Individual Psychotherapy: Franz Alexander. Psychosomatic Med., VIII, 1946, pp. 110–115.

Transference neurosis, Freud's most important discovery, became the basis of modern psychoanalytic therapy. 'The search for forgotten memories, and the intellectual reconstruction of the past history, gave place more and more to the consistent utilization for therapeutic purposes of the emotional experiences of the patient in relation to the physician. Psychoanalytic therapy became in a sense a prolonged emotional training of the ego.' By mobilization of repressed emotions the ego's failing functions are restored. Ego function activities are perceptive (internal and external) and executive; the ego must first register subjective needs in order to gratify them and it must inform itself about existing external conditions. Mastery of an old unresolved conflict is possible because the intensity of the transference conflict is less than the original conflict, and because the therapist assumes a different attitude from that which the parent assumed in the original conflict siutation. The more precisely the therapist is able to revive the original emotional situation in the transference, and the more precisely he can provide by his own attitude towards the patient the necessary corrective experiences, the more profound and speedy will be the therapeutic result.