Changing Patterns of Transference and Fetishism: A Cultural Inquiry*

When, in the course of his early psychoanalytic work, Freud discovered transference, he at first viewed the phenomenon as a purely neurotic reaction. 4 The strength of the neurotic's attachment to the analyst, its irrelevance to the latter's actual personality, appearance and function, seemed initially an unwelcome obstacle that impeded the treatment of the patient.

Subsequently Freud recognized that without transference there could be no therapeutic learning; since transference lays the groundwork for accepting other's ideas as well as projecting one's own, it is the loom on which new experiences are woven. In his autobiography 9 Freud emphasized the universality of transference and equated it to hypnotic suggestibility, the mechanism of rapport under hypnosis:

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 relation to his human environment. We can of each person's relation to his human environment. We can easily recognize it as the same dynamic factor that the hypnotists have named “suggestibility.”

The transference pattern is developed in the context of the child's earliest social relationships. Since relationships are formed with a number of persons in his environment, one might also generalize that under favorable conditions the child develops a number of