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With this issue we continue our series on the basic clinical phenomena of psychoanalysis. Here we take up the phenomenon of transference.
Transference is not only one of the basic clinical phenomena of psychoanalysis; it appears in every analysis, and, in fact, is one of the two defining phenomena of psychoanalysis set down by Freud:
It may thus be said that the theory of psychoanalysis is an attempt to account for two striking and unexpected facts of observation (emphasis added) which emerge whenever an attempt is made to trace the symptoms of a neurotic back to their sources in his past life: the facts of transference and resistance. Any line of investigation which recognizes these two facts and takes them as the starting point of its work has a right to call itself psychoanalysis, even though it arrives at results other than my own [Freud, 1914, p. 16].
Freud in this passage was endeavoring to distinguish psychoanalysis from hypnosis and other forms of therapy employing suggestion. Even at this early date (1914), however, Freud had made many other observational discoveries of psychoanalysis which he might have chosen as defining: infantile sexuality; the Oedipus complex; the nature of dreams; and so forth (and some of these discoveries have indeed been so included by later generations of psychoanalysts). Yet of all the rich observational discoveries of psychoanalysis, he chose transference and resistance as definitional above all others.
Hence, knowing that there will be a lot more to say about transference than can be contained in a single issue, we have titled this issue “Transference I.” It is the first of many to be devoted to this subject.
What is transference? We can find no simpler and clearer definition than that included in Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (Moore and Fine, 1990).