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Unfortunately, it will be almost impossible for me to respond to every aspect of everyone's questions concerning my paper (Le Guen, 1974a) and most particularly to Dr Béjarano's pertinent comments (Béjarano, 1974). I am surprised, however, that the discussion has not taken the course I had expected: I was expecting some strong criticism of my thesis that the countertransference is antecedent to the transference and is, in fact, its cause. This notion does not seem to have troubled anyone or caused any objections. The discussion has, therefore, focused on other issues.
I shall try to give a general answer to the questions that were raised by redefining my paper in relationship to the work which preceded it: in fact, this brief exposé on the origins of the transference should be articulated with my other works on the origin of the Oedipus complex and psychoanalytic practice. So, I shall very briefly summarize the salient issues which have arisen in the course of my previous work.
I find myself guided, above all, by a statement of Freud's: 'I regard it as a methodological error to seize on a phylogenetic explanation before the ontogenetic possibilities have been exhausted' (Freud, 1918, p. 97). He himself thought he had reached this limit in his research on the Oedipus complex; he faced this very fundamental problem squarely and proposed as a solution the hypothesis of the father's murder in the primal horde, inherited over the ages via fantasy; to support his hypothesis Freud appealed to certain anthropological data which have subsequently been discredited. Phylogenesis supplied the final touches. I wanted to be completely faithful to Freud's work and advice (perhaps even more doggedly so than he himself) in attempting to describe the Oedipus complex only in ontogenetic terms; this was the goal of my book (Le Guen, 1974b).
We are familiar with Freud's (1926) description of the six- to eight-month-old infant's situation (which Freud points to 'as the only situat