The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 23, 1954, No. 1: Heinrich Racker. 'Notes on the Theory of Transference.'

Racker adds the following considerations to Freud's formulation of the dynamics of the transference. (1) Free association abrogates the dominance of those ideas which reject impulses. Though superficially rejected ideas may be projected upon the analyst, at base the ideas projected are always the rejecting ones—moral, affective, and instinctive. Feelings of destruction and persecution do not form an exception; they must be regarded as primitive rejecting ideas directed against impulses. This phenomenon is probably a consequence of the identification of the primitive ego with its impulses. Interference originally came from the outside. Thus the rejecting ideas are the surrogates of the early rejecting objects who are one and the same as the first libidinal objects. Racker notes that if it is the giving up of rejection which is responsible for this transference, then it is due not to a resistance, but to the partial relinquishment of a resistance. (2) Since the rejecting objects are also those who are most needed, the more they are projected on to the analyst the more he is needed. Hence an intensification of the need for love already noted by Freud as basic to the transference. (3) A reverse process is also at work. The understanding of the analyst, taken as affection, increases the patient's capacity for loving. But the more the analyst is loved the more the patient's archaic paranoid and depressive anxieties are stimulated. (4) Analytic transference is characterized not only by its intensity but also by its depth. The analysis of the transference of the rejecting superego uncovers the transference of the rejecting internal libidinal objects derived from the genitally frustrating parents of the oedipal phase with whose rejecting action the patient's ego has become linked.

The author next considers what light these considerations throw on the rôle of the transference in therapy.

Freud regarded the negative and sexual transferences both as a resistance to