The Externalizing Transference

This paper has been written with a group of adult patients in mind who seek psychoanalysis and develop what might be termed an 'externalizing transference'. For purposes of definition, the term 'externalizing' is understood to mean 'the subjective allocation of inner phenomenon to the outer world' (Novick & Kelly, 1970). In the externalizing transference, the outer world becomes, for the analysand, the analyst and to him is allocated inner aspects of the patient. The process is essentially narcissistic rather than object libidinal (Freud, 1914).

In classical transference (Moore & Fine, 1967) in terms of what is transferred, the emphasis is upon the displacement to the analyst of infantile aims towards infantile objects. The conflict reissued in the transference, is between wishes towards and fears of the analyst. In the externalizing transference the emphasis is upon allocation of internal structures and their antecedent archaic self and object representations to the analyst. The conflict reissued in the transference is between and within psychic structures and antecedent self-object representations. These elements are at bottom ambivalently held as contradictory opposites. This is not to say that in classical transference there is not an externalization of object imagos (Nunberg, 1951); (Zetzel, 1956) nor that in the externalizing transference there is not a displacement of infantile object libido on to the analyst but, rather, that the emphasis is decisive for the development of the two contrasting types of transference. It would appear that as transference becomes rather more an occasion for the revival of narcissistic pre-oedipal, pregenital and prestructural elements and rather less an object-libidinal oedipal, genital and structural matter, the 'externalizing' rather than so-to-speak a 'displacing' transference takes place. Furthermore, in the classical transference, displacement is the complement to repression whilst in the externalizing transference