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Certain of Freud's (1912a, 1912b, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1920) writings on transference reveal apparently disparate views. On the one hand, transference was considered to register consciously and operate in the service of the resistance against warded-off associations (1912a, p. 103). On the other, Freud (1920) characterized transferences as psychic contents that arise from the system unconscious and are themselves resisted (p. 19). Racker (1968) concerned himself with this ambiguity and worked out a division between relatively superficial, conscious transference phenomena and warded-off, unconscious transferences. For example, Racker referred to a patient who “arrive[d] at a very rejected, feminine attitude towards the father-analyst, [however]… if he defends himself with hate, projects this hate, and thus distrust and paranoid ideas emerge in relation to the father-analyst, these latter feelings are the resistance (the ‘transference resistance’), and the feminine feelings are what is resisted” (p. 49).
In particular, archaic transferences threaten to expose patients to the analyst as warded-off incarnations of infantile and childhood dangers, and thus the capacity to tolerate warded-off transferences is augmented by the working alliance, including the capacity to experience the analyst both as transference object and as the conveyer of reality aspects of the analytic setting (Greenson, 1967). In the case of severe personality disorders, however, the working alliance is notoriously unstable, so that transferences emerge as terrifyingly real. For instance, according