The Analysis of Transference as an Interpersonal Process

Abstract

THE ANALYSIS OF TRANSFERENCE AS AN INTERPERSONAL PROCESS1* When Freud first set forth his concept of transference, he presented it as a sort of addendum to what he then considered to be the central tool of his new method of psychotherapy. In 1904 free association and the interpretation of dreams were at the center of his interest and he tried to cure Dora by interpreting her dreams and getting at the finer structure of her disorder. To be sure only three dreams were discussed and the course of treatment ran for only three months. But Freud managed to display his remarkable clinical acumen despite the paucity of psychological data. And he spelled out his first perception of the ways in which a patient utilized the new relationship with the therapist to incorporate many of her previous difficult experiences with other people. He saw this all very simply despite its many complicated manifestations: Dora was out to gain revenge against men, against her father and against Herr K.; that she also tried to get revenge against her doctor because this satisfied her unconscious need was a manifestation of transference. And if Dora was to succeed it meant that Freud had to fail, which he did. In the years that followed, Freud introduced many refinements in metapsychological theory which he eventually translated into refinements in therapeutic technique, especially his observations of transference-love and the repetition-compulsion. By 1918 Freud decided that transference was the chief "battleground" of psychoanalytic therapy. A transference process was the repetition of traumatic oedipal experiences in the analytic relationship with the therapist, but it was repetition without recall of the traumatic factors which were part of those experiences. The analysis of transference became the sine qua non of psychoanalytic therapy. Without it there was no possibility of success, and without a "positive" transference it was considered a foregone conclusion that nothing of worth could be accomplished. This made the analyst's task an easily defined one, even though it was easier to define than carry out. There had to be a working through of what was presented as transference with the objective of bringing about the recall of the repressed. The implicit assumption of this procedure was that if the forgotten episodes could be brought back into current awareness then the need to repeat would be curbed or resolved. In other words it was necessary to transform unconscious memory into conscious memory; repetition had to be transformed into recollection. So far as the analysis of transference was concerned, it seems that Freud equated memory at any particular point with consciously available memory, while what was, in his view, "forgotten" had to be pursued into the distant past where it presumably originated. The psychological issues involved in any theory of memory and recall are complex, and one cannot hope to deal with them in the context of a paper of this sort. None the less, an attempt to inspect Freud's theory of transference requires that we look into what it means to forget something of traumatic significance. On the face of it, he seems to have held two different opinions on this matter: first, that the events of the oedipal period could be reconstructed as the infantile amnesias were overcome; and second, that the distorted experiences in the current relationship with the therapist had to be worked through. These two views of the therapeutic objective are not intrinsically discordant, but when one is sharply emphasized to the detriment of the other-as I believe Freud did-then the analytic experience can become an intellectual game of looking for a needle in the haystack. His method of working as evidenced in his Collected Papers was to lead the patient back to the infantile neuroses and to reconstruct all of the infinite detail of those early experiences. An example of this is his analysis of the "wolf-man" where the puzzle of the infantile neurosis was solved but the patient had to return to analyze his current difficulties in living with another therapist. …