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The clinical discoveries of Heinz Kohut, the empirical studies by a host of infant researchers, and the formulations of developmental theorists offer a challenge and expanded opportunities to the psychoanalytic clinician. Jointly, they promise to increase our understanding of the patient–analyst interaction and the patient's organization of that experience, the transference. A clinical vignette will illustrate the contributions from these various sources to our understanding. We will focus on the role of repetition and transformation in two dimensions of the transference: the selfobject dimension and transference as organized by representational configurations.
The illustrative clinical vignette is taken from the first year of the analysis of a 39-year-old divorced woman who was anxious and despondent to the point where she occasionally could not function in her work as a travel agent. After several months of treatment these symptoms had abated somewhat. Then, over the course of several sessions she described the following events: She had met a man who thought she was an emotional person and thought of himself as blocked and distant. In his relationship with her he hoped he would learn how to be emotionally freer. The patient stated that she made it clear to this man that she did not want to be his teacher. In the following session she reported a dream about her former therapist and depicted her as her daughter. The next session contained descriptions of numerous incidents with friends in which the patient had accepted their preferences about planning various activities and