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The literature on transference has been highly inconsistent because of 1) the idiosyncratic nature of psychoanalytic work; 2) transference's origins in hypnosis; 3) the psychically charged and often contradictory philosophical assumptions concerning authority and power so central to the concept of transference; and 4) the ambiguous and dialectical nature of transference phenomena. Normal transference, in which notions of reality are always filtered through the lens of our subjectivity, is distinguished from pathological transference, in which a part of the past is “split-off” in the mind and this lives on as present reality (though never fitting into it).
The concept of transference neurosis within the orthodox, Kleinian, and modern positions is compared. All these schools must cope with the enmeshed relationship of past and present in transferences, the episodic nature of transference phenomena in treatment, and the intense psychic difficulties the analyst must endure to live empathically with and through the patient's transferences. However, for the orthodox group transference is the past imposed on the present. They distinguish an infantile (i.e., oedipal) transference neurosis from general transference reactions, and their treatment aims to recover the past. The Kleinians focus on countertransference, do not give special importance to the oedipal period, and consider extratransference interpretations unimportant. The moderns emphasize the present interreactions of the analytic dyad and see the patient's current state of mind as the lens through which the past is constantly redefined; becoming more conscious of the present as it manifests itself in all transference reactions is the goal of treatment. The author compares the neurotic and psychotic transference with the sexualized, isolative, secretive, and part-object nature of the transference of the perverse character.