Chapter 18 Postscript (1969b) to ‘Dynamics of Transference Interpretations’ (1955/6)

This postscript was added to the French publication of Paula Heimann’s paper on ‘The dynamics of transference interpretations’ (1956) in Bulletin de l’Association Psychanalytique de France 5 . It contains several revisions of her views presented in 1956 and has been translated into English for this book.

Nearly fifteen years have elapsed since I wrote this paper1 and of course later experience, stemming from my own work and from the study of the work of other psychoanalysts, has led me to modify the conclusions I expressed there. Those changes consist, on the one hand, of additions, enlargements, slight shifts of emphasis, but also, on the other hand, of important alterations concerning basic aspects in pathological psychic functioning, the earliest stages of development, and also the nature and course of later psychic growth.

To begin with I shall briefly examine these last points, for they concern my basic orientation and therefore provide the centre from which my views on the dynamics of transference interpretations extend and in which they both converge and authenticate each other.

Since my student days, I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Freudian theory of life and death instincts, considered as the ultimate source of all instinctual processes. I still think that with this theory Freud presented an awe-inspiring concept—and in what fine language!—that has given us a glimpse of the relations between the various elements that make up the universe and which reconciles the contrasts between its various phenomena: attraction and repulsion, the expansion and contraction of the universe, animate and inanimate matter. However, I gradually came to mistrust this very enthusiasm and to realize (as I have said elsewhere [Heimann 1968]) that my attitude was ‘oceanic’ rather than scientific; I have come to distinguish between the clinically verifiable elements of Freud’s theory and the cosmic speculation that it involves.