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IN THIS PAPER I DESCRIBE an interpersonal technique I have adapted for psychoanalytic work with eating disordered patients: particularly members of that subgroup who, for reasons having to do with their "false self" character defenses, are highly resistant to any direct discussion of the transference or the therapeutic relationship. At the same time I relate this specific technical application to a more general topic in the recent psychoanalytic literature: the question of how technically to approach patients whose "resistance to awareness of the transference" (Gill, 1979) ; (1982) makes them unable to tolerate standard psychoanalytic techniques such as analysis of transference and resistance.
Merton Gill coined the phrase "resistance to awareness of the transference" to refer to the pervasive tendency of psychoanalytic patients to unconsciously defend against their immediate affective responses to the therapist via such mechanisms as displacement and identification (Gill, 1980, p. 273). To deal with this kind of resistance Gill recommends that the therapist/analyst be as aggressive as possible in pursuing the transference implications of the patient's communications, even when there is no explicit reference to the therapist or therapeutic relationship. The aim of this approach is to "encourage the transference to expand within the analytic situation" (1982, pp. 59–68): that is, to make explicit what