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.
The analytic situation is a variant of … human transference relationship (HOFFER, 1956).
Like many other psychoanalytic concepts, that of transference is one which has developed from the clinical situation of psychoanalytic practice. When we come to integrate it into our general psychoanalytic metapsychology we find—as with other concepts—that difficulties of conceptualization and definition may arise.
In this paper we should like to present some of the difficulties which arise in connection with the integration of a clinical concept into our general psychoanalytic psychology, to illustrate some of the problems with examples drawn mostly from analytic work with children, and to suggest a possible direction in which further research may proceed. No attempt will be made to present a systematic review of the literature, and this paper should be regarded as presenting a line of thought which has been stimulated by our work, and which will certainly require further elaboration and extension.
It is nearly three-quarters of a century since Freud first described the phenomenon which he called 'transference'. It appeared as a source of resistance to the analytic process, based on what he called 'a false connexion' between the person of the physician and 'the distressing ideas which arise from the content of the analysis' (1895). Ten years later Freud was referring to transferences as
new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician.
He pointed out that past experiences are revived as applying to the physician in the present, and remarked that
some of these transferences have a content which differs from that of their model in no respect whatever except for the substitution.
Using the analogy from publishing, he continues by saying that such transferences