2. Transference and Relationship

Transferences arise in all human relationships, and this fact gives Freud's discovery wide significance. Initially, however, he based his definition of transference on observations made in the course of therapy:

They are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and fantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician. To put it another way: a whole series of psychological experiences are revived, not as belonging to the past, but as applying to the person of the physician at the present moment. Some of these transferences have a content which differs from that of their model in no respect whatever except for the substitution. These then — to keep to the same metaphor — are merely new impressions or reprints. Others are more ingeniously constructed; … by cleverly taking advantage of some real peculiarity in the physician's person or circumstances and attaching themselves to that. These, then, will no longer be new impressions, but revised editions. (Freud 1905e, p. 116)

Later, however, he generalized:

Transference arises spontaneously in all human relationships just as it does between the patient and the physician. It is everywhere the true vehicle of therapeutic influence; and the less its presence is suspected, the more powerfully it operates. So psychoanalysis does not create it, but merely reveals it to consciousness and gains control of it in order to guide psychical processes towards the desired goal. (Freud 1910a, p. 51)

Transference is thus a generic term in both senses of the word: First, since a person's past experiences have a fundamental and persistent influence on his present life, transference is universal in Homo sapiens. Second, the concept embraces numerous typical phenomena which are expressed individually and uniquely in each one of us. Special forms of