MORTON SHANE, in his introductory remarks, mentioned the principal forerunners of this panel and stressed the more specific focus of the present panel on the contributions of developmental concepts to the understanding of the nature of transference. He then attempted to place these two elements, development and transference, into historical perspective. The concept of transference has been central to psychoanalysis ever since Freud discovered that no one could be hanged, or loved, in effigy. The "here-and-now" immediacy of the patient's distorted and powerful involvement with the analyst is the arena in which most interpretations that prove to be mutative are made.

Shane emphasized that because Freud stressed the Oedipus complex as the key to the psychoneuroses, transference had in the past been inevitably linked to oedipal experience. The tendency was to conceptualize transferences on other levels as regressions from, or avoidances of, oedipal conflicts. It is only more recently that preoedipal