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In this paper I want to describe the strength of the emotions shown towards me by a ten-year-old girl from the very onset of her once-weekly treatment. The term ‘transference’ denotes the total complex of the patient's conscious and unconscious perceptions of the therapist and his feelings towards him. It has been defined many times in Psycho-analytic literature since its discovery by Freud. A good definition is that of Dina Rosenbluth (1970):
“What the child transfers and projects on to the
therapist are his unconscious images of his internal
parents or aspects of his parents, images which were
created by a fusion of his own impulses and feelings,
his own phantasies and external experience. And what
is reexperienced in the transference relationship
are the feelings, impulses and anxieties not only
from the oedipal but also from the earliest periods of life”.
Therefore facets of the transference relationship carefully observed and interpreted by the therapist are of unique importance. Winnicott writes (1958):