Dynamics of Transference Interpretations1
Paula Heimann
In 1919 Freud (3) wrote: 'We have formulated our therapeutic task as one of
bringing to the knowledge of the patient the unconscious repressed impulses
existing in his mind and, to this end, of uncovering the resistances that oppose
themselves to this extension of his knowledge about himself.'
This definition of psycho-analytic therapy still holds good. Advance in
psycho-analytic work has proved the truth of the theories embodied in it. To
paraphrase those germane to the present paper: mental illness is caused by
unconscious conflicts, the clashes between instinctual impulses and what is
opposed to them. Mental recovery depends on conscious work on these conflicts,
and this work proceeds through the medium of the patient's emotional relation
with his analyst. Psycho-analytic therapy is thus directed towards the patient's ego.
Freud's definition of psycho-analytic therapy anticipated his systematic
formulations of the nature and functions of the ego and its interaction with the
other mental systems (4), but his earlier work (1), (2) had already presented the
basic principles governing mental processes. Perception and motor action are the
two poles of the mental apparatus, perception initiating mental activity and
controlling physical activity. Between these poles is the realm of attention, the
readiness for perception, memory, the store of past perceptions which is used in
fresh perceptive acts and conscious associative thought, leading to correct
assessment of inner and outer conditions. It is on such conscious and reasoned
judgements that reality-adjusted and purposeful activities are based. The ego is the
system of consciousness and its sequelæ. It grows and takes shape through contact
with objects. Its root function from which its other functions stem is perception. 'In
the ego perception plays the part which in the id devolves upon instinct' (4).
Perception is thus the prime and fundamental activity of the ego, as Freud stressed,
and not a passive experience. The ego brings something of its own towards the
object to be perceived. It cathects the object actively. Cathexis presupposes the
existence of a mobile energy, derived from the instinctual reservoir, which can be
moved from one place to another, from the subject to an object, from one object to
others. Mobility is a primary character of life, and the ultimate motive which
makes the ego turn towards an object, perceive and cathect it, lies in its
helplessness and in its wish to live. The first perceptions are those of bodily
sensations and bodily needs. 'The ego is first and foremost a body-ego' (4). The
urge to obtain satisfaction expresses the life instinct. I would suggest that when the
ego turns towards an object for satisfaction, what it brings forward of its own for a
perception of this object is the expectation that it will be good, gratifying, loving,
i.e. it sends out some of its own libido towards the object. According to Melanie
Klein (15) such libidinal cathexis includes projection of part of the ego's own love
on to the object.2 Perception furthermore involves introjection (9). The basic
function of the ego, perception, is thus associated with the main structural
processes which are responsible for ego development.
The analysis of the factors involved in perception and following upon it bears
out Freud's statement of the paramount significance of perception for the whole of
ego development. The ego is the sense organ and executive of the total organism.
Perception initiates contact; and contact involves the main structural mechanisms
of introjection and projection, which then build up and shape the ego. Contact,
moreover, initiated by perception, leads on to obtaining both satisfaction and
protection (defence). Satisfaction, gratification, gratitude, and love are closely
—————————————
Paper read at the International Psycho-Analytical Congress at Geneva, 24–28 July,
1955.
2 Freud described an extreme example of such projection in the condition of infatuation.
When the lover endows his beloved with all the virtues, his own ego becomes depleted.
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 1921. Standard Edition, 18.
1
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allied experiences. Thus the ego is the seat of the feelings and emotions. It
contains the affective responses to perceptions and the emotional charge of
memory traces. It is the organ which expresses the total personality. It was in this
last wide sense that Freud used the term before he proceeded to his definition of
the system ego. Yet this wider meaning still pertains to it, since what we call a
person's character 'must be thought of as belonging entirely to the province of the
ego' (6). It is in the wake of his gratifying contact with his first object, the mother's
breast, that the infant comes to love this object (anaclitic process).
The first sense organ to function for the total personality in contact with
another human being is the mouth; the basis and model of all later perceptions is
feeding, oral intake.
The point I wish to underline here is that it is the life instinct which is
operative in perception, the instinct which aims at union and contact, in contrast to
the death instinct which aims at avoiding or breaking up contact and union. It is, of
course, true that an expression of destructive impulses also needs contact with an
object, but this does not invalidate the proposition that contact primarily and
ultimately serves the life instinct. If contact is wanted in order to attack and
destroy an object, this object is one that rouses fear. Self-preservation requires it to
be defeated or annihilated. In contradistinction, negativism, refusal to perceive and
cathect the object, turning away from it, denial, are characteristic expressions of
the death instinct (10).
Libidinal and self-preservative needs drive the subject towards objects and
engender perception. When these needs are satisfied, the ego ceases to perceive;
the baby after a happy feed, the adult after orgasm, falls asleep.
In its role of root function of the ego perception leads to and establishes
healthy life. Conversely, distorted perceptions and hallucinations lead to
malformation of the ego and mental illness, with all the sequelæ of delusional
thinking and acting and failure in social life.
These propositions, viz. that perception is the basis of consciousness, that it is
the expression of the life instinct and promotes contact and union, intrapsychically and inter-personally, that it is the foundation of reality-adjusted
behaviour, give substance to Freud's definition of the therapeutic task of widening
the patient's knowledge about himself through the medium of his emotional
relation with the analyst. Perception is the prime mover in the unifying analytic
process of reconciling into a whole the disparate, repressed, and conflicting
elements of the patient's personality. In this work the transference becomes the
battleground on which the patient's conflicts have to be fought out, since it is in the
transference that the experiences that originally developed and shaped his ego are
repeated. Under the sway of the pleasure principle the patient wishes to repeat
only the pleasurable aspects of his past life. He wants the analyst to gratify his
libidinal wishes and to comfort and reassure him against his painful feelings of
dread and guilt. He fights against the analyst's endeavour to make him conscious
of what he excludes from consciousness on account of its painful character. When
he is interested in the analytic approach and is willing to learn, it is in the pattern
of pleasurable learning as in childhood that he wants to proceed, and thus his
intellectual interest becomes a form of resistance. The infant learns pleasurably by
introjecting his loving and protective parents. As ordinary observation shows, an
infant who first shrank from a new object, say a cat, and took flight into his
mother's arms, will venture forth and stroke and explore this object when he has
seen his mother do so and so feels encouraged by her. He does not merely emulate
her; he has taken this mother inside himself and under her protection can now do
what before was too dangerous. Melanie Klein has called the introjection of the
mother's breast in its loved and loving aspect the focal point of the developing ego
(15).
In fact, however, the patient is unable to follow the pleasure principle by
repeating only the pleasurable parts of his past object relationship in the
transference. He re-experiences his old conflicts with their attendant persecutory
and depressive anxieties. But repetition turns into modification, because the
analytic relationship provides not merely a stage on which the patient re-enacts his
past experiences. This time the patient's emotional object, the analyst, does not
react by responding emotionally to his wishes and fears, as his original objects did.
In this new emotional setting in which the patient repeats, the analyst contributes,
in the form of interpretations, the perception and consciousness of what is
happening in this setting. This combination of contact with an object together with
conscious insight into what this contact unconsciously signifies distinguishes the
transference from the original relationship.
It follows, and this is the main contention of
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this paper, that the specific instrument of psycho-analytic therapy, in contrast to
other forms of psycho-therapy, is the transference interpretation. Repetition gives
way to modification, to dynamic changes in the patient's ego, because the
transference interpretation enables the patient's ego to perceive its emotional
experiences, its impulses and their vicissitudes, makes them conscious, at the
moment when they are actively roused in a direct and immediate relationship with
their object. The emotional excitation must be followed closely by perception of it,
and almost coincide with conscious awareness of it. We know that a person can be
profoundly changed by religious experiences, divine revelations, a vision of the
divinity. The quality of immediacy characterizes these experiences, and it is this
that engenders conviction. But whilst in religious convictions of this kind the ego
accepts unquestioningly the divine truth, and submits passively to its deity, the
personality changes which follow from the psycho-analytic process are founded on
the fullest activity of the ego, that is, on realistic, critically tested perceptions.
UNCONSCIOUS PHANTASY IN THE
TRANSFERENCE
In spite of general agreement amongst analysts that the transference is the
battleground, in other words that the dynamic changes in the patient's ego depend
on the working through of his emotional conflicts as they centre upon the analyst,
there are great differences in psycho-analytic technique as practised. These have
often been defined in terms of the timing of transference interpretations, of
interpretations of the negative versus the positive transference, or deep versus
superficial interpretations, or the number of interpretations altogether. In the
past—perhaps not only in the past—the analyst's efficiency was measured by the
amount of his silence.
These definitions, important though they are, do not go to the core of the
matter. The essential causes of the differences in psycho-analytic technique are in
my view related to the analyst's appreciation of the role played by unconscious
phantasy in mental life and in the transference.
It is not sufficient to regard the transference as a manifestation of the
repetition compulsion and as a mechanism of displacement of ungratified libidinal
impulses and unsolved conflicts. In such repetition and displacement unconscious
phantasy itself is operative. The patient is not prompted by realistic perception and
rational thought when he treats the analyst as his parents; when interpretations are
enjoyed as the sustaining milk from his mother's breast or dreaded as the castrating
father's attacks. He is behaving under the domination of his unconscious infantile
phantasies, those dynamic psychic processes which Susan Isaacs (11) defined as
'the mental corollary, the psychic representative of instinct.' 'All impulses, all
feelings, all modes of defence are experienced in phantasies which give them
mental life and show their direction and purpose.' 'A phantasy represents the
particular content of the urges or feelings … dominating the mind at the moment.'
When Freud described that a special mental function, that of phantasying,
remained exempt from the reality principle, he considered defensive and gratifying
phantasies (2). But these are only one particular form or manifestation of that basic
mental capacity which Susan Isaacs showed to be inherent in Freud's concept of
instincts as borderland entities between mind and soma, and in his derivation of
intellectual function from the interplay of the primary instinctual impulses (5). I
have mentioned above one example of the wish-fulfilling type of phantasying in
the transference, and one of the opposite, the anxiety rousing type. Moreover, it is
not only in regard to objects that this basic capacity of phantasying comes into
play, thus determining the character of the transference; it is also in regard to parts
of the self, body and mind, that this capacity exerts itself. On account of
unconscious phantasy the patient treats his own ideas, his memories of past events,
his wishes and fears, etc. as personified entities localized within himself, and he
transfers these internal objects as well on to the analyst. In his phantastic
evaluation of ideas and memories the patient repeats (or retains) the infantile mode
of reaction to bodily sensations and intra-psychic processes, following in part the
connexion with real external objects, his parents, who first gave him words and
ideas (as well as concrete gifts), and whom he internalized together with the ideas
and the activity of thinking.
Another aspect of unconscious phantasies is important in psycho-analytic
work. The communication of an idea, or a memory, or a dream not only forms part
of the patient's emotional relation with his analyst; it is also prompted by it. Here,
as so often in our work, we encounter a two-way traffic. The patient tells a dream
not because it just happened to come into his mind. It
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came into his mind because to tell it to his analyst is a suitable way of expressing
his impulses towards him, which he then acts upon by telling the dream. The
degree to which infantile modes of thinking prevail does, of course, differ with
different individuals, but they must never be neglected in any analysis, and they
become dominant when the analytic process has stirred early infantile levels of
experience.
At times these unconscious phantasies find expression in a dramatic manner,
but it is not only at these conspicuous moments that they are operative. (Nor is the
drama of life in appearance always dramatic.) They are in existence always, even
if hidden and apparently quiescent, and they necessitate a persistent readiness in
the analyst to perceive them. On this view unconscious phantasy, the cause of the
transference, is not something that occasionally irrupts into the patient's relation
with the analyst and then interferes with his reason and co-operation. It is the
fertile matrix from which his actual motives spring and which determine his
apparently rational behaviour, his reasoned presentation of ideas and co-operative
acceptance of the analyst's interpretations no less than his silence, or negativism,
or openly defiant resistance.
The therapeutic task of extending the patient's conscious knowledge about
himself, about his unconscious impulses and defences against anxiety and pain,
makes it necessary to bring his unconscious phantasies to consciousness. This
holds for the positive transference no less than for the negative. Whilst the latter
more obviously acts as resistance, the former too serves this purpose. The patient's
infantile need to deify his parents is repeated with the analyst, at the cost of
forgoing independence and objectivity. Moreover, the analyst, at one point raised
in unconscious phantasies to the stature of a god, is bound to change into a demon
when the patient's expectations that his total life will become blissfully happy
through his analysis are thwarted. In any case, even during the apparently smooth
period of a predominantly positive transference there are negative undercurrents;
the very idealization of the analyst covers hostile feelings, sanctions greedy and
possessive demands etc., so that we cannot make so very sharp a distinction
between what in fact always occurs in a fusion or in rapid oscillations.
When the analyst expresses these unconscious phantasies in his
interpretations, the patient's ego makes contact with them and so discovers
something which is in reality its own, although he himself was unable to verbalize
these phantasies or can remember only fragmentary flashes of such feelings or
ideas flitting through his mind at some former time. Superficial contents of
feelings will be nearer to consciousness and easily accessible to interpretation; but
underlying them are the infantile and primitive contents, some of which have
never been experienced in verbal form. Verbalization of the most primitive and
chaotic impulses and of the ego's relationship with its intra-psychic objects renders
these unconscious experiences only in approximation. Nevertheless, words are of
the greatest significance, because they remove the barriers between the different
strata of the ego, they promote clear and critical thinking, and they are the vehicle
of conscious, explicit communication between patient and analyst. The
interpretations of the character of the patient's relation to his analyst in terms of
these primitive impulses and of the transference of intra-psychic object
relationships are necessary if analysis is to bring about the patient's fuller
understanding of himself.
THE ANALYST AS THE PATIENT'S
SUPPLEMENTARY EGO
Freud has given us the most succinct description of the analyst's function in
saying that the analyst acts as a mirror to the patient.
A mirror has no self, so to speak, no independent existence; it is there to
reflect the patient. Thus the analytic process is carried out by a team of two
persons acting as a functional unit, in which separate roles are accorded to each.
The patient's share is described by the fundamental rule, under which he has
the right and duty of saying whatever comes into his mind. He initiates the themes
of the discussion by words or silent behaviour. He can discard logic, reason, and
social conventions in behaviour and language. He can express his emotional
demands on his partner, love, trust, seduction or hate, contempt, rejection; can
roam over every place and time of his life; can forget the purpose of the
relationship.
The analyst's share is to be the mirror, to record and reflect the patient's
mental processes and so to provide his ego with perceptions of these processes.
The analyst assumes the role of a supplementary ego for the patient.
The analyst does not speak spontaneously, but in response only to the patient's
associations, verbal or behavioural. He has to follow the
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themes which the patient has brought up. His remarks need to be clear and to the
point. He cannot roam, but must relate himself to what is emotionally and actually
relevant for his patient. He has to remember that all that the patient says and does
is taking place in the transference situation, and he has to seek the reasons and
meanings for the patient's associations. His own emotions are barred from
expression; both his hostility and his benevolence have to be sublimated into the
readiness to perceive without personal bias, without selecting or rejecting; he has
to analyse his counter-transference and extract clues from it for the patient's
processes. His first objective is to enable the patient's ego to perceive its intrapsychic and inter-personal processes, as they occur in the immediate situation.
The loss of perception with its sequelae which the patient incurred in his
attempts to solve his conflicts with his original objects, his defensive acts of
denial, repression, isolation, splitting, etc. become actual and manifest in the
transference. His perception is reduced and distorted, his thinking repetitive,
rambling, blocked, or irrelevant; awareness of these defects in his ego functions is
absent or obscured. Illusion, delusion, or hallucination replace realistic perception
and judgement. Thus the analyst is not only or primarily to interpret something
that happened in the past; it is happening now.
The question the analyst has to ask himself constantly is: 'Why is the patient
now doing what to whom?' The answer to this question constitutes the transference
interpretation. It defines the patient's actual motives, arising both from his
instinctual impulses and from his defences against pain and anxiety towards the
analyst as their object. It defines the character of the analyst and the character of
the patient at the actual moment. In the wake of these clarifications of the
immediate relationship some picture of his earlier object-relations emerges, to
which the patient responds with either a general feeling of familiarity or with
direct and specific recollections. His immediate emotional experience with his
object, rendered conscious by this object's interpretations, taps the depths in him,
his phantasies and memories. It is the transference interpretation which fully reinstates the past in the present and makes it accessible to the patient's ego. The
patient is not then looking back coolly and intellectually at what he once felt with
his parents, but is experiencing his immediate feelings and their phantasy contents
towards the analyst as the real and living equivalent of his past life with his
original objects who have indeed been intra-psychically preserved.
Although the patient re-enacts his past object relations in the transference, the
analyst has to consider the reciprocal fact that his own personality, no matter how
much he controls its expression, is perceived and reacted to by the patient. He
must be aware of himself, his personal peculiarities, etc. as prompting responses—
both correct and distorted perceptions—in his patient which interact with the
patient's spontaneous productions. Therefore the patient's criticisms of his analyst
and attempts at analysing him cannot be dismissed as resistance only. The
analyst's personality is one part of the analytic situation and of the patient's
problems on a realistic as well as a phantasy level. An interesting sideline
concerns the patient's unawareness of his analyst, especially for instance when the
analyst himself has had some distressing experience. Such a lack of perception in
patients may spring from tact, or insensitivity, or from the need to deny whatever
threatens the use of an object as a source of gratification.
Such incidents reveal important aspects of the patient's personality in his
immediate contact with an object; yet in my view it is not possible to interpret
them directly. The analyst cannot make his patient aware of his failure of
perception, since this would involve expressing something about himself. I have
pointed out elsewhere (8) that any confession of personal matters by the analyst is
injurious to the analytic process. It amounts to an intrusion and projection by the
analyst. It may, though, be possible for the analyst to point to a conspicuous
absence, a phobic avoidance concerning himself, in the patient's associations, if
indeed this is an observable fact. This may or may not lead to the emergence of the
patient's denied, repressed, split-off experience of having noticed something
disturbing in the analyst. But in any case it is an important part of the analyst's
work to be aware of such incidents. Since they do show something of the patient's
way of dealing with inter-personal problems, repetitions in other settings are
bound to occur which the analyst can interpret freely. The value of his perception
in the incident described lies in his having become sensitized, so that he will detect
the same phenomenon the more quickly when it occurs next time.
An important part of the transference interpretations concerns the patient's
introjection of
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his analyst. The theory that introjection of the analyst modifies the patient's
archaic superego and, therefore, is part of analytic therapy needs to be revised.
Introjection of any friendly authority represents a therapeutic experience and may
modify a strict superego. But it is not the specific characteristic of psycho-analytic
therapy; that is the extension of the patient's consciousness and the widening and
unifying of his ego. The really valid modifications of the superego result from
changes in the ego by the conscious working through of its impulses, conflicts and
anxieties.
The origin of the cruel superego, as Melanie Klein has shown (12), lies in the
infant's projecting his own sadistic impulses on his parents as external and internal
objects. Introjection of the analyst into the patient's superego alone is far from
breaking the vicious circle of destructive impulses and dread of the superego. It
merely achieves a shift and maintains the dangerous twin formation of idealization
and persecution. If the ego's conflicts with its superego are not worked through,
the ego continues with its early infantile mode of splitting and doubling its
relationships. The patient in fact repeats unconsciously his oscillation from one
bad parent, now his real and internalized parents, to the other good parent, now the
kind analyst.
What really change the archaic superego and divests it of its demoniacal or
godlike character are processes in the ego: its conscious recognition of its
impulses, its accepting responsibility for them and withdrawing projection from its
external and introjected objects. This process of working through is experienced in
the transference with the analyst in the role of the original and internalized objects,
and includes the reexperience of infantile conflicts down to the levels which
Melanie Klein (13), (14) has described as the paranoid and depressive infantile
positions. Alongside the modification of the ego, the superego changes its
character. It ceases to be a cruel intra-psychic figure which restricts the ego,
prohibits libidinal pleasure, and by relentlessly equating impulses with deeds,
punishes cruel wishes. It assumes an abstract character; the character of guiding
principles which the ego can critically test and accept as valuable. Many of these
the patient may consciously remember to have been held by his parents. Closely
linked with these processes the ego's capacity for sublimation is freed, and its
former rebellion against an intra-psychic devil or submission to an intra-psychic
god is replaced by the ego's creative struggle with ideas, with intellectual, or
artistic, or practical problems, for whose solution it exercises itself and works
hard, often, indeed, painfully (7). An introjection of the analyst as a benevolent,
permissive figure by-passes this development of the ego. The interpretation that
such introjection is in progress is a vital part of the analyst's work.
The patient's tendency to short-circuit his painful labours by accepting his
analyst as a saviour and mentor makes it necessary for the analyst to avoid
authoritative attitudes. Giving his opinion on the patient's friends or parents,
proffering advice or practical interventions—all this runs counter to the analytic
aim and procedure.
It is introjection of a different kind which analytic technique aims at. The
analyst acts as the patient's supplementary ego by providing perception and
consciousness of the patient's own processes. What the patient introjects,
therefore, is something that essentially belongs to his own ego, but which had been
in a state of abeyance through various denial techniques, or else had been stifled at
the beginning and thus been prevented from pursuing its normal growth. In the
course of the analytic work the patient does arrive at new ideas and points of view,
at new emotional constellations, but they are a part of his own self, not his
analyst's ideas or feelings. He becomes conscious through the interpretative work
of what he had forgotten; he also becomes capable of thinking consecutively and
finds conclusions where earlier his line of thought was blocked. His integrated ego
advances farther. When the patient's consciousness is extended in the hard-won
battles against his resistances, he discovers and re-discovers himself; he also
grows and his capacities develop; he becomes more creative, and the assimilation
of apparently new ideas and feelings is facilitated by the fact that, as the patient
sometimes says, he 'actually knew it all the time'.
The functional unit of analyst and patient reproduces the functional units
which the patient experienced in the past, first with his mother's body, and later
with both parents. The fundamental difference is evident. The parents are
supplementary to a physically and emotionally helpless infant and their
responsibility is maximal, as is their child's dependence on them. The analyst is
not his patient's parents. His responsibility and his means of caring for his patient
are limited in extent and different in kind. If his patient is incapacitated to a major
degree
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and in need of parental care, it is not for the analyst to take on that function. Freud
warned the analyst against the temptation to act as his patient's saviour (4) and
defined his function as the patient's mirror. This limitation signifies an acceptance
of reality by the analyst and constitutes a safeguard against his own weaknesses
and faults. Moreover, it protects the patient from an interference with his
personality arising from another person's opinion that he ought to be different. To
believe that analysis is compatible with influencing the patient's life is to fall in
with the patient's wish for an omnipotent solution of his problems, i.e. his wish to
retreat into baby-hood.
Conversely, the patient's tendency to regress is lessened and his adult ego
strengthened when the analyst steadfastly refrains from encouraging the acting out
of infantile experiences by participating in them.
The transference interpretation is the real tool of analytic technique. It is not
always instantly available. Often the analyst is baffled. To expect that he should
always understand what is going on would be tantamount to claiming that his own
ego functions to perfection. But the fact that he is bewildered is a reality in the
immediate situation and needs to be clearly perceived as such by the analyst. He
will then avoid blurring the issue further by irrelevant or misleading comments.
Moreover, he will discover, if only gradually, the specific meaning and
significance of such occurrences. His own contribution to such situations he will
find from the analysis of his counter-transference which, as I have suggested,
forms part of the analyst's work. Often what has happened is that the patient has
succeeded in projecting his fears and defensive dissociation into the analyst's ego,
or that he has re-enacted a primal scene with anal attacks on his parents and
effectively confused the analyst, or that he has taken flight by a special form of
narcissistic withdrawal.
If the dynamic transference interpretation remains in abeyance for too long
and the analyst merely supplies preparatory clarifications, the patient either finds
more fuel for his intellectual defences or he experiences just another emotional
upset, as so often in his outside life, without gaining from it. Repetition has not
been turned into modification, and often this will lead to more repetition by the
patient, that is, acting out in his social life.
Whether the patient talks about a dream or a current incident or a childhood
episode, the analyst's task is to perceive the dynamic line which links this with the
patient's actual motives, preconscious or unconscious, towards the analyst.
The emotional centre, the centre of growth, lies in the transference
relationship and is kept there against the patient's resistance by the interpretations.
My contention that it is the transference interpretation only which achieves
dynamic changes in the patient's ego does not mean that the analyst speaks only
about himself and denies the importance of the persons with whom the patient is
consciously concerned. Nor do I overlook that often a patient takes flight into the
transference from a current conflict in his life. My contention is that the relevant
meaning, the true understanding of the patient's conscious problems can only be
discovered if the dynamic line is perceived and followed out linking these
problems with the emotional motives governing the patient in the immediate, the
transference situation. The patient's unsolved problems can only be recognized and
made accessible by the understanding of the transference.
There are moments in the analysis when the patient recovers his lost original
objects. He then dwells on memories of incidents and feelings, speaks with deep
and genuine concern about them, works out what a certain episode meant to him
and must have meant to his mother or father, how he misunderstood them or they
misunderstood him at the time, whilst he now realizes that he falsely attributed to
them motives of indifference or hostility. In these thoughts and feelings there is
sadness, remorse, and quiet love, not paranoid hatred or self-pity. The experience
is immensely meaningful and important to the patient; it is truly an experience
with his original objects, they are alive to him and present, they are felt as an
essential part of himself and his present life even though in fact they may be dead.
(Joan Riviere has shown that such free and direct contact with past love objects
acts as a creative source (16).) His ego is an integrated whole and functions
optimally. There is some happiness within the sadness and remorse. The analyst is
also felt to be there; he is admitted to the relationship, and incidents with him
interweave with the recollections of incidents with his parents.
Such moments are the reward for the work done; transference interpretations
have led to contact with the object from whom the conflicts had been transferred.
During these passages the
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analyst remains a listener, a bystander; nevertheless, vigilance is needed to
perceive a sometimes insidious transition to disturbances in the patient's ego, to
resistance, denial of emotions and withdrawal from them and from the actual
object, the analyst. Recovery of lost love is succeeded by the emergence of
hostility and new problems. The patient swings into a different mood and
experience: the affect of love and contact in relation to his original objects has
become exhausted. Again conflict is operative in the transference relation and has
to be discovered and made conscious. The analyst's activity is called for in order to
recognize and interpret the changes in the patient's condition and in his relation to
the analyst.
Unusual events in the patient's life outside the analysis (e.g. bereavement or
threat of bereavement) may stir the depths of his emotional life, so that at this
point his ego does not take the detour via the transference relationship to arrive at
a dynamic contact with his original objects. (This does not mean that the patient is
not then in an emotionally significant relation with his analyst, but that the latter is
additional to what he is re-living from his past.) These, however, are exceptions,
and exceptions are rare. As a rule the patient employs the medium of the
transference and the analyst has to take everything he presents as a parable, that is,
to quote the O.E.D., as 'a narration in which something is expressed in terms of
something else.'
REFERENCES
FREUD, S. 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams
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