You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Ladies and Gentlemen, —Those of you who can look back to a long record of analytical experience will have perhaps been able to observe that in a certain, well-night typical class of case, which need not necessarily be characterized by special difficulties in structure, your therapeutic efforts have been of little or no avail. It was this circumstance which first led me to state the problems now to be discussed.
In the second place we find that an analysis which has threatened to break down, among other reasons, because even painstaking analytical work has proved incapable of overcoming the patient's transference-resistance (positive or negative) often undergoes a remarkable change in the further course of its development so soon as the patient is obliged, whether for external or internal reasons, to find another analyst. This fact can be observed most often and most clearly when the sex of the second analyst differs from that of the first. We then find, after a comparatively short time has elapsed, that certain resistances, which it had been impossible for month after month to overcome, now become accessible to analysis, but above everything, that the transference situation assumes a different complexion. No doubt, even in cases where a patient simply breaks off analysis and later resumes it with the same analyst, we often observe what appear to be favourable changes occurring in the analytical work accomplished by the patient, as a consequence of this proceeding. They are conditioned for the most part by the circumstance that the interruption has the effect of a warning and increases the patient's willingness to satisfy the analyst by more energetic co-operation. So far as it rests with the patient, his ego-resistances are thereby reduced and he takes greater pains over the analysis. Nevertheless these changes scarcely ever produce effects such as those that arise in the circumstances mentioned above, nor are they so long maintained; and, above all, they do n