Some Thoughts on our Conception of Transference and the Nature and Role of Transference Interpretation: A Discussion of Two Papers

Transference is truly an inconvenient concept. Perhaps more so than other psychoanalytic concepts, it forces us to consider the linkage between the historical past and our intercurrent attitudes, emotional reactions, fantasies, and conflictual wishes; it reinforces the basic psychoanalytic claim that our object relations are never solely governed by logic and reason but also by unconscious forces that may be as irrational as they are compelling; it further asserts that this subjective distortion is present in varying degrees in all of our relationships with others. Such ideas are inconvenient because they are not easily quantified, are inherently subjective, and require both time and insight to understand fully. They are clearly incompatible with the current zeitgeist in which the amelioration of symptoms is accorded far more importance than insight into what produced them, and in which the abiding scientific ambition is that every illness be reduced to its genetic components and treated on that basis.

Psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists may have their own difficulties with the concept of transference, of course. There are three errors, in particular, which psychoanalytic clinicians may be apt to commit in the arena of transference. In the first place,