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Natterson's paper concerns itself with extra-analytic transferences which are incorrectly handled by the analyst. He warns that such “reductionist efforts” to “squeeze” every expression of feeling toward another person into a transference interpretation increases the resistance and may jeopardize the transference, and ultimately the analysis. Natterson's advice is well taken; it is not new and has been dealt with frequently in the literature, obviously because the mistakes he points out tend to be repeated by the beginning analyst, and often enough by experienced analysts who treat patients with preconceived ideas rather than by observation based upon the analyst's free-floating attention.
Natterson's approach to the problem is rather reductionist in itself. Transference is a universal phenomenon and the most difficult aspect of analysis (Bird, 1972). Freud (1925) says, “It must not be supposed, however, that transference is created by analysis and does not occur apart from it. Transference is merely uncovered and isolated by analysis. It is a universal phenomenon of the human mind, it decides the success of all medical influence and, in fact, dominates the whole of each person's relations to his human environment” (p. 42). Accordingly, Silverberg (1948) does not limit transference to the psychoanalytic therapy situation, but rather treats it as a specific dynamism that may enter into any interpersonal relationship (Orr, 1954, p. 632); Horney (1939) advocates horizontal
interpretations of the patient's disturbances in current interpersonal relationships, including the analytic relationship, as opposed to vertical interpretation that relates everything back to infancy and childhood, and warns that any rigidity in the analysis may render it utterly unproductive, which agrees with Sylvia Payne's (1946) opinion that “any stereotyped transference interpretation will be liable to interfere with the progress of the case” (p. 15). Fenichel (1939) says somewhat impatiently