Cold and Warmth in the Transference Experience1

Every experienced analyst knows that when analysis has to be interrupted for some reason, or even when an interruption is likely to occur, the analysand often reacts with manifestations of separation anxiety. Such manifestations appear with particular frequency before holiday seasons, but not so very seldom also before the week-end, and occasionally when the treatment progresses so well that the patient begins to envisage its termination. This latter phenomenon is, in fact, typical enough to constitute in the minds of some analysts a criterion for the advisability of continuing or terminating an analysis (Bridger).

There is generally no doubt about the transferential meaning of this separation anxiety. What the patient fears is nearly always a repetition of his separation from his mother in childhood. Accordingly, the impending interruption of the analysis is, with particular frequency, experienced as an oral threat, of being fed for too short a time or too scantily or of being inconsiderately weaned. Material of this type appears, in fact, in this situation very regularly, not only through associations and dreams, but also through the medium of acting-out behaviour and psychosomatic disorders. It is therefore not surprising that in psycho-analytic literature the oral interpretations of separation anxiety prevail throughout, even where the clinical evidence is comparatively slim.

Particularly in the literature on the psychogenesis of certain respiratory disorders is this tendency clearly to be seen. It is a well-known fact that patients often catch colds when their analyses have to be interrupted even for a short period (Saul), and that asthma attacks frequently appear at week-ends or immediately before the holidays (French and Alexander). As patients of this type often refer in their dreams and associations to oral topics (dinner parties, gifts of cigars or sweets, proximity of bosomy women), it is quite understandable that such happenings have been connected