Editorial

In July 1914, in the hush of nervous expectancy and awareness that the impossible could be about to happen, Freud completed two papers on technique, ‘Observations on transference-love’ and ‘Remembering, repeating and working-through’. In many ways, these were the high-points of his writing about the practice of psychoanalysis. In the penultimate paragraph of the second of these papers, Freud introduced a concept whose centrality for the whole conduct of psychoanalysis has been fully recognized (if also at times disputed) - the ‘transference-neurosis’; yet on only one future occasion (in the opening sections of Beyond the Pleasure Principle) would he add further to these remarks:

We regularly succeed in giving all the symptoms of the illness a new transference meaning and in replacing his ordinary neurosis by a ‘transference-neurosis’ of which he can be cured by the therapeutic work. The transference thus creates an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made. The new condition has taken over all the features of the illness; but it represents an artificial illness which is at every point accessible to our intervention. It is a piece of real experience, but one which has been made possible by especially favourable conditions, and it is of a provisional nature. (Freud 1914, p. 154)

The implications of this conception of the conduct of the cure are considerable. They point towards the imminent danger for the analyst and patient that they may get frozen in this intermediary zone between illness and real life - the possibility of the interminability of the analytic process - and that they may become too comfortable in this intermediary zone between illness (or phantasy) and ‘reality’; they may even, if they are both practitioners of psychoanalysis, model their institutional relations on this ‘transference neurosis’, infecting, along with others in the same boat, their professional and scientific lives with