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The following is a condensed version of the proceedings of the Forum, which evolved into a lively exchange and presentation of individual points of view.
Dr Rangell opened the meeting with an invitation to the audience to participate in a dialogue with the Panel on any aspect of the issues of the science and art of psychoanalysis. He then read a question submitted to him: At a time when manifest symptom neurosis is not so clear, is the concept of transference neurosis still useful?
Dr Stein considers transference neurosis to be at least as useful now as before and does not know whether there has been a change in symptom neuroses themselves or whether this is due to a change as a result of analysts' looking for and understanding manifestations in character. In cases of acting out—the re-enactment of unconscious infantile fantasies, often of a primitive character, in everyday life—the patient's behaviour outside the analysis may become relatively free of acting out and brought into the analysis in the ideal analytic situation. Analysis of the acting out starts at this point.
Dr Pasche stated that transference neurosis happens frequently in analyses and that without it an analysis would not have much chance of succeeding. He distinguished resistance to the transference and the transference neurosis, and the splitting of the ego in cases of hysteria—the establishment of distance in relationship to what the patient is feeling. There is a qualitative difference between transference neurosis and the resistance and theatrical aspects of such patients.
Dr Sandler described the process of the formation of the transference neurosis in which the internal or internalized conflict, which enters into the formation of the neurosis or pathological aspects of character, gets externalized in the analytic situation so that there is a conflict, not within the patient, but externalized so that it is between the patient and analyst. Concurrently we get a concentration of emotional forc