Transference Interpretations Only?

In the following pages I shall be examining Anglo-American psycho-analytic literature (excluding Kleinian) from the late forties to the present. Often I shall express assertions about transference as if I held them, where the context will, I hope, show that they are ideas I describe and discuss. Where I speculate about motives which make for or against the acceptance of a hypothesis, it is, of course, understood that they are not pertinent for assessing its truth or falsity.

The subject with which I shall be concerned is the relationship between interpreting transference on the one hand and interpreting the patient's past and present life outside of the hour on the other hand. That is, I shall not deal with another relationship, which Greenson (1972) and Greenson & Wexler (1969), (1970) have clarified in recent years: the relation between those reactions of the patient to the analyst which are transference and those which are not.

Not being a clinician, I do not attempt to give answers to the questions I raise, or to have a stand on the hypotheses I articulate. But, as the reader will easily see, my prejudices are with Anna Freud, Phyllis Greenacre and Leo Stone rather than with Brian Bird and Paul Gray. That is, while transference interpretation is indeed crucial, non-transference interpretation, it seems to me, may also be of strong importance. However, those whose sympathies are contrary to mine might still be able to disregard my partisan inflections and agree, in whole or in part, with my structuring of the problem. The purpose of this paper is not to judge, but to undertake an operation without which any judgment may be vitiated: to articulate what has unduly been taken for granted—with the accompanying illusion that it had been fully discussed. Capital changes, I shall submit, have occurred—for better or worse—with little confrontation between the hypotheses discarded and those replacing them—both remaining largely unstated even if universally underst