Is the Transference Interpretation Still Central to Analytic Work?1

Within the framework of the congress whose central theme was convergences and divergences in practice analytical today, the subject of our panel raised a crucial question about interpretation and transference, two pillars of our analytical work. In bond with the project of the congress which was to create, not a common basis, but to support an in-depth discussion on the way in which the various psychoanalytical cultures consider their practice, the panel allowed, starting from the clinical presentation, to confront and put in tension several points of view.

At the beginning of the panel, the clinical presentation of Alicia Leisse de Lustgarten (Venezuela) opened a field of very rich discussions. ‘Valentina’, the introduced patient, is a delicate and fragile patient who poses from the start the question of the tempo of interpretation and especially of interpretation in the transference which is likely to revive the traumatisms that the patient experienced. With tact and patience, Alicia reassures the patient to enable her little by little to approach her internal world. In one of the meetings presented, we see well how the patient tries to control her analyst and how the analyst arrives finally at the transference. Alicia makes us feel indeed the importance of the interpretation of the transference for her and, at the same time, the difficulty in formulating it with a patient who is so afraid of an emotional closeness. It is important to add that this difficulty goes beyond the psychoanalytic culture of the presenter as will be shown by the discussion.

To begin the discussion, Georg Bruns (Germany) gave us a very relevant clinical example in its manner of approaching interpretation ‘in’ the transference with difficult patients in order to create a space of ‘play’ which allows them gradually to find their own psychic space, before making an interpretation ‘on’ transference. For G. Bruns too, the interpretation of the transference is central to the work because it brings