Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East

December 4, 1989. A RECONSIDERATION OF THE CONCEPT OF TRANSFERENCE NEUROSIS. Gail S. Reed, Ph.D.

Dr. Reed reviewed the literature on transference neurosis, which contains a wide range of definitions of and attitudes toward the concept. She then discussed the results of her interviews with twenty-two psychoanalysts from the American Psychoanalytic Association. The interviews had been conducted to investigate the meanings that the term, transference neurosis, had for the analysts. In view of the value of oral transmission in psychoanalysis, Dr. Reed paid close attention to the exact transcriptions of her interviews with the twenty-two analysts. The respondents frequently referred to the "classical description" and compared or contrasted the data from their cases to this definition. Two major areas of differences among the respondents were noted. The first was in their varying definitions of transference and transference neurosis; the other was in the different degrees of importance attributed to the patient's conscious involvement with the analyst. Various connotations of the term, transference neurosis, were identified, and Dr. Reed presented material from the interviews "to illustrate … the breadth of phenomena associated with the term and some of my respondents' clinical emphasis."

Dr. Reed gave her own current working definition of the term: "I prefer to think of the transference neurosis in terms of the patient's unconscious cathexis of the object representation of the analyst in such a way that the relationship with the analyst suffuses and informs the patient's current experience." The relationship permeates whatever the patient is manifestly talking about as well as the form in which he or she talks about it. In her discussion, Dr. Reed elaborated on the phenomenon of "form." In addition, she stated: "I propose a process definition in which the term transference neurosis is reserved for the … unfolding and understanding of increasingly specific tra