently seems to be directed toward transference in borderline and narcissistic personality disorders. In addition to developments within analysis, external influences, too, have intruded on the psychoanalytic scene and situation. Competing theories and therapies, and the declining prestige, popularity, and practice of analysis have all threatened the analyst's identity and the identity of psychoanalysis. These factors as well as shifts in the analytic “role model” away from full-time, exclusively analytic practice have all stimulated reconsideration of analytic process and derivative therapeutic applications.
The subject of transference is, of course, intrinsic to psychoanalysis and to the many problems of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy was the subject of the pre-Congress of the International Psycho-Analytical Association held in July 1979 and of a panel reported (Panel, 1979) about the same time in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. At that Panel, the chairman, Dr. Robert Wallerstein, noted that in the years 1952–1954 the American Psychoanalytic Association devoted