American Psychoanalytic Association

The sixth annual midwinter meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association was held in conjunction with the New York Psychoanalytic Society at the Academy of Medicine, New York City, on December 26, 1929. An informal dinner preceded the meeting. The papers read were as follows: (1) Some Remarks on Transference by Dr. L. E. Emerson; Boston; discussed by Drs. White, Schilder, Zilboorg, Lewin and Sullivan. (2) An Observation of Super-ego Formation by Dr. P. R. Lehrman, New York City; discussed by Drs. Zilboorg, Schilder, Lewin, Wittels, Broadwin, White, Sullivan, Meyer and Emerson. (3) The Problem of the Termination of Analysis by Dr. Dorian Feigenbaum, New York City; discussed by Drs. Glueck, Stern and Brill.

At a short business session which followed the scientific program, Dr. Brill was authorized to appoint a committee to revise the constitution of the Society.

The following is a digest of the above papers:

I. L. E. Emerson, M.D., Boston. Some Remarks on Transference.

A brief history of the development of the idea of transference in Freud's mind will serve as an introduction to my remarks. So far as I can find out, Freud first defined transference in his “Studien Über Hysterie,” published 1895. “If the patient fears lest the painful ideas emerging from the content by the analysis would be transferred to the physician …” no progress can be made until that resistance is overcome. He goes on to say: “The transference to the physician occurs through false connections,” and illustrates it by an example (p. 118). Fourteen years later, in his lectures at Clark University, Freud said: “The study of transfer can also give you the key to the understanding of hypnotic suggestion,” and ten years later still, in his “Introduction to Psychoanalysis” he says “Bernheim, with unerring perspicacity, based his theory of hypnotic manifestations in the statement that all persons are open to suggestion in some way or other. Suggestibility in his sense is nothing more than an inclination