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IN FORMULATIONS OF THE FUNCTIONS OF THE PSYCHIATRIC school consultant, the psychoanalytic concept of transference reactions has played an important part (Berlin, 1966); (Hitchcock and Mooney, 1969). When applied to the consultation process in the original sense of a revived object relationship from the past, transferred to the therapist, who becomes the object of the patient's drives, it is misleading. On the one hand, in the practice of psychiatric school consultation, interpretations of such transferences, with their focus on individual past histories of consultees, rarely need be made, if ever (Babcock, 1949); (Caplan, 1970); (Coleman, 1947); (Hitchcock, 1977); (Maddux, 1950). On the other hand, as noted by Berlin (1966), management of transference along lines appropriate for the purposes of individual psychotherapy and psychoanalysis would promote unwelcome regression in the consultation process.
The psychoanalytic concept of externalization, however, as a "subspecies of transference" (A. Freud, 1965, p. 43) does justice to the projective distortions that are regularly encountered