Extra-Analytic Transference: A Two-Way Tide

It is a good divine that follows his own instructions. I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.

In this paper i will use actual clinical occurrences to establish my observations that some transferences follow a course other than what, to my knowledge, has been expressed to date in the literature on this subject, and that their management requires somewhat different measures. As my ideas and recommendations are developed, I hope the analyst-reader will try to view them without preconception and will ask himself whether they conform to his own observations and interventions.

Intense, significant, autonomous transference reactions toward persons and situations outside the analytic relationship are regular occurrences throughout the course of extended psychoanalyses. In day-to-day practice they are handled effectively and discriminatingly by experienced psychoanalysts. But in specific discussions of technique, these phenomena tend to be overlooked or incompletely elucidated, or regarded as unfortunate nonanalytic complications which require deviation from established technique.

The psychoanalytic situation is complex, and efforts to simplify it are both understandable and desirable; however, there are times when such reductionist efforts not only result in glossing over certain complicating and important facts but prevent us from recognizing and exploring them.

I do not challenge the firmly established fact that hidden

transferences to the analyst may find displaced expression toward extra-analytic objects. The method of free association permits the analyst to observe these displacements, to draw valid inferences as to the submerged transference attitudes directed at him, and, through interpretation, to make the analysand conscious of them. But some transferences follow a different course, and, accordingly, they must be managed differently. We can understand their dynamic