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The heart of psychoanalysis is, by general agreement, the theoretical notion of unconscious motivation. Its guts are believed by many to be the clinical encounter with the transference neurosis. To question this phenomenon or tamper with it is considered, then, to be tantamount to evisceration of clinical theory and practice.
Yet in this issue Reed had deftly chronicled the varieties of surplus meaning and ideological baggage that the term has come to acquire since its original use by Freud to describe a phenomenon he encountered in his early clinical practice. She rightly urges us to divest the term of polemics and to focus more clearly on its clinical grounds. Nonetheless, despite its ambiguities, tautologies, and inconsistencies, Treurniet and Jacobs view the term as usefully encompassing clinical phenomena that they sensitively delineate in case vignettes. London forthrightly defends the use of the term and offers a process definition of the concept in reference to the formal characteristics of play. Cooper, on the other hand, argues persuasively that the term is obsolete, referring to a phenomenon that is inconsistently present and can be considered merely a quantitative variation of omnipresent transference manifestations. Gedo,