Meeting of the Psyhcoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Howard K. Welsh noted Freud's analogy of the analyst as archaeologist, whose job it is to piece together not just individual pieces of pottery, but the layers in which they were found and their relationship to one another, as well as the relationship of one hidden mound to another, in order to gain insight into the workings of the entire community. Similarly, Dr. Jacobs has taken a broad perspective in his analysis of transference phenomena and their interrelationships. Dr. Welsh described a case of his own, which served to illustrate Dr. Jacobs's thesis that patients who reproduce these kinds of transference shifts are attempting to master early traumas in relation to original objects. His patient would for several days speak easily, with a positive transference and working alliance. Then, toward the end of the week, she would have terrifying dreams of a zombie-like creature and would view Dr. Welsh as a ghoulish figure whom she feared and distrusted. The meaning of this behavior did not become clear until they were able to reconstruct a recurrent traumatic experience of her childhood. Her father was a week-end alcoholic who would terrorize the family and beat his wife when he was drunk. Afterward, her mother would pretend that nothing had happened, and the patient would feel that it had all been a bad dream. The patient dealt with the terrifying reality and her intense frightened feelings with a defensive blurring of reality and dream, both in the analysis and in her work. In another of Dr. Welsh's patients abrupt termination after nine months of analysis occurred in spite of the realization that the nine months symbolized his mother's pregnancies, and that he was attempting to master his early feelings of abandonment. Sudden transference shifts may also occur in a patient who as a child was shifted back and forth between divorced parents. Dr.