Transitional Relatedness, Containment and the Transference Neurosis

This paper attempts to extend to the classical analytic situation my formulations previously reported for analytic work with schizophrenic and borderline patients. Two case vignettes are chosen to demonstrate a particularly pivotal sequence in which the key to the analyst's successful intervention is his recognizing in a seemingly unrelated personal situation, a countertransferential counteridentification with his patient's threatening experience. In the discussion, the therapeutic action of this intervention is explained in terms of the concept of projective identification and containment, and defined as a process of the analyst coming to function as a transitional object for his patient. The therapeutic effect results from the empathic interpretation of the patient's negative object experience at the point of urgency in the transference-countertransference interaction. Containment of the negative object experience in this way has a particularly liberating effect on free associations, first in the analyst and then in the patient. I also discuss similarities and differences between the containment process described here with healthier neurotics and that described previously with sicker borderline and schizophrenic patients.