Narcissistic Transference: The Product of Overlapping Self and Object Fields

Freud (1905) regarded transference as one of the two pillars of psychoanalysis, the other being resistance. In his metaphor, transferences are “new editions or facsimiles” of old emotional experiences, and “they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician.” In a similar vein, Greenson (1967) defines transference as “the experience of feelings to a person which do not befit that person and which actually apply to another. Essentially, a person in the present is reacted to as though he were a person in the past.” Until recent times in clinical theory, “the past” was understood to refer to the patient's oedipal period and the “earlier person” to a significant object of that period whose characteristics the patient now attributes to the analyst.

The ego of the oedipal child is relatively advanced in terms of function and identity. Self and object, child and parent, are perceived by the child as separate entities. When this situation is later replicated in the transference, the patient who is arrested at the oedipal period sees the analyst as a clearly delineated object who represents an earlier well-defined parental figure, both differentiated from the patient's self, past and present. Thus, for example, when such a patient accuses the analyst of being sly and deceptive, he is displacing onto him his impression of an imago of his one-time oedipal period.

The narcissistic patient differs form this picture. The phase at