Editorial

As much as we might struggle to keep undiluted versions of psychoanalysis available to those who need it and can use it, its labour-intensive nature makes this desideratum ever more difficult. Psychoanalysis creates a special domain, set apart from ordinary life, in which infant experience comes into the foreground; the full-blown transference becomes, in Freud's words, ‘a playground in which it is allowed to expand in almost complete freedom and in which it is expected to display to us everything in the way of pathogenic instincts hidden in the patient's mind’ (1914, p. 154). The evolution of the concept of transference means that this special experience can be used to explore beyond infancy to what it means to relate altogether. For individuals suffering a paucity of human relationships or gross distortions in self and object experience, transference work offers potentialities for the enrichment of human intimacy that can bring about an improvement in mental health and crucial life changes quite possibly unobtainable elsewhere.

In this issue Mark Pearson offers a review of the transference literature, but argues that some patients find transference interpretation threatening or intrusive. He believes that transformation of core relationship problems can be wrought equally as much by ‘staying within the patient's metaphor’, advocating the narrative or storytelling approach that seems to be being incorporated into psychoanalytic theory more and more lately. In a critique of the concept of transference, Nick Handley discusses how it can be used inappropriately to protect the analyst, to deny the real aspects of the therapeutic relationship or to create iatrogenic problems. He resituates the theory of transference within the existential-phenomenological encounter, suggesting that this gives it a firmer footing in clinical reality.

The theme of transference wends its way, inevitably, through the other papers in this issue. Gertrud Mander offers an exploration of psychody