You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is the third volume in the “Contemporary Freud: Turning Points and Critical Issues” series founded by Robert Wallerstein and published with the International Psychoanalytical Association. Already presented was Freud's Analysis Terminable and Interminable, edited by Joseph Sandler, followed by On Narcissism: An Introduction, edited by Sandler, Ethel Spector Person and Peter Fonagy. The series
calls upon prominent IPA member practitioners and teachers to re-examine seminal essays in the Freud oeuvres in light of both their historical significance and their current utility, after decades of clinical research and theory development.
The essays included here reveal broadening geographical and theoretical ecumensim. The book includes analysts working in Britain and Europe, North and Latin America, and, for the first time in the collection, a contribution from Asia. The latter piece, by the Japanese Takeo Doi, applies a specifically Easter concept of infantile nonverbal emotion, “indulgent dependency,” to the understanding of transference love. While the second volume publicly welcomed Kleinian and Kohutian points of view, this entry entertains the contributions of Lacan (Canestri) and modern infant observation studies (Stern) to a contemporary understanding of the technical and theoretical problems of transference in general and, specifically, of the phenomenon of affectionate transference.
Following an excellent Introduction (Person) to what was reportedly Freud's favorite of the brief technique papers and to the writers represented in this volume, “Observations on transference love” appears in its entirety. Person calls our attention to a current perspective that regards transference and its analysis as the core of the psychoanalytic process. “Transference analysis,” she writes, “appears to have replaced dream analysis as the ‘royal road’ to the unconscious” (p. 5).
Re-reading Freud's essay, we note that the field of observation is limited to those female patients