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This is an important and unusual book about a topic that is at the heart of psychoanalytic technique—the interpretation of transference. More specifically, the center of Leites' concern is captured by two questions that comprise the headings of the two longest sections of his book: (1) Is all transference? (2) Is transference all?
In asking the first question, he has in mind a trend that has become increasingly prevalent in psychoanalytic thinking during the past two or three decades: to view the productions of all patients all of the time as dominated by, if not exclusively, an expression of veiled references to the analyst. In discussing this, he notes that while in the earlier days of psychoanalysis “the analyst's major task was to discover the parent behind himself, now (it is) to discern himself behind the rest of the patient's world” (p. 29). Or in the words of Stone, quoted by Leites “Transference interpretation … as used in the current psychoanalytic vernacular refers not so much to the genetic interpretation of the current transference attitude as it means a … statement to the patient of an attitude toward the analyst which is at the moment active but unconscious or … preconscious” (p. 30).
The second question “Is transference all?” refers to a related recent trend in psychoanalytic thinking—the belief that the only effective interpretations in psychoanalysis are transference interpretations, which in keeping with Stone's quotation above, refers to exposing the hidden meanings behind the veiled references to the analyst. Other interpretations, according to this school of thought, are at best ineffective, and at worst, damaging to the treatment. In the words of Gittelson, whom Leites cites, “the analyst plays into … resistance by directing interpretations (to other things) rather than to the transference” (p. 64).