Commentary on Sander M. Abend's “Freud, Transference, and Therapeutic Action”

In his carefully documented and clearly argued paper, Sander Abend illuminates a largely overlooked but highly consequential conundrum in the history of psychoanalytic ideas. The problem is this: Although the fundamentals of his theoretical structure changed dramatically from its first iteration in 1895 to the work in progress that was his legacy to future generations of psychoanalysts, Sigmund Freud held tenaciously and perhaps even stubbornly to one of his earliest visions of the therapeutic action of the treatment he created. From beginning (if we date the beginning to the Dora case, published in 1905 but written four years earlier) to end, Abend reminds us, Freud insisted that only the analysis of the transference is capable of leading to enduring, stable, and genuinely psychoanalytic improvement. Abend suggests that Freud never revisited this idea in light of theoretical changes that rendered it no longer tenable.

Abend argues compellingly that Freud's vision originated at a time when he was working with a conceptual system that had relatively few moving parts. Mainly, there was the quasi-physiological mover of our erotic lives, libido, and a psychic apparatus that is capable of expelling unwanted mental contents from consciousness. The rejected contents are inaccessible to awareness, but the mind is incapable of extinguishing them or even of greatly weakening their power to shape our experience and behavior.