On the Conception and Development of the Transference Neurosis

DESPITE THE CENTRAL IMPORTANCE attached to the transference neurosis in clinical psychoanalysis, there remains an aura of uncertainty about its development and phenomenology and its theoretical conceptualization. The transference neurosis concept is frequently either uncritically accepted, or loosely used so as to be sometimes indistinguishable from transference or other analytic relationships. Questions concerning the concept in recent years may also be related to the changing form of neurotic disorders since Freud's time, with less classical symptom neurosis, more character disorders and atypical transference reactions in a widened scope of psychoanalytic therapy. New interest in the transference neurosis arose as a result of research on the psychoanalytic situation, the distinction between the therapeutic alliance and transference, the elucidation of genetically early primal transference, the delineation of the structural and developmental requirements for the creation of a transference neurosis, and examination of the transference neurosis concept in child analysis.

The creation and dissolution of the transference neurosis classically distinguishes psychoanalysis from all other types of psychotherapy. This paramount vehicle of therapy, however, was described for the most part before the introduction of structural theory and ego psychology. Later theory, although it has broadened our understanding of the multiple factors which influence the development of the transference neurosis, has posed problems in definition and conceptual refinement.