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LEO STONE SET THE HISTORICAL, THEORETICAL and clinical framework of the panel's topic. He noted that whereas the centrality of transference interpretation has been repeatedly emphasized by analysts, other interpretations have been assigned an exclusively adjunctive or preparatory function and have rarely been discussed. He emphasized the centrality and ultimate essentiality of transference interpretation and of the transference neurosis as the phenomenon that epitomizes the analytic experience. It is the transference neurosis, he commented, that permits the profundities of object relations and fundamental conflicts to become clearer and more accessible to understanding and interpretation than they would be in any other relationship. Despite this conviction, stone noted that clinical questions persist. Are interpretations elicited by other issues superfluous? Or diversionary? Or feeble? Or possibly just ancillary? Is material from other sources indispensably informative, providing a matrix for the transference emergence and understanding, and in that sense alone, useful? Or can such interpretations contribute in themselves to significant "structural change"? Or do they sometimes include effective transference references via the principle of multiple appeal?
In reflecting on these questions, Stone said that the patient's responses to the formidable contingencies of life, often revealing affective