Psychoanalysis and the Sour Apple: Thought-Transference in Historical and Contemporary Psychoanalysis

Abstract

The concept of “thought-transference” holds a special position within the psychoanalytic field. It first emerged in the margins of the discipline as an object of the psychical sciences. It was then extracted by psychoanalysis from the darkness of occultism, Freud considered thought-transference as the kernel of truth in occult beliefs. In this article, we propose to review the role of thought-transference from Freud to the present. This article is divided into two sections, the first of which illustrates how the concept was interpreted by Freud, then taken over by successive generations of analysts. The second section turns to contemporary works that have addressed the topic through three lines of inquiry: its ontological possibility, its conditions of emergence, and its clinical implications. Our aim is thus to shed light on the heuristic role of thought-transference and how it has been the locus of innovative psychoanalytic discoveries.