Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

June 13, 1961. SOME ASPECTS OF TRANSFERENCE RESISTANCE IN PREPUBERTY. Sylvia Brody, Ph.D.

Resistance of children to transference is generally acknowledged but the manifestations of this resistance have been neglected. In the child who is nearing or is in prepuberty, Dr. Brody has found a phase-determined resistance to treatment developing as an effort to ward off the transference neurosis which threatens to emerge. To illustrate this process she described the successful treatment of a ten-year-old girl with nocturnal fears, beginning depressive states, and a masochistic character formation. The case presented the following questions: 1. Did a transference neurosis develop in prepuberty to such an extent that its working through was sufficient for the lifting of repression? 2. Did the patient's attempts to avoid transference itself reflect transference? 3. On a more general level, are there developmental factors in prepuberty that facilitate transference neurosis and affect the capacity for working through?

In answer to the first question, Dr. Brody described how the patient initially developed a positive transference to the analyst, repeating an early wish for sole possession of her mother both at the preoedipal and negative Oedipal levels. When the positive transference was eventually interpreted as resistance, she fell into moods of hopelessness and self-accusation that corresponded to similar moods with her mother before treatment began and that repeated early feelings of being cast out by her mother. Humiliations, from her third year, at being excluded from parental sexual activities also came to light and, upon being reexperienced in the transference, were followed by a reduction in nocturnal fears and sibling rivalry, and in progress socially and academically. The recall of other repressed memories from the fourth and fifth years also occurred during this period of treatment.

Answering the second question, Dr. Brody stated that at first the patient avo