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In the post-war years researches in ego-psychology, and a greater understanding of the child-care techniques and the importance of the environment in the primitive stages of ego-development (Winnicott (19a), (22), (24)) have led to a more sensitive and careful assessment of the role of the analyst and the analytic setting towards the establishment and evolution of the clinical process, which in classical terms is called 'the transference neurosis'. The writings of Winnicott (20), (21), (22), Balint (1), (2), Waelder (18), Rycroft (15), and Little (13), to mention only a few, amply bear this out. Discussing the importance of the part played by the frame in the painting of pictures, Milner (14) states: 'The frame marks off the different kind of reality that is within it from that which is outside it; but a temporal special frame also marks off the special kind of reality of a psycho-analytic session. And in psycho-analysis it is the existence of this frame that makes possible the full development of that creative illusion that analysts call the transference.' What Milner calls 'the frame' in the above quotation I here discuss as the analytic setting.
I wish to make two further notes to clarify my use of the concepts transference and counter-transference in this essay.
Transference as the 'therapeutic alliance' (25) I shall take for granted. It was a very impressive trait of Mrs X's personality and behaviour that through the various vicissitudes of mood and emotion in her treatment the 'therapeutic alliance' was never once really threatened. In speaking of transference, therefore, I shall be referring mostly to its dynamic and genetic aspects, which one usually associates with the concept of 'transference neurosis'.
By counter-transference I do not mean here the conflictual unconscious transference in the analyst. I am not pretending that such experiences during this treatment were absent from my relationship to the patient. But I do not think that on