Transference and Thought-Transference1

Some difficulties about the concept of transference might perhaps be overcome if we take our start from the assumption of an ideal human situation in which there would be no transference whatsoever. This could be either a situation of total narcissistic identification (Federn's egocosmic ego-state), or else a situation of perfect and fully satisfactory communication, in which the spontaneous give-and-take of the communicants would have no intellectual or emotional (conscious or unconscious) deficiency.

Leaving aside 'egocosmic conditions' such as deep sleep or catatonic stupor, we have to admit that a pure, non-transferential pattern of interpersonal relations, if it exists at all, could only be extremely circumscribed. Therefore transference, in its broadest sense, could be termed the emotional, unexpressed accompaniment of practically all human attempts to communicate: an accompaniment which is part and parcel of one of the most primitive needs of the individual, that which seeks to reinstate a lost primordial unity through bridging 'distances' and filling gaps between the 'self' and the 'whole'.

This is the kind of transference which Freud called 'a universal phenomenon of the human mind', a phenomenon which 'in fact dominates the whole of each person's relations to his human environment' and 'is merely uncovered and isolated by analysis' (1). Since no human relation can be conceived as being totally independent from emotional premises, and since, conversely, such emotional preconditions of communication, related to more primitive strivings towards contact and unity, are abnormally acute and discernible in the analytical situation, transference in a restricted sense has assumed a particular relevance in analysis, both as a phenomenon which offers itself to investigation, and as an instrument by which certain therapeutic goals can be reached.

Transference in our neurotic patients—i.e. neurotic transference—is promoted by a general disposition of the patient to 't