Transference in Daily and Weekly Treatment*: In Collaboration with Psycho-Therapists on the Staff at the Hampstead Clinic

In so far as we assume that all later relationships in life are based on the earliest object ties, e.g. that of the baby to the mother, the term transference can be applied to all relationships.

Transference, in this generalised sense, is present in the adult patient's first contact with the therapist, who represents a parental figure to him, and towards whom he resumes the role of the child. He also brings to analysis, however, certain ideas and expectations with regard to treatment: he feels ill, comes for help, and welcomes the analyst as a helpmate, realising his knowledge and skill and trusting himself and his neurosis to his handling. This attitude soon disappears; the analyst becomes a loved or hated object, friendly or hostile. He takes on aspects of important people in the patient's childhood, of his early love objects; irrational elements are thus introduced into a reality situation by the past life of the patient. We would like to reserve the term transference for these manifestations, in contrast to transference in its widest sense which applies to any number of life situations, is not specific to the treatment situation and the therapist and the exact origin of which can only be assumed or guessed at. In treatment the patient's fantasies about the therapist and his irrational attitudes towards him, based on his early object relationships, distort the reality aspect of the treatment situation and enable patient and analyst to gain insight into the nature and origin of early emotional conflicts. Gradually, the patient transforms his current neurosis into a transference neurosis, that is, he transfers his emotional involvement with his parents, in its entirety, to the person of the analyst.

In the analysis of adults we work all along with that part of the patient's personality which is rational and reality adapted, and step by step confront his ego with the irrational aspects stemming from his childhood conflicts and brought into treatment in the transferenc