3.1 Transference: Working Definition

The development of the technique of psychoanalysis has been determined essentially by the evolution of our knowledge about the nature of transference. The greatest advances in psychoanalytic technique were derived from Freud's (1905c) major discoveries about the twofold power of transference; it is an instrument of irreplaceable value, and it is the source of the greatest dangers. Transference reactions offer the analyst an invaluable opportunity to explore the inaccessible past and the unconscious (Freud, 1912a, p. 108). Transference also stirs up resistances that become the most serious obstacle to our work (p. 101). Every definition of psychoanalytic technique must include as a central element the analysis of the transference. Every deviant school of psychoanalysis can be described by some aberration in the way the transference situation is handled. Transference reactions occur in all patients undergoing psychotherapy. Psychoanalysis is distinguished from all other therapies by the way it promotes the development of the transference reactions and how it attempts systematically to analyze transference phenomena.

By transference we refer to a special kind of relationship toward a person; it is a distinctive type of object relationship. The main characteristic is the experience of feelings to a person which do not

befit that person and which actually apply to another. Essentially, a person in the present is reacted to as though he were a person in the past. Transference is a repetition, a new edition of an old object relationship (Freud, 1905c, p. 116). It is an anachronism, an error in time. A displacement has taken place; impulses, feelings, and defenses pertaining to a person in the past have been shifted onto a person in the present. It is primarily an unconscious phenomenon, and the person reacting with transference feelings is in the main unaware of the distortion.

Transference may consist of any of the components of an object relationship, i.e., it may be ex