A Short Annotation to Sigmund Freud's 'Observations on Transference Love'

Freud has incisively described the discovery of the virtuality of the transference in the triangular supervision situation, complicated by many conflicts, of Josef Breuer's cathartic treatment of Anna O. In his paper 'Observation on transference love' he resorts connotatively to an uncanny vision of Heinrich Heine, to describe a clinical category of patients who demand direct gratification in the transference without the element of virtuality. Meticulous editorial work for the supplementary volume of the Sigmund Freud Studienausgabe in 1975 brought to light the source of Freud's formulation 'the logic of soup, with dumplings for arguments' employed to characterize a type of woman not amenable to analysis. The context of the Heine poem from which Freud took and altered the quotation and the English translation of which was never linked with Freud's text, renders the regression to oral sadism most evident and comments astutely on the almost impossible analysability of the pathology concerned. In spite of different terminologies the clinical problem has been reflected since Freud in a similar way by different schools of psychoanalysis. A short survey of these reflections is made.