Chapter 4 Transference to the Analyst as an Excluded Observer1

In this chapter I consider some of the ways the analyst can be put in the position of an excluded observer who looks on rather than participates. From this position he may become critical of what he observes, and it is this “superego”-like role that elicits some of the fear of being looked down on in the patient. I briefly review some significant points in the development of ideas about transference, which owe so much to the discoveries of Freud. I then discuss some of the subsequent developments that were based on Freud’s work and have personally impressed me. In particular I mention Melanie Klein’s elaboration of an internal world peopled by internal objects and her description of the mechanisms of splitting and projective identification, both of which profoundly affect our understanding of transference.

Using some clinical material, I try to illustrate an important transference situation that I do not think has been sufficiently emphasised, although it is part of the “total situation” outlined by Klein. In this kind of transference the analyst finds himself in an observing position and is no longer the primary object to whom love and hate are

directed. Instead, he is put in a position of an excluded figure who can easily enact rather than understand the role he has been put in. In this situation he may try to regain the position as the patient’s primary object in the transference. Alternatively, he may avoid the transference altogether and make extra-transference interpretations and in this way ena