Chapter 7 Transference Interpretations of Separation Anxiety

‘Ce qui embellit le désert, dit le petit prince, c’est qu’il cache un puits quelque part…’

‘What adds beauty to the desert’, said the Little Prince, ‘is that hidden somewhere in it ‘there is a well…’

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, p. 72

Following our examination in the foregoing chapters of the position assigned to separation anxiety by the principal psychoanalytic theories of object relations, the present chapter will be devoted to the problem of interpretation of this type of anxiety when it arises in the analysand-analyst relationship during the course of psychoanalytic treatment.

Nowadays, most psychoanalysts surely recognize the crucial function performed by the working through of separation anxiety in the psychoanalytic process. However, the way each analyst interprets depends on a large number of factors and varies not only with our personal training, theoretical preferences and clinical practice but also with our personal experience of separation anxiety—i.e. our own experience of it in our lives, in our own psychoanalysis and in the analysis of our countertransference with our analysands.

Again, the sheer diversity of psychoanalytic theories constitutes a problem for today's psychoanalysts, and especially those in training, having regard to the bewildering array of psychoanalytic schools and theories which have mushroomed since Freud. This poses the following practical question: what foundation is a psychoanalyst faithful to Freud's thought to take as the basis for his interpretations in his clinical work? As we have seen, Freud

left us with a number of indicators, and many other analysts have made their own contributions within the framework of psychoanalysis, although often adopting original paths of their own. This question of the multiplicity of psychoanalytic currents within one and the same organization-the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) established by Freud in 190