Transference as Creative Illusion

The Startling Effect of some interpretations, and the very ineffectiveness of others, made me think about the technique of analysis. One patient threw the furniture about when I pointed out how angry he was, a diabetic followed a direct interpretation with a coma, while with a third patient even the juiciest comments seemed to have no effect at all, and the analysis got stuck. Clinical papers tend to select dramatic episodes to highlight a conclusion, but this made me wonder what happens in the more humdrum daily flow of analysis. What is the aim of interpretation? Why say this rather than the other? And how account for change?

In the dramatic episodes of analysis the patient's fantasies, as it were, come alive and get linked with the impulses which they mirror. Unconscious fantasy reflects instinctual wishes and impulses, and underlies conflict over such impulses. Conflicts over instinctual pressures at the crucial points of development give rise to anxiety, and the defences come into force as an attempt to deal with this anxiety. This is the psychoanalytic view, and Melanie Klein gives prominent place to conflict over aggressive impulses towards the breast as a fantasied inner object. In her view (Klein, 1952) it is fantasies about the consequences of a hungry attack on the mother's breast, and about the breast as a fantasied inner object, that gives rise to anxiety in the infant and so to defences of a schizoid nature. Thus she stresses the primary role of fantasied inner objects in infantile conflict.

Accounts Of Fantasy By Freudian And Jungian Schools

It is useful to be clear about the sense in which we are using the word fantasy. At first Freud located the origin of neurosis in an actual traumatic event, and this changed when he found the crux to be fantasies of such traumas in hysterical patients. The fantasies with which we are concerned are unconscious fantasies which may become conscious, and are to be distinguished from fantasies as day-dreams, o