The Maligned Therapist, Or an Unsolved Problem of Psychoanalytic Technique

In the analysis of a young woman who became famous in the history of psychoanalysis under the name of Dora, Freud (1905) discovered, in 1900, the momentous importance of the emotional relationship to the analyst that the patient creates in his unconscious. Freud called it transference when he discovered that what appeared clinically as being genuine was in truth transferred from other sources. He found that the transference relationship was determined by a compromise among a variety of forces, the most significant of which were not referable to the analyst's personality and behavior but were of extraneous origin. Primarily, they originated in the patient's life history, starting in earliest infancy, as well as in unconscious imagery involving the analyst, fantasies, along with loving and aggressive impulses that were formed in accordance with past experiences and were often almost replicas of them. Transference and the technique of how it should be handled moved into the center of psychoanalytic clinical and research interests. Through its observation the therapist became acquainted with the deepest layers of the patient's repressed material. The knowledge thus acquired, when skillfully applied, helped achieve the optimal outcome of therapy.

In the course of an analysis, the analysand transmits to the analyst, to the extent that he can, the full range of his inner world; during treatment sessions the analyst in turn, concentrating on the subject's world, becomes totally absorbed in it to the exclusion of all other