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In accordance with our custom, we are reproducing the reports submitted to us of the various panel discussions. We are publishing them at this time in somewhat more detail than in the past because of the innumerable requests we have received for publication of the scientific proceedings of the American. We would be interested to know from the membership whether they would like us to continue this policy.
CHAIRMAN: Rudolph M. Loewenstein, M.D. (New York)
REPORTER: Robert Waelder, Ph.D. (Philadelphia)
Dr. Nunberg's paper on Transference dealt with the relations between the unconscious needs of an individual and his perceptions of reality. He began with a fragment from a case: A patient constantly criticized the analyst, tried to educate and remold him in the pattern of the patient's image of her father. It was as though she were saying in anger: “Why are you not like my father? I want you to be like him.” Nunberg called this phenomenon “transference readiness.” In this state, the patient desires to find his infantile object in the analyst, attempts to change him into such an object, and feels frustrated because the analyst is not this object. From this point of departure, Nunberg sketched the following picture: We carry within us images of the parents of old and try to find them in the outside world. We try to find something in reality that is exactly like them and desire to bring about an identity between the perception of present objects and the images within us. Such a tendency must lead to frustrations, suffering, distortions, misrepresentations, etc. The patient may try to change the reality so as to make it conform with the inner picture (transference readiness) or, in actual transference, may seize upon some detail in the present reality which is similar to the old objects and, aided by such detail, project his inner images onto the current reality. Some such