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Dr. Little's paper brings to our attention first how complexly-developed and yet how uniquely neglected has been our scrutiny of countertransference when it has to do with the analyst's feelings of failure and difficulty (rather than the hackneyed overworked standby subjects of sex and hostility), and second, it prompts us to reconsider more accurately the nature and character of that major phenomena of psychoanalysis, viz., imago identification with the analyst.
The heuristic model with which we work assumes that most of our patients have been exposed in their childhood to parental figures who in a variety of important ways failed to supply the security, affection, encouragement and approval that through introjection and identification are incorporated into this subsequently-developed self-approving and self-reliant ego structure. They bring, therefore, to analysis not only their immediate problems but an underlying deeply debased conception of their worth. Hence, unconsciously, they look for the good parent whom they never had: one who ideally is consistent, wise, strong, and loving.
These infantile expectations prompt the patient to make an imago identification, i.e., a transference expectation of finding in the analyst the good parent who prior to analysis has had to be hallucinated. When this occurs (and much of the technique of analysis is assuring that it does occur), the neurosis is exchanged for the transference neurosis, a cathexis of the analyst with the frustrated childhood expectations, a conception of him as omnipotent and omniscient. Only after the patient is stronger, more insightful and self-reliant is the transference neurosis, like the scaffolding around a building, dismantled in this “working through.”
We soon learn that this proneness to perceive us as generally more wise, powerful, and loving than we are, occupies a central and necessary place in the therapeutic process. We are urged (by such writers as Marmor) not to fall for our own propaganda a