The Concept of Transference: II. Transference and Genetic Continuity

Of the many psychoanalytic concepts that have inspired debate throughout the history of psychoanalysis, none has attracted such continuing review as the notion of transference. Despite persistent efforts to elucidate a clear and unambiguous definition of this prototypical concept, a consensus has yet to be achieved. In recent years, moreover, we have witnessed a preoccupation with the breadth of the clinical applicability of transference that has further diluted the operational specificity of the term. Specifically, a tendency has arisen to subsume quite indiscriminately many aspects of the clinical situation under the rubric of transference, militating against an understanding of the requirements of an epistemologically coherent concept of transference. In response to this trend, this article appeals to epistemology in order to impart new precision to the status of transference with respect to both clinical theory and psychoanalytic metatheory. I should underscore at the outset that this article deals with epistemology and not cognition, even though this epistemological appeal takes cognition as an important referent