International Journal of Psychoanalysis

Nunberg, Herman. Transference and Reality, p. 1.

Read, Herbert. Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Aesthetic Value, p. 73.

Nunberg, Herman. Transference and Reality. A patient is described who was critical from the beginning of the treatment. This phenomenon did not reflect the phenomenon transference. It merely revealed a readiness for transference. It produced two attitudes in her. The first was an expectation of finding her real father in the analyst. The second was the wish to change the real person of the analyst into her father as she imagined him. As this desire could not be realized, she suffered constantly from disappointments, frustrations and anger. This led to conflicts with the analyst. She did not transfer her emotions but rather she attempted to transform her analyst into her father. Her wish could not be fulfilled and the attempts to establish a working transference were futile. This is thus a cause of the breaking of the transference. In the transference the analyst tries to unmask the projections or externalizations whenever they appear during the treatment. A second patient is described who could not understand the analyst when she was lying on the couch with her eyes open. When she closed her eyes she could understand. A real expectation produced a regression and revived a picture from childhood which, in the dream, acquired qualities of reality. The third case was one where about eight months after the conclusion of analysis a patient asked to be seen immediately because of sudden panic and insomnia. This example shows that the tendency to transfer infantile experiences into reality and to act them out can be observed not only in the transference situation but also independently of it. This is an urge to establish identity of perceptions through repetition of past experiences. The establishment of identical perceptions is an act of projection as well as of identification. At certain depths in analysis, it is difficult to discern between id