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This chapter draws a parallel between the psychoanalytic process with its power to engage and transform and a spontaneously occurring healing process depicted in Margaret Drabble's novel The Needle's Eye. Despite widespread controversy as to what constitutes psychoanalytic process, the interpersonal relationship between therapist and patent is central to change in treatment. The concept of transference in its broadest sense underlies the power of this process (Freud, 1905, 1912). People constantly seek out and attempt to resume, reenact, and repair old love relationships; elements of both transference and reality coexist in all relationships and become the focus of psychotherapeutic ones (Bird, 1972).
It stands to reason that healing relationships may spontaneously arise, exist, develop, and eventually terminate outside of any formal psychotherapeutic sphere. Falling in love is a striking example from ordinary life (Weingarten and Almond, 1970). Transforming lifelong friendships; relationships with mentors and teachers; and religious beliefs connected with faith in a deity or deity-like leader all have the power to create the kind of growth and development that one also seeks in psychoanalytic treatment (James, 1902; Erickson, 1959; Levinson, 1978).
Works of literature, particularly “psychological” novels, often capture this process with startling clarity even if this is not their primary intent (B. Almond, 1989; R. Almond, 1989). We read the passages in David Copperfield that deal with David's marriage to Dora and realize the intensity with which, to the exclusion of sound judgment and realistic