The Transference Neurosis: A Survey of the Literature

IT HAS BECOME A virtual tradition for the member of the panel who is to present a review of the pertinent literature to begin his presentation with that somewhat melancholy statement that, owing to the limitations of time and to the overabundance of excellent papers, only a small segment of the important material could be included and a sizable proportion of the significant contributions would have to be passed over. For better or for worse, I am not in a position to offer such an apology; and although I have no intention of presenting an encyclopedic summary of everything that has been published in the psychoanalytic literature on the transference neurosis, that decision has not been dictated only by the pressures of scheduling. It is both of interest and of significance that the number of papers in the psychoanalytic literature dealing specifically, in a systematic fashion, with the concepts and the theory of the transference neurosis is remarkably small; and if I had so desired, I probably could have included at least a cursory review of all such articles in the literature. I would also suggest that this apparent lack of interest in the transference neurosis, as reflected by the relative poverty of scientific papers, is paralleled by a comparable relative disregard of the concept by psychoanalysts in their case reports and discussions. In his textbook, Glover (1955) lamented the fact that the transference-neurosis concept has fallen into "relative desuetude" and has been