Comments on the Topic

During the era when I was trained, the controversies over the role of interaction in analytic technique were just beginning to brew. Greenson's ideas on the real relationship (1967), Kohut's (1977) concept of narcissistic transference, and Kernberg's (1976) work on the treatment of borderline patients all had as a central concern the use of the “relationship” in technique. Today, the struggle to understand which aspects of psychoanalytic interaction furnish its mutative power continues. The controversies are now phrased by referents to a paradigm shift: Is psychoanalysis a one-person psychology, focused primarily on the analysand, or a study of a coconstructed interaction? The answer to this question will determine, in part, whether the here-and-now transferential environment will be utilized as opposed to the more traditional goal of excavating the there-and-then and the use made of reconstruction. Is there a way to conceptualize the function of the analytic relationship without recourse to suggestion, or the manipulation of the positive transference, a technique that is essentially a return to Freud's earliest hypnotic attempts to overcome resistance? As and Gill (1982) have noted, except for a brief time period, Freud saw transference primarily as a form of resistance; free association and the recovery of childhood memories remained the cornerstone of his technique and the source of his greatest discoveries. He never fully articulated the position that transference was the key to understanding how memories, reorganized under the hegemony of conflict, become structuralized and continue to affect the personality in the present. Perhaps every