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This volume of collected essays is the third in the series, “Contemporary Freud: Turning Points and Critical Issues,” focusing on Freud's germinal contributions.1 Robert Wallerstein, during his presidency of the International Psychoanalytical Association, devised this format to promote the spirit of pluralism which characterized his tenure. He sought to provide an opportunity for contributors with diverse orientations to interpret Freud's work. This current volume is skillfully edited and introduced by Ethel S. Person.
In the first essay, Friedrich-Wilhelm Eickoff sees in Freud's essay the germs of ideas elaborated by Loewald and Winnicott—to wit, transference as occupying a transitional space between illness and real life. Technically, he reads Freud as emphasizing the unreality of the transference: “The analyst's duty not to return the offered affection is based on considerations of analytic technique—namely, the need to treat the situation as ‘something unreal,’ to understand and interpret the transference in its virtuality” (p. 40).
Wallerstein's contribution highlights some of the limitations of Freud's thinking about transference in 1914—his tendency toward dichotomous thinking (positive versus negative transference) and the constraints of a topographic model, soon to be supplanted by Freud's more complex structural model. Among the enduring contributions of Freud's essay, Wallerstein cites the description of a class of patients with highly eroticized transferences, seemingly intractable to analytic resolution. He traces some later developments in understanding these transferences, citing particularly Ernst Rappaport (“the preoedipal