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By courageously submitting his own experience to public criticism, Dr. Little shows in a highly fascinating way the subtle interaction between the patient's and the analyst's unconscious. It is his thesis that his countertransference as well as the patient's transference had adaptive meaning: that they contributed to the survival of the analyst as well as of the analysis.
To be sure, transference has an adaptive function in infancy. In this phase, the transference of the symbiotic mother-child relationship to a substitute of the mother protects the baby from trauma and death. It is especially relevant to our problem that the survival value of transference is not restricted to the period of infantile vulnerability: it also is operative in situations which repeat the early constellation, that is, in situations of mortal danger. In these situations of helplessness the individual reverts, just as the infant does, to regressive symbiotic fantasies and wishes which are reflected in the positive attitude toward doctor and nurse. That this regression is of survival value is stressed by many authors.1,2,3 It wards off the deleterious effect of the threatening depression which could paralyze the patient's self-healing forces.
But beyond such emergency situations, the adult fixation to infantile transference—which we regard as the essence of neurosis—is considered as a fixation to an illusion which impedes adaptation. Of course, we are well aware that human behavior is never fully cut off from its origin in childhood experiences; even in the normal individual, a residue remains operative. This remnant of infantile transference (called by me “normal transference”4 and by Stone “primal transference”5) which, in the mature individual, is strangely coupled with insight into its phantom quality, has some adaptive meaning: it creates the readiness to give and to receive mutual help and protection which underlies the formation of human society and without which man would be unable to e