Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Margaret Mahler agreed that too little reliance had been placed on the appearance of transference neurosis in child analysis. In this case she thought there was too much stress on the resistance and too little interest in the transference neurosis as a revival of and opportunity to understand the past. She felt the differences among the concepts of 'transference neurosis', 'transference phenomena', and 'transference resistance', as discussed in the paper, should be elaborated. She agreed with Dr. Brody's attributing the child's intolerance for confrontation and interpretation to narcissism, but felt that the phase-specific vulnerability of the child's ego, which is defended by desperate efforts to protect his defenses against interpretations, should also be considered. She wondered whether the presence of an adult combined with the child's fear of exposing sexual and emotional excitement was not an important part of the resistance to being analyzed of prepuberty children.

Dr. Peter Blos felt Dr. Brody's paper described the paradigmatic transference resistance of the prepuberty girl. The girl's activity could be seen as essentially a defense against regressive, passive submission to the active preoedipal mother after full consolidation of the Oedipal phase had taken place. He noted that the patient was not conscious of the full force of her rage against the preoedipal mother until late in the analysis, after she entered adolescence and positive Oedipal wishes had been acknowledged.

Dr. Ted Becker noted that while motor activity of the prepuberty child during analysis can serve as a resistance, it is also a means of communicating fantasy—for instance, in the child who writes historical plays—and of expressing closeness. He thought motor activity might more properly be called resistance when it becomes stereotyped and repetitive over a considerable period of time. Where it has served as a resistance, it defends against the reawakened preoedipal s