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Frequently psychoanalysts and other psychotherapists encounter patients who suffered parent loss during childhood. Over time a small but significant literature has developed that focuses on the special clinical problems of this population (Freud, 1927; Lewin, 1937; Deutsch, 1937; Fleming and Altschul, 1962; Jacobson, 1965; Altschul, 1968; Fleming, 1972, 1974; Stolorow and Lachmann, 1975; Blum, 1980, 1983, 1984; Shane and Shane, 1990a,b). A frequent observation of these analysts has been that many analysands who have experienced parent loss avoid engagement in and experience of the transference, and it has been agreed that the analyst's ability to understand and analyze this complex transference response is essential to successful treatment outcome. To this end, I intend to explore a key motivation of the transference in these patients.
My observation has been that a certain group of these patients withdraw psychologically and emotionally from others as a result of the childhood loss of a sustaining intersubjective context of mutual relatedness that was lost with the death of a parent. More specifically, the resistance to the experience of the transference and the engagement in a