On: Transference

Ruth Stein, a member of IJP's North American Editorial Board since 2007, died suddenly in January, 2010. Ruth was an analyst and a scholar whose interests and experience were truly international, bridging diverse cultures as well as a number of theoretical traditions. Her vitality and her sparkling, challenging presence enlivened the Board's deliberations; she will be deeply missed.

Dear Editors

During the past three years, the Study Group of Psychoanalytic Epistemology of the SPPA has revised the status of certain concepts (the unconscious, trauma and causality) within the current psychoanalytical theory, in the light of a perspective of complexity. Following our plan of study, we have focused our attention on the topic ‘transference’.

Revising articles published in the IJP, it seems that currently this term incorporates, besides Freud's traditional concept, all the later development in the patient—analyst relationship, raising an immediate question. When we talk about transference, a central concept in psychoanalyses, are we all referring to the same ‘transference’? We can set an example, among many others, from an article written by Thomas Ogden, an author well known in Brazil, published in 2004, The art of psychoanalysis: Dreaming undreamt dreams and interrupted cries. The author's understanding of the psychoanalytical process, presented in this paper, does not include the term transference. It can be found in this passage, though: “A principal subject of the dialogue that takes place in the analytic situation concerns the patient's anxieties and defenses arising in response to the relationship of analyst and analysand at an unconscious level (the transference—contratransference)” (Ogden, 2004, p. 864). In this context, it works as a synonym for the relationship of analyst—analysand. Soon after, he states that transference—countertransference (always as a pair) is partly viewed from a historical perspective (both from the patient's life and that of the analysis). H