Delusions commonly occur in certain severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder (also called manic-depressive illness), some cases of major depression, Dissociative disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and paranoid personality disorder. In addition, delusions may result from abuse of certain drugs, including alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, and hallucinogens such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), phencyclidine (PCP), and mescaline. Medical conditions affecting the brain, such as syphilis and brain tumours, may also cause delusions.
Delusional disorder is a relatively uncommon mental illness characterized by delusions. People with this disorder have one or more delusions that persist for at least one month. In addition, they do not suffer from other symptoms of schizophrenia, such as disorganized speech and bizarre behaviour. Usually their delusions are less bizarre than those that occur in schizophrenia and seem merely odd or unsupported by facts. Examples of nonbizarre delusions include beliefs that one is being followed, loved by someone famous, or deceived by one’s spouse. Because delusional disorder is relatively rare, little research has systematically examined its treatment. However, doctors most often use Antipsychotic drugs (also called neuroleptics) to treat this disorder. These drugs help reduce or eliminate delusions, hallucinations, and other psychotic symptoms.
In spite of his narcissistic retreat, every schizophrenic has some underlying notion of the unreality and loneliness of his substitute delusionary world. He longs for human contact and understanding, yet is afraid to admit of himself, or his therapist for fear of further frustration.
That is why the patient may take weeks and months to test the analyst before being willing to accept him, however, once he has accepted him. His dependence on the analyst is greater and he is more sensitive about it than is the psychoneurotic because of the schizophrenic’s deeply rooted insecurity, the narcissistic seemingly self-righteous attitude is but a defence.
Whenever the analyst fails the patient from reasons to be discussed later - one cannot at times avoid failing one’s schizophrenic patients - it will be severe disappointment and a repetition of the chain of frustrations the schizophrenic has previously endured.
The instinctually primitive part of the schizophrenic’s mind that does not discriminate between himself and the environment, it may mean the withdrawal of the impersonal supporting forces of his infancy. Severe anxiety will follow this vital deprivation.
In the light of his personal relationship with the analyst it means that the therapist seduced the patient to use him as a bridge over which he might be led from the utter loneliness of his own world to reality and human warmth, only to have him discover that this bridge is not reliable. If so, he will respond helplessly with an outburst of hostility or with renewed withdrawal as may be seen most impressively in catatonic stupor.
The symptoms of mental illness can be very distressing. People who develop schizophrenia may hear voices inside their head that say nasty things about them or command them to act in strange or unpredictable ways. Or they may be paralysed by paranoia—the deep conviction that everyone, including their closest family members, wants to injure or destroy them. People with major depression may feel that nothing brings pleasure and that life is so dreary and unhappy that it is better to be dead. People with panic disorder may experience heart palpitations, rapid breathing, and anxiety so extreme that they may not be able to leave home. People whom experience episodes of mania may engage in reckless sexual behaviour or may spend money indiscriminately, acts that later cause them to feel guilt, shame, and desperation.
Other mental illnesses, while not always debilitating, create certain problems in living. People with personality disorders may experience loneliness and isolation because their personality style interferes with social relations. People with an eating disorder may become so preoccupied with their weight and appearance that they force themselves to vomit or refuse to eat. Individuals who develop post-traumatic stress disorder may become angry easily, experience disturbing memories, and have trouble concentrating.
Experiences of mental illness often interact differently but depend on one’s culture or social group, sometimes greatly so. For example, in most of the non-Western world, people with depression complain principally of physical ailments, such as lack of energy, poor sleep, loss of appetite, and various kinds of physical pain. Indeed, even in North America these complaints are commonplace. But in the United States and other Western societies, depressed people and mental health professionals who treat them tend to emphasize psychological problems, such as feelings of sadness, worthlessness, and despair. The experience of schizophrenia also differs by culture. In India, one-third of the new cases of schizophrenia involve catatonia, a behavioural condition in which a person maintains a bizarre statue like pose for hours or days. This condition is rare in Europe and North America.
With appropriate treatment, most people can recover from mental illness and return to normal life. Even those with persistent, long-term mental illnesses can usually learn to manage their symptoms and live productive lives.
By a variety of symptoms, including loss of contact with reality, bizarre behaviour, disorganized thinking and speech, decreased emotional expressiveness, and social withdrawal. Usually only some of these symptoms occur in any one person. The term schizophrenia comes from Greek words meaning “split mind.” However, contrary to common belief, schizophrenia does not refer to a person with a split personality or multiple personality. For a description of a mental illness in which a person has multiple personalities. To observers, schizophrenia may seem or appear for being as some sorted kind of madness or a manufacturing insanity.
Perhaps more than any other mental illness, schizophrenia has a debilitating effect on the lives of the people who suffer from it. A person with schizophrenia may have difficulty telling the difference between real and unreal experiences, logical and illogical thoughts, or appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. Schizophrenia seriously impairs a person’s ability to work, go to school, enjoy relationships with others, or take care of oneself. In addition, people with schizophrenia frequently require hospitalization because they pose a danger to themselves. About 10 percent of people with schizophrenia commit suicide, and many others attempt suicide. Once people develop schizophrenia, they usually suffer from the illness for the rest of their lives. Although there is no cure, treatment can help many people with schizophrenia lead productive lives.
Schizophrenia also carries an enormous cost to society. People with schizophrenia occupy about one-third of all beds in psychiatric hospitals in the United States. In addition, people with schizophrenia account for at least 10 percent of the homeless population in the United States. The National Institute of Mental Health has estimated that schizophrenia costs the United States tens of billions of dollars each year in direct treatment, social services, and lost productivity.
Approximately 1 percent of people develop schizophrenia at some time during their lives. Experts estimate that about 1.8 million people in the United States have schizophrenia. The prevalence of schizophrenia is the same regardless of sex, race, and culture. Although women are just as likely as men to develop schizophrenia, women tend to experience the illness less severely, with fewer hospitalizations and better social functioning in the community.
Schizophrenia usually develops in late adolescence or early adulthood, between the ages of 15 and 30. Much less commonly, schizophrenia develops later in life. The illness may begin abruptly, but it usually develops slowly over months or years. Mental health professionals diagnose schizophrenia based on an interview with the patient in which they determine whether the person has experienced specific symptoms of the illness.
Symptoms and functioning in people with schizophrenia tend to vary over time, sometimes worsening and other times improving. For many patients the symptoms gradually become less severe as they grow older. About 25 percent of people with schizophrenia become symptom-free later in their lives.
A variety of symptoms characterize schizophrenia. The most prominent include symptoms of psychosis—such as delusions and hallucinations - as well as bizarre behaviour, strange movements, and disorganized thinking and speech. Many people with schizophrenia do not recognize that their mental functioning is disturbed.
Some people with schizophrenia experience delusions of persecution - false beliefs that other people are plotting against them. This interview between a patient with schizophrenia and his therapist illustrates the paranoia that can affect people with this illness.
Delusions are false beliefs that appear obviously untrue to other people. For example, a person with schizophrenia may believe that he is the king of England when he is not. People with schizophrenia may have delusions that others, such as the police or the FBI, are plotting against them or spying on them. They may believe that aliens are controlling their thoughts or that their own thoughts are being broadcast to the world so that other people can hear them.
Research suggests that the genes one inherit strongly influence one’s risk of developing schizophrenia. Studies of families have shown that the more close one is related to someone with schizophrenia, the greater the risk one has of developing the illness. For example, the children of one parent with schizophrenia have about a 13 percent chance of developing the illness, and children of two parents with schizophrenia have about a 46 percent chance of eventually developing schizophrenia. This increased risk occurs even when such children are adopted and raised by mentally healthy parents. In comparison, children in the general population have only about a 1 percent chance of developing schizophrenia.
Some evidence suggests that schizophrenia may result from an imbalance of chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters. These chemicals enable neurons (brain cells) to communicate with each other. Some scientists suggest that schizophrenia results from excess activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine in certain parts of the brain or from an abnormal sensitivity to dopamine. Support for this hypothesis comes from Antipsychotic drugs, which reduce psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia by blocking brain receptors for dopamine. In addition, amphetamines, which increase dopamine activity, intensify psychotic symptoms in people with schizophrenia. Despite these findings, many experts believe that excess dopamine activity alone cannot account for schizophrenia. Other neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and norepinephrine, may play important roles as well.
Although scientists favour a biological cause of schizophrenia, stress in the environment may affect the onset and course of the illness. Stressful life circumstances - such as maturing in age and character as for living in poverty, the death of a loved one, an important change in jobs or relationships, or chronic tension and hostility at home—can increase the chances of schizophrenia in a person biologically predisposed to the disease. In addition, stressful events can trigger a relapse of symptoms in a person who already has the illness. Individuals who have effective skills for managing stress may be less susceptible to its negative effects. Psychological and social rehabilitation can help patients develop more effective skills for dealing with stress.
Although there is no cure for schizophrenia, effective treatment exists that can improve the long-term course of the illness. With many years of treatment and rehabilitation, significant numbers of people with schizophrenia experience partial or full remission of their symptoms.
Treatment of schizophrenia usually involves a combination of medication, rehabilitation, and treatment of other problems the person may have. Antipsychotic drugs (also called neuroleptics) are the most frequently used medications for treatment of schizophrenia. Psychological and social rehabilitation programs may help people with schizophrenia function in the community and reduce stress related to their symptoms. Treatment of secondary problems, such as substance abuse and infectious diseases, is also an important part of an overall treatment program.
Antipsychotic medications, developed in the mid-1950s, can dramatically improve the quality of life for people with schizophrenia. The drugs reduce or eliminate psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions. The medications can also help prevent these symptoms from returning. Common Antipsychotic drugs include risperidone (Risperdal), olanzapine (Zyprexa), clozapine (Clozaril), quetiapine (Seroquel), haloperidol (Haldol), thioridazine (Mellaril), chlorpromazine (Thorazine), fluphenazine (Prolixin), and trifluoperazine (Stelazine). People with schizophrenia must usually take medication for the rest of their lives to control psychotic symptoms. Antipsychotic medications appear to be less effective at treating other symptoms of schizophrenia, such as social withdrawal and apathy.
Because many patients with schizophrenia continue to experience difficulties despite taking medication, psychological and social rehabilitation is often necessary. A variety of methods can be effective. Social skills training help people with schizophrenia learn specific behaviours for functioning in society, such as making friends, purchasing items at a store, or initiating conversations. Behavioural training methods can also help them learn self-care skills such as personal hygiene, money management, and proper nutrition. In addition, cognitive-behavioural therapy, a type of psychotherapy, can help reduce persistent symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and social withdrawal.
Because many patients have difficulty obtaining or keeping jobs, supported employment programs that help patients find and maintain jobs are a helpful part of rehabilitation. In these programs, the patient works alongside people without disabilities and earns competitive wages. An employment specialist (or vocational specialist) helps the person maintain their job by, for example, training the person in specific skills, helping the employer accommodate the person, arranging transportation, and monitoring performance. These programs are most effective when the supported employment is closely integrated with other aspects of treatment, such as medication and monitoring of symptoms.
Some people with schizophrenia are vulnerable to frequent crises because they do not regularly go to mental health centres to receive the treatment they need. These individuals often relapse and face rehospitalization. To ensure that such patients take their medication and receive appropriate psychological and social rehabilitation, assertive community treatment (ACT) programs have been developed that deliver treatment to patients in natural settings, such as in their homes, in restaurants, or on the street.
People with schizophrenia often have other medical problems, so an effective treatment program must attend to these as well. One of the most generally shared in or participated in things conforming to a type without noteworthy excellence or faults just as common a rule, by ordinary, frequent and ordinarily as an idea or expression deficient in originality or freshness, yet, only of its exchanging the commonplace of the common associated problems is vehemently and usually coarsely expressed condemnation or disapproved, as the interpretative category of an unequalled vocabulary is itself a genuine abuse. Successful treatment of substance abuse inpatients with schizophrenia requires careful coordination with their mental health care, so that the same clinicians are treating both disorders at the same time.
The high rate of substance abuse in patients with schizophrenia contributes to a high prevalence of infectious diseases, including hepatitis B and C and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Assessment, education, and treatment or management of these illnesses is critical for the long-term health of patients.
Other problems frequently associated with schizophrenia include housing instability and homelessness, legal problems, violence, trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and suicide attempts. Close monitoring and psychotherapeutic interventions are often helpful in addressing these problems.
Several other psychiatric disorders are closely related to schizophrenia. In schizoaffective disorder, a person shows symptoms of schizophrenia combined with either mania or severe depression. Schizophreniform disorder refers to an illness in which a person experiences schizophrenic symptoms for more than one month but fewer than six months. In schizotypal personality disorder, a person engages in odd thinking, speech, and behaviour, but usually does not lose contact with reality. Sometimes mental health professionals refer to these disorders together as schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.
Severe mental illness almost always alters a person’s life dramatically. People with severe mental illnesses experience disturbing symptoms that can cause of such difficulties and holding to a job, or go to school, relate to others, or cope with ordinary life demands. Some individuals require hospitalization because they become unable to care for themselves or because they are at risk of committing suicide.
The symptoms of mental illness can be very distressing. People who develop schizophrenia may hear voices inside their head that say nasty things about them or command them to act in strange or unpredictable ways. Or they may be paralysed by paranoia - the deep conviction that everyone, including their closest family members, wants to injure or destroy them. People with major depression may feel that nothing brings pleasure and that life is so dreary and unhappy that it is better to be dead. People with panic disorder may experience heart palpitations, rapid breathing, and anxiety so extreme that they may not be able to leave home. People whom experience episodes of mania may engage in reckless sexual behaviour or may spend money indiscriminately, acts that later cause them to feel guilt, shame, and desperation.
Other mental illnesses, while not always debilitating, create certain problems in living. People with personality disorders may experience loneliness and isolation because their personality style interferes with social relations. People with an eating disorder may become so preoccupied with their weight and appearance that they force themselves to vomit or refuse to eat. Individuals who develop post-traumatic stress disorder may become angry easily, experience disturbing memories, and have trouble concentrating.
Experiences of mental illness often take issue upon its stability for depending on one’s culture or social group, sometimes greatly so. For example, in most of the non-Western world, people with depression complain principally of physical ailments, such as lack of energy, poor sleep, loss of appetite, and various kinds of physical pain. Indeed, even in North America these complaints are commonplace. But in the United States and other Western societies, depressed people and mental health professionals who treat them tend to emphasize psychological problems, such as feelings of sadness, worthlessness, and despair. The experience of schizophrenia also differs by culture. In India, one-third of the new cases of schizophrenia involve catatonia, a behavioural condition in which a person maintains a bizarre statue like pose for hours or days. This condition is rare in Europe and North America.
Of furthering issues regarding depersonalization disorder, meaning, in effect, that it is a categorised illness based within its intendment for being an illness, of mind, in which people experience an unwelcome sense of detachment from their own bodies. They may feel as though they are floating above the ground, outside observers of their own mental or physical processes. Other symptoms may include a feeling that they or other people are mechanical or unreal, a feeling of being in a dream, a feeling that their hands or feet are larger or smaller than usual, and a deadening of emotional responses. These symptoms are chronic and severe enough to impede normal functioning in a social, school, or work environment.
Depersonalization disorder is a relatively rare syndrome thought to result from severe psychological stress. It may occur as part of other mental illnesses, especially anxiety disorders. For example, some people with panic disorder feel nervous, have a sense of doom about their future and health, and have a troubling sense of detachment form the lose in the attemptive use in making or doing or achieving a useful regularity as might be expected of the control over their bodies. Depersonalization disorder may also be a component of more severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia. Treatment may include training in relaxation techniques that enhance body perception and control, hypnosis to modify symptoms, and psychotherapy to explore possible stress-related components of the disorder.
Psychiatrists classify depersonalization disorder as one of the Dissociative disorders. Such disorders involve a disruption of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception.
All the while, the schizophrenic responds to altercations in the analyst’s defections and understanding by corresponding stormy and dramatic changes from love to hatred, from willingness to leave his delusional world to resistance and renewed withdrawal.
As understandable as these changes are, nevertheless may come as a surprise to the analyst who frequently has not observed their source, this is quite in contrast to his experience with psychoneurosis whose emotional reactions during an interview he can usually predict. These unpredictable changes seem to be the reason for the conception of the unreliability of the schizophrenic’s transference reaction, yet they follow the same dynamic rules as the psychoneurotic’s oscillations between positive and negative transference and resistance, however, if the schizophrenic’s reactions are stormy and seemingly more unpredictable than those of the psychoneurotic, that instances suggested to be due to the inevitable errors in the analyst’s approach to the schizophrenic, of which he himself may be unaware, rather than to the unreliability of the patient‘s emotional response?
Why is it inevitable that the psychoanalysts disappoint his schizophrenic patient time and again?
The schizophrenic withdraws from painful reality and retires to what resembles the early speechless phase of development where consciousness is not yet crystalized. As the expression of his feelings is not hindered by the convention that he has eliminated, as his thinking, feelings, behaviour and speech - when present - obey the working rules of the archaic unconscious. His thinking is magical and does not follow logical rules. It does not admit to every ‘no’, and likewise the no to ‘yes’: There is no recognition of space and time, I, you, and they, are interchangeable expression through which of symbols and often by movement and gestures rather than by words.
As the schizophrenic is suspicious, he will distrust the words of his analyst. He will interpret them and incidental gestures and attitudes of the analyst according to his own delusional experience. The analyst may not even be aware of these involuntary manifestations of his attitudes, yet they mean much to the hypersensitive schizophrenic who uses them as a means of orienting himself to the therapist‘s personality and intentions toward him.
In other words, the schizophrenic patient and the therapist are people living in different worlds and no different levels of personal development with different means of expressing and of orienting themselves. We know little about the language of the unconscious that belongs to the schizophrenic, and our access to it is blocked by the very process of our own adjustment to a world the schizophrenic has relinquished, so, we should not be surprised that errors and misunderstandings occur when we under take to communicate and strive for a rapport with him.
Another source of the schizophrenic’s disappointment arises form that the analyser accepts and does not interfere with the behaviour of the schizophrenic, his attitude may lead the patient to expect that the analyst will assist in carrying out all the patient’s wishes, even though they may not seem to be in his interest to the analyser‘s and the hospital’s in their relationship to society. This attitude of acceptance so different from the patient’s experiences readily fosters the anticipation that the analyst will try to carry out the patient’s suggestion and take his part, even against conventional society with which it should occasionally arise. Frequently it will be wise for the analyst to agree with the patient‘s wish to remain unbattled and untidy until he is ready to talk about the reasons for his behaviour or to change spontaneously. At other times, he will unfortunately be unable to take the patient’s part without being able to make the patient understand and accept the reasons for the analyst’s position.
If the analyst is not able to accept the possibility of misunderstanding the reaction of the schizophrenic patient and in turn of being misunderstood by him, it may shake his security with his patient.
That is to say, that, among other things, the schizophrenic, once he accepts the analyst’s insecurity. Being helpless and open to himself - in spite of his pretended grandiose isolation - he will feel utterly defeated by the insecurity of his would-be helper. Such disappointment may furnish reasons for outbursts of hatred and are comparable to the negative transference reactions of psychoneurosis, yet more intense than these, since they are not limited by the restrictions of the actual world - that is, it exists in or based on fact, its only problem is a sure-enough externalization for which things are existing in the act of being external in something that has existence, ss if it were an actualization as received in the obtainable enactment for being externalized, such that its problem of in some actual life that proves obtainable achieved, in that of doing something that has an existence for having absolute actuality.
These outbursts are accompanied by anxiety, feelings of guilt, and fear of retaliations that in turn lead to increased hostility. Yet this established a vicious circle: We disappoint the patient, he is afraid that we hate him for his hatred and therefore continues to hate us. If in addition he senses that the analyst is afraid of his aggressiveness, it confirms his fear that he is actually considered as some dangerous and unacceptable, and this augments his hatred.
This establishes that the schizophrenics capable of developing strong relationships of love and hatred toward the analyst. After all, one could not be so hostile if it were not for the background of a very close relationship. In addition, the schizophrenic develops transference reactions on the narrower sense that he can differentiate from the actual interpersonal relationship. For which the schizophrenic’s emotional reactions toward the analyst have to be met with extreme care and caution. The love that the sensitive schizophrenic feels as he first emerges, and his cautions acceptance of the analyst’s warmth of interest is really most delicate and tender things. If the analyst deals with the transference reactions of a psychoneurotic is bad enough, though as a reparable rule, but if he fails with a schizophrenic in meeting positive feelings by pointing it out for instance before the patient indicates that he is ready to discuss it, he may easily freeze to death what has just begun to grow and so destroy any further possibility of therapy.
Some analysts may feel that the atmosphere of complete acceptance and of strict avoidance of any arbitrary denials that we recommend as a basic rule for the treatment of schizophrenics may not avoid our wish to guide of reacceptance of reality, nevertheless, Freud says that every science and therapy that accept his teachings about unconscious, about transference and resistance and about infantile sexuality, may be called psychoanalysis. According in this definition we believe we are practising psychoanalysis with our schizophrenic patients.
Whether we call it analysis or not, it is clear that successful treatment does not depend on technical rules of any special psychiatric school but rather on the basic attitude of individual therapist toward psychologic persons. If he meets them as strangle creatures of another world whose productions are not comprehensible to ‘normal’ beings, he cannot treat them, if he realizes, however, that the difference between himself and the psychologic is only of degree, and not of kind, he will know better how to meet him. He will not be able to identify himself sufficiently with the patient to understand and accept his emotional reactions without becoming involved in them.
The process of constant and perpetual change is examined and closely matched within the study of philosophical speculations and pointed of a world view that asserts that basic reality is constantly in a process of flux and change. Indeed, reality is identified with pure process. Concepts such as creativity, freedom, novelty, emergence, and growth are fundamental explanatory categories for process philosophy. This metaphysical perspective is to be contrasted with a philosophy of substance, the view that a fixed and permanent reality underlies the changing or fluctuating world of ordinary experience. Whereas substance philosophy emphasizes static being, process philosophy emphasizes dynamically becoming.
Although process philosophy is as old as the 6th-century Bc Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, renewed interest in it was stimulated in the 19th century by the theory of evolution. Key figures in the development of modern process philosophy were the British philosophers Herbert Spencer, Samuel Alexander, and Alfred North Whitehead, the American philosophers Charles S. Peirce and William James, and the French philosophers Henri Bergson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Whitehead's Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929) is generally considered the most important systematic expression of process philosophy.
Contemporary theology has been strongly influenced by process philosophy. The American theologian Charles Hartshorne, for instance, rather than interpreting God as an unchanging absolute, emphasizes God's sensitive and caring relationship with the world. A personal God enters relationships in such a way that he is affected by the relationships, and to be affected by relationships is to change. So too is in the process of growth and development. Important contributions to process theology have also been made by such theologians as William Temple, Daniel Day Williams, Schubert Ogden, and John Cobb, Jr.
‘Reality’ is a difficult word to use to every one’s satisfaction or even to one’s own satisfaction. In this instance the word reality is used arbitrarily to designate the direct, here-and-now impact of the analyst upon the patient. Reality. In this sense, contrasts with the impact the analyst has through his representation in the patient’s fantasy life, neurosis, and transference, since both kinds of impact seem always to coexist and since the former - the analyst’s real impact - may be the worst enemy of the transference, the matter of their differentiation is possibly the most challenging aspect of analysis.
The analytic situation, which is set up to shut out ordinary reality intrusions, that cannot . . . nor, should not exclude all, but to say, that in the beginning months, for instance, reality inevitably has the upper hand. The analyst, the office, the procedure, are all overwhelmingly real. Everything is strange, frightening and exciting, gratifying and frustrating. Unlike the patient can test it and orient himself to it, the impact of this reality is usually so great that even an ordinary useful transference relationship cannot be expected to develop.
Perhaps the most confusing aspect of this beginning period is the frequent appearance in it of what can be regarded as a false transference relationship. With great intensity and clarity, the patient may reveal, through transference-like references about the analyst, some of the deepest secrets only of his neurosis but of its genesis. The pseudotransference, too good to be true, is almost sure to be nothing more than the patient’s attempt to deal with the person of the analyst, the entire spectrum of his various patterns of behaviour. If, it is easy to do, the analyst overlooks the likelihood that the patient’s relationship with at this time is really about that almost everything said about it is related, analysis may get off to a very bad start. And if, as is even earlier to do, the analyst’s interests the genetic meaning of the openly exposed material, a good transference relationship may be seriously delayed and a workable transference necrosis may never appear. Even after initial reality has had time to fade, reality may continue to intrude in ways that are very hard to detect and that is very troublesome.
One of the most serious problems of analysis is the very substantial help that the patient receives directly from the analyst and the analytic situation. For many a patient, the analyst in the analytic situation is in fact the most stable, reasonable, wise and understanding person he has ever met, and the setting in which they meet may actually be the most honest, open, direct and regular relationship he has ever experienced. Added to this is the considerable helpfulness to him of being able to clarify his life storey. Confess his guilt, express his ambitions, and explore his confusions. Further real help comes from the learning-about-life accruing from the analyst’s skilled questions, observations and interpretations. Taken together, the total real value to the patient of the analytic situation can easily be immense. The trouble with this kind of help is that it goes on and on, it may have such a real, direct and continuing impact upon the patient that he can never get deeply enough involved in transference situation to allow him to resolve or even to become acquainted with his most crippling internal difficulties. The trouble is far too good, the trouble also is that we as analysts apparently cannot resist the seductiveness of being directly helpful, and this, when combined with the compelling assumption that helpfulness is bound to be good, permits us top credit patient improvements to ‘analysis’ when more properly it should often be recognized for being the amounting result for the patient’s using the analytic situation, as the model, for being the preceptors and supporter in the dealing practically within the immediate distractions as holding to some problem.
Perhaps, we can now refer to something in a clear unmistakable manner, and it would be to mention, for being, that one more difficult-to-handle intrusion of reality into the analysis, that by saying, that this is the definitive and final interruption of the transference neurosis by the reality of termination; in the sense, the situation is reversed and the intrusion is analytically desirable, since ideally the impact of reality of impending and certain termination is used to facilitate the resolution of the transference. As with the resolution of earlier episodes of transference neurosis, this final one is brought about principally by the analyst’s interpretations and reconstructions. As these take effect, the transference neurosis and, hopefully, along with it the original neurosis is resolved. This final resolution, however, which is much more comprehensive, is usually very different and may not come about at all without the help of the reality of termination. Accordingly, any attenuation of the ending, such as tapering off or causal or tentative stopping, should be expected to stand in the way of an effective resolution of the transference. Yet, it seems that this is what most commonly happens to an ending, and because of this a great many patients may lose the potentially great benefit of a thorough resolution and are forever after left suspended in the net of unresolved transference.
Yet, slurring over a rigorous termination seems understandable, as difficult as transference neurosis may be in the analyst at other times, this ending period, if rigorously carried out, simply has to be the period of his greatest emotional strain. There can surely be no more likely time for an analyst to surrender his analytic position and, responding to his own transference, become personally involved with his patient than during the process of separating from a long and self-restrained relationship. Accordingly, it may be better to slur over the ending lightly than to mishandle it in an attempt to be rigorous.
In considering more broadly the function of the transference in the psychoanalytic process, one is confronted by the apparent naïve, but, nonetheless important questions of the role of the actual (current) object as compared with that of the object representation of the original personage in the past. We recall Freud’s paradoxical, somewhat gloomy, but portentous concluding passage in “The Dynamics of Transference.” This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is on that field that the victory must be won - the victor y whose expression is the permanent cure of the neuroses. It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psychoanalysis with the greatest difficultly, but it should not be forgotten that they do us the inestimable service of making the patient ‘s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses of showing their immediate and manifested impossibilities, for when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigies.
Both object and representation is made necessary by the basic phenomenon of original separation. The existence of an image of the object, which persist in the absence of the object, is one of the important beginnings of psychic life in general, certainly an indispensable prerequisite for object relationship. As generally construed. Whether this is viewed as (or a times demonstrably is) something unstable for allotting introjection, s always subject to alternative projection, or an intrapsychic object representation clearly distinguished from the self-representation, or firm identification in the superego, or in the ego itself, these phenomena are in various ways components of the system of mastery of the fact of separation, or separateness, from the original absolutely necessarily anaclitic (in the earliest period) symbiotic ‘object’. In the light of clinical observation, it would appear to be that the relative stability (parental) objects representation. At which time of varying degree, are to a greater extent for the archaic phenomena. Even in nonpsychotic patients, overwhelmed by them, sometimes resembles the restoration from oedipal identification, which provides the preponderant basis for most demonstrable analytic transferences. That within the necrotic patients, the transference is effectively established when this representation invests the analyst to a degree - depending on intensity of drive and most of ego participation - which ranges in all the, wishing and strivings to remake and analyst to biasses judgements and misinterpretation of data, are finally the actual perceptual distortions.
However, the old object representations as such may be invested, however rigidly established the libidinal or aggressive cathexis of the image may be, this as such can become the actual and exclusive focus of instinctual discharge, or of complicated and intense instinct-defence solutions, only and general energy-sparing quality of strictly intrapsychic processes. For the vast majority of persons, visible to any degree, including those with severe neurosis, character distortions, addictions and certain psychoses, the striving is toward the living and actual object, even at the cost of intense suffering. In a sense, this returns us to the state in which the psychological ‘object-to-be’. Has a critical importance never again to be duplicated, except in certain acute life emergencies, even if the object is not firmly perceived as such, in the sense of later object relations? And it does seem that trance impressions from the earliest contacts in the service of life preservation, and the associated instinctual gratifications, and innumerable secondarily associated sensory impressions. Are activated by the specific inborn urges of sexual maturation? These propel the individual to renew many of the earliest modes of actual bodily contact, in connection with seeking for specific instinctual gratification. Or, to look away from clear-cut instinctual matters to the more remote elaborations of human contact: Few regard loneliness as other than a source of suffering, even self-imposed, as an apparent matter of choice, and the forcible imposition of ‘solitary confinement ‘ is surely one of the most cruel of punishments.
Of these few generalizations have some important implications, no reaction to another individual is all transference, just as surely as no relationship is entirely free of it. There is not only the general maturational-developmental drive toward the outer world, but the seeking for a variety of need and pleasure satisfactions, learned or simulated in relation to the primordial object, but necessarily and inevitably transferred from this object the generically related things and persons in the expanding environment. These may be used or enjoyed without penalty, if the distinction between the original and the new is profoundly and genuinely established (with due respect for the quantitative ‘relativism’ of such concepts). The range of such inevitable displacement (transfers) in endless in all spheres - sexual, aggressive, aesthetic, utilitarian, intellectual. More immediately relevant, in the lives of those whose development has been relatively healthy, are those individuals whose vocations provide similarities or parallels, however, rarefied, to the caretaking functions of the original parents: Teachers, physicians, clergymen, political rulers, occasionally others. Again it must be noted, that such persons perform real functions, that the adult individual’s interest in them, his specific need for them, often greatly outweighs similar reactions to parents, who retain their unique place for a complex and variable combination of other reasons. For such surrogate parents perform for the adult what his parents largely performed for him in realist years, and the psychological comparison is with an old object representation, or with an early identification, to which such latter-day parent surrogates may add important layers of elaborations. It is on the basis of such functional resemblances that persons in these roles have a unique transference valence. The analyst is first perceived as a real object, who awakens hope of help in the patients experience at all level of integration, from that of actual and immediate perception, evaluation, and response, to the activation of original parental object representations and their cathexes. That the analyst becomes invested with such representations, in forms ranging from wishes or demands to functional or even perceptual misidentifications, comprises the broad range of phenomena that we know as the therapeutic transference. Thus, the complicate structural phenomena of conflict are activated in relation to a real object, and such activation is uniquely dependent on the participation of this object, in a situation whose realities revive, with the affirmative associations, the memories of old and painful frustrations. In this situation, the continuing and prolonged contact, under strictly controlled conditions, is an important real factor, which has been elaborated previously. Without these actualities, dream life, - or instance of greater energid imbalance between impulses and defence - neurosis, will be the spontaneous solution, while everyday ‘give-and-take’ object relations are, at least on the surface, maintained as such. Occasionally, neurotic behaviour, where transferences dominate the everyday relationships, will supervene.
Interpretation, recollection or reconstruction, and, of course, working through, is essential for the establishment of effective insight, but they cannot operate mutatively if applied only to memories in the structural sense, whether of higher cathected events or persons. For it is the thrust of wish or impulse, or the elaboration of germane dynamic fantasies, and the corresponding defensive structures and their inadequacies, associated with such memories, which give to neurosis. It is a parallel thrust that creates the transference neurosis. Where memories are clear and vivid, through recall, or accepted as much through reconstruction and associated with variable, optional, and adaptive, rather than rigidly structuralized’ response patterns, the analytic work has been done.
This view does place somewhat of a weighty emphasis on the horizontal coordinate of procedural operations, the conscious and unconscious relation to the analyst as a living and actual object, which is of investing upon the becoming imagery, traits, and functions of critical objects of the past. The relationship is to be understood in its dynamic, economic, and adaptive meaning, in its current structuralized tenacity, the real and unreal carefully separated from one another. The process of subjective memory or of reconstruction, the indispensable genetic dimension, is, in this sense, involved toward the decisive and specific autobiographic understanding of the living version of old conflict, than with the assumption that the interpretative reduction of the transference neurosis to gross mnemic elements is, in itself and automatically, mutative. At least, this view of the problem would seem appropriate to most chronic neurosis embedded in germane character structures of some plexuity. That neurosis symptoms connected with isolated traumatic events, covered by amnesia, may, at times, disappear on restoration of memories with adequate effective discharge, regardless of technical method, is, of course, indisputably true, even though the details of process, including the role of transference, are probably not yet adequately understood. Psychoanalysis was born in the observation of this type of process. In a thoughtful manner, the role of transference, in the early writings of both Freud and Ferenczi, seemed weighted somewhat in the direction of its resistance function, i.e., as directed against recall, although its affirmative functions were soon adequately appreciated, and placed in the dialectical position, which has obtained to the present day.
Other while, the primal processes of projection ad introjection, being inextricably linked with the infant’s emotions and anxieties, initiate object-relations, by projecting, i.e., deflecting libido and aggression onto the mother’s breast, the basis for object-relations is established, by introjecting the object, first of all the breast, relations to internal objects comes into being. The term ‘object-relations’ are based on the contention that the infant has from the beginning post-natal life a relation to the mother, although focussing primarily of her breast, which is imbued with the fundamental element’s of an object-relation, i.e., loves, hatred, phantasies, anxieties, and defences? The introjection of the breast is the beginning of superego formation that extends over years. We have grounds for assuming that from the first feeding experience onwards the infant’s introjection, the breast in its various aspects. The core of the superego is thus the mother’s breast, both good and bad. Given to the simultaneous operation of introjection and projection, relations to external and internal objects interact. The father too, who soon plays a role in the child’s life, early on becomes part of the infant’s internal world it is characteristic of the infant‘s emotional life that there are rapid fluctuations between love and hate, between external and internal situations between perception of reality and the fantasises relating to it, and accordingly, an interplay between prosecutory anxiety and idealization - both referring to the internal and external object’s, the idealized object brings a corollary of the prosecutory, extremely bad one.
The ego’s growing capacity for integration and synthesis leads more and more, even during these first few months, to states in which love and hatred, and correspondingly the good and bad aspects of objects, for being synthesized. This gives rise to the second form of anxiety - depressive anxiety - for the infant’s aggressive impulses and desires toward the bad breast (mother) are now felt to be a danger to the good breast (mother) as well. In the second quarter of the first year these emotions are reinforced, because at this stage the infant increasingly perceives and introjects the mother as a person. Depressive anxiety is intensified, for the infant feels he has destroyed or is destroying a whole object by his greed and uncontrollable aggression. Moreover, owing to the growing synthesis of his emotions, he now feels that these destructive impulses are directed against as a ‘loved person’. Similar processes operate in relation to the father and other member s of the family. These anxieties and corresponding defences constitute the ‘Depressive position’, which comes to a head about the middle of the first year and whose essence is the anxiety and guilt relating to the destruction and loss of the loved internal and external objects.
It is at this stage, and bound up with the depressive position, that the oedipus complex sets in. Anxiety and guilt add a powerful impetus toward the beginning of the oedipus complex. For anxiety and guilt increase the need to externalize (project) bad figures and to internalize (introject) good ones. There to attaching desires, love, feeling of guilt, and reparative tendencies to internal figures in the external world, however, not only is the search for new objects that dominates the infant’s needs, but also, the drive toward new life proposes: Away from the breast toward the penis, i.e., from oral desires toward genital ones. Many factors contribute to these developments, the forward drive of the libido, the growing integration of the ego, physical and mental skills and progressive adaption to the external world. These trends are bound up with the processing of symbol formation, which enables the infant to transfer not only emotions and phantasies, anxiety and guilt, from one object to another.
The processes are linked with another fundamental phenomenon governing its mental life, such that pressures exerted by the earliest anxiety situation are factors through which bring about the repetition compulsion, however, one conclusion about the earliest states of infancy are a continuation of Freud’s discoveries; on certain points, nonetheless, the divergencies having to arise of which are very relevant, perhaps, its main contention that object-relations are operative from the beginning of post-natal life.
Nevertheless, the view that autoerotism and narcissism are the young infant contemporaries with the first relation to objects - external and internalized, that hypothetically, autoerotism and narcissism include the love for and relation with the internalized good object that in phantasy forms part of the loved body and self. It is to this internalized object that in autocratic gratification and narcissistic stages a withdrawal takes place. Concurrently, from birth onwards, a relation to objects, primarily the mother (her breasts) is present. This hypothesis contradicts Freud’s concept of autoerotic and narcissistic stages that preclude an object-relation. However, the difference between Freud’s statement on this issue is equivocal. In various context he explicitly and implicitly expresses opinion that suggested a relation to an object, the mother’s breast, preceding autoerotic and narcissism.
In the first instance the oral component instinct finds satisfaction by attaching itself to the sating of the desire for nourishment, and its object in the mother’s breast. It then detaches itself, becomes independent and at the same time of autoerotic objectivity is found to an object in the child’s own body.
The act or practice for which Freud’ of using something or the state of being used is found in the applications availing to the term object is somewhat different from the context that is used of this term, but Freud is referring the object of an instinctual aim. What it is to mean, that, while, in addition, it is meant as an object-relation involving the infant’s emotions, phantasies, anxieties and defences. Nevertheless, in sentence referred to, Freud clearly speaks of a libinal attachment to an object, the mother’s breast, which precedes autoerotism and narcissism.
In this context, it is reminded that of Freud’s findings about early identification. In “The Ego and the Id,” speaking of abandoned object cathexes. He said, ‘ . . . The effects of the first identification in earliest childhood will be profound and lasting. This leads us back to the origin of the ego-ideal, . . . Freud then defines the first and most important identifications that lie hidden behind the ego-ideal as the identification with the father, or with the parent’s, and places them, as he expresses it, in the ‘prehistory’ of every person’. These formulations come close to the deceptions as described of their resulting of introjected objects, for by definition identifications are the result as such, but that the statement and the passage quoted from the Encyclopaedia article, it can be deduced that Freud, although he did not pursue this line of though t, however, he did assume that in the earliest infancy that both an object and introjective processes play a part.
That is to say, as regards autoerotism and narcissism we meet with an inconsistency in Freud’s views. Such inconsistencies that exist on a number of points of theory clearly show, which on these particular of issue s Freud had not yet arrived at a final decision. In respect to the theory of anxiety he stated this explicitly in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. His realization that much about the early stages of development was still unknown or obscure to him is also exemplified by his speaking of the first years of a girl’s life as, ‘ . . . lost in a past so dim and shadowy . . .’
As regards to the question of autoerotism and narcissism, Anna Freud - although her views about this aspect of Freud’s work remains unknown, but she seems only to have taken into account Freud’s conclusions that an autoerotic and a narcissistic stage precede object-relations, and not to be allowed for other possibilities, of which are implied in some of Freud’s statements such as the ones inferred above. This is one of the reasons why the divergence between Anna Freud’s conception and the immediacy of early infancy is far greater than that between Freud’s views, taken as a whole, and those of stating it as the essential to clarify the content and nature of the differences between the two schools of psychoanalytic thought, represented by Anna Freud and those that imply of such clarification is required in the interests of psychoanalytic training and also because it could help to open up fruitful discussions between psychoanalysts and thereby contribute to a greater generality of a better understanding of the fundamental problems of early infancy.
The hypothesis that a time interval extending over several months precedes object-relations implies that - except for the libido attached to the infant’s own body - impulses, phantasies, anxieties, and defences either are not present in him, or are not related to an object, that is to say, they would operate in vacua. The analysis of very young children, as to implicate, would show that there is no instinctual urge, no anxiety situation, no mental process that does not involve objects, external or internal, in other words, object-relations are at the centre of emotional life. Furthermore, love and hatred, phantasies, anxiety and defences are also operative from the beginning and are ‘ad initio’ indivisibly linked with object-relations.
The oedipus complex, in a pragmatic analytic sense, retains its position as the ‘nuclear complex’ of the neurosis. It is a climactic organization experience of early childhood, apart from its own vicissitudes, It can under favourable circumstances provide certain solutions for pregenital conflicts, or in itself suffer from them. In any case, include them in its structure. Only when the precursor experiences have been of a great severity, for which it is to claim to a shadowy organic determinacy, as the new ‘frame of reference’, which hardly having the independent and decisive significance of its own. In any case, its attendant phallic conflicts must be resolved in their own right, in the analytic transference. From the analyst, (or his current surrogate in the outer world) thus from the psychic representation of the parent, the literal (i.e., bodily) sexual wishes must be withdrawn, and genuinely displaced to appropriate objects in the outer world. The fraction of such drive elements that can be transmuted to friendly, tender feeling toward the original object. Or too other acceptable (neutralized) variants, will of course, influence the economic problem involved. This genuine displacement is opposed to the sense of ‘acting out’, while other objects are perceptually different substitutes for the primary object (thus for the analyst). This may be thought to follow automatically on the basic process of coming to terms with (accepting) the childhood incestuous wish and its parricidal connotation. Such assumption does not do justice to the dynamic problem implicit in tenaciously persistent wishes. To the extent that these wishes are to be genuinely disavowed or modified, rather than displaced, a further important step is necessary: The thorough analysis of the functional meaning of the persisting wishes and the special etiologic factors entering into their tenacity, as reflected in the transference neurosis. Thus, in principle, the literal accuracy of the concept phrased by Wilhelm Reich, “transference of the transference,” as the final requirement for dissolution of the erotic analytic transference, even though the clinical discussion, which is its context, is useful. This expression would imply that the object representation that largely determines the distinctive erotic interest in the analyst can remain essentially the same, so long as the actual object changes. While a semantic issue may be involved in some degree, it is one that impinges importantly on conceptual clarity. However, such definite conceptualization of one basic element in the phenomenon or transference may be, and should be, subject to the reservations appropriately attaching themselves to any very clear-cut ideas about obscure areas, with the clinical concept of transference, its clinical derivation and its generally accepted place in the psychnalytic process.
The evolution of the reality-relatedness between patient and therapist, over the course of the psychotherapy, is something that has received little more than passing mention in the literature, Hoedemaker (1955), in a paper concerning the therapeutic process in the treatment of schizophrenia, stresses the importance of the schizophrenic patient’s forming healthy identifications with the therapist, and Loewald (1960), his concerns and considerations to the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis in general, repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the real relationship between patient and analyst, but only in the following passage eludes the evolution, the growth, of this relationship over the course of treatment:
. . . Where repression is lifted and unconscious and preconscious are again in communication, infantile object and contemporary object may be united into one - a truly new object as both unconscious and preconscious are changed by their mutual communication, the object that helps to bring this about in therapy, the analyst, mediates this union. . . .
It has been distinctly impressive that the patient’s remembrance of new areas of his past - his manifestation of newly de-repressed transference reactions to the therapist - occurs only hand-in-hand with the reaching of comparable areas of feeling in the evolving reality-relatedness between patient and therapist. For example, he does not come to experiencing fond memories of his mother until the reality-relatedness between himself and the therapist has reached the point where the feelings between them have become, in reality, predominantly positive. Loewald’s words, imply that an increment of transference resolution slightly preceding in time or in arrangement to go before as to go before time, the all-out preceding that many are the cause to be preceded, which makes it possible in the forming of each successive increment the evolving reality-relationship between patent and analyst. It has been, by contrast, that the evolution of the reality-relatedness proceeds alway a bi t ahead of, and makes possibly, the progressive evolution and resolution of the transference, although to be sure the latter, in so far as it frees psychological energy and makes it available for reality-relatedness, helps greatly to consolidate the ground just taken over by the advancing reality-relatedness. Loewald (1960) thinks of it that
. . . The patient can dare to take the plunge into the regressive crises of the transference neurosis that brings him face to face again with his childhood anxieties and conflicts, if he can hold on to the potentialities of a new object-relationship, represented by the analyst.
It seems that this new object-relationship is more that a potentiality, to be realized with comparative suddenness, toward the end of this treatment with the resolution of the transference. Rather it is, it has seemed as constantly being there, being built up bit by bit, just ahead of the likewise evolving transference relationship. Predeterminates as in Freud’s (1922) having pointed out that projection (expressed in the Latin is called ‘projectio’) which is, after all, so major an aspect of transference - is directed not ‘into the sky, so to speak, were there is nothing of the sort already’, but rather onto a person who provides some reality-basic for the projection.
In the final months of the therapy, the therapist clearly sees that extent to which the patient’s transferences to him as representing a succession of figures from the latter’s earlier years have all been in the service the patient’s unconscious successively decreasing extent, fro experiencing the full and complex reality of the immediate relatedness with the therapist in the present. The patent at last comes to realize that the relationship with a single other human being - in this instance, the therapist - is so rich as to comprise all these earlier relationships - so rich as to evoke all the myriad feelings that have been parcelled out and crystallized, wherefore, in the transference that have now been resolved. This is a province most beautifully described by the Swiss novelist, Herman Hesse (1951) winner of the Nobel Prize in 1946,in his little novel. Siddhartha. The protagonist in a lifelong quest for the ultimate answer to the enigma of man’s role on earth, finally discovers in the face of his beloved friend all the myriad persons, things, and events that he has known, but incoherently before, during the vicissitudes of his many years of searching.
It is thus that the patient, schizophrenic or otherwise, becomes at one with himself, in the closing phase of psychotherapy. But although the realization may come to him as a sudden one, it is founded on a reality-relatedness that has been building up all along. Loewald (1960) in his magnificent paper to which transference resolution plays in the development of this reality-relatedness. As, perhaps, that the evolution of the ‘countertransference’ - not counter-transference in the classical sense of the therapist’s transference to the patient, but rather in the sense of the therapist’s emotional reaction to the patient’s transference - forms an equally essential contribution to this reality-relatedness.
It is, nonetheless, but often, that the therapist who sees a new potentiality in the patient, a previously unnoted side of him that heralds a phase of increasing differentiations. And frequently the therapist is the only one who sees it. Even the patient does not see it as yet, except in the projected form, so that he perceives this as an attribute of the therapist. This situation can make the therapist feel very much inalienable as separated from others that apart or detached in the isolated removal and intensely threaten.
Upon which the transference relationship with the therapist, we find that the patient naturally brings this relationship, just as he brings into the relatedness in which the difficulties concerning differentiation and integration that were engendered by the pathological upbringing upon the advances in differentiation and integration necessarily occur first outside the patient - namely, in the therapist’s increasingly well differentiated and well-integrated view of, and consequently, responses to, him - before these can become well established within him.
Because the schizophrenic patient did not experience, in his infancy, the symbolic relatedness with his mother such as each human being needs for the formation of a healthy core in his personality structure, in the emotion of the transference relationship to his therapist he must eventually succeed in establishing such a mode of relatedness.
This means that he must eventually regress, in the transference, to such a level in order to get a fresh start toward a healthier personality differentiation and integration than he had achieved before entering therapy. This is not to say that he must ‘act out’ the regressive needs in his daily life, to be sure, the schizophrenic patient, whether in therapy or not, inevitably does so to a considerable degree, but to the extent that these needs can be expressed in the transference relationship, they need not seek expression, unconsciously, thorough acting out in daily life.
Focussing now upon the transference relationship with the therapist, we find that the patient naturally brings about the difficulties concerning differentiation in the process of integration that was engendered by the pathological upbringing as for being the one more interruption in the impeding principle of reconstructions of an identifying manufacture of the transference. And the every day, relationships are found in the interplaying form of corresponding advances in differentiated dynamic integrations necessarily occur first outside the patient - namely, in the therapist’s increasingly well or acceptably differentiated by the integrated extent or range of vision, that the position or attitudes that determine how of the intent of something (as an aim or an end or motive)or by way the mind is directed. Its view of and the consequent response ought to become acknowledgingly established within them.
Because the schizophrenic patient did not experience, in his infancy, the establishment of and later emergence form, a healthy symbiotic relatedness with his mother such as each human brings needs for the formation of a healthy core in his personality structure, in the evolution of the transference relationship to his therapist he must eventually succeed in establishing such a mode of relatedness.
This means that he must eventually regress, in the transference, to such a level, in order to get a fresh start toward a healthier personality differentiation and integration than he had achieved before entering therapy. This is not to say that he must act out the regressive needs in his daily life. To be sure, the schizophrenic patient, whether in therapy or not, inevitably does so to a considerable degree; even to the extent that these needs can be expressed in the transference relationship, they need not seek expression, unconsciously, through acting out in daily life.
This symbiotic mode of relatedness is necessarily mutual, participated in by therapist as well as patient. Thus, the therapist must come to experience not only the oceanic gratification, but also the anxiety involved in his sharing a symbiotic, subjective oneness with the schizophrenic patient. This relationship, with its lack of felt ego-boundaries between the two participants, at times invokes the kind of deep contentment, the kind of felt communion that needs no words, which characterize a loving relatedness between mother and infant. But at other times it involves the therapists feeling unable to experience himself as differentiated from the pathology-ridden personality of the patient. He feels helplessly caught in the patient’s deep ambivalence. He feels one with the patient’s hatred and despairs and thwarted love, and at times he cannot differentiate between his own subjectively harmful effect upon the patient, and the illness with which the patient was to come or go or nearly recede in the achievement afflicting when the therapist first undertook to help him. Thus, at these anxiety-ridden moments in the symbiotic phase, the therapist feels his own personality to be invaded by the patient’s pathology, and feels his identity severely threatened, whereas in the more contented moments, part of the contentment resides in both participants enjoying a freedom from any concern with identity.
This same profound lack of differentiation may come to characterize the patient’s view of the persons about him, including his therapeutic, and at time’s, in line with his need to project a poorly differentiated conglomeration of ‘bad’ impulses, he may perceive the therapist for being but one head of a hydra-headed monster. The patient’s lack of differentiation in this regard, prevailing for month after month of his charging the therapist with saying or doing various things that were actually said or have done by others in the hospitalized presences to its containing of environmental surfaces, or by the family members, can have a formidably eroding effect upon the therapist’s sense of personal intensity. But the patient may need to regress to just such a primitivity, poorly differentiated view of the world in order to grow up again, psychologically, in a healthier way this time.
Among the most significant steps in the maturation that occurs in successful psychotherapy are those moments when the therapist suddenly sees the patient in a new light. His image of the patient suddenly changes, because of the entry into his awareness of some potentiality in the patient. Which had not shown itself before? From now on, his responses t o the patient is a response to this new, enriched view, and through such responding he fosters the emergence, and further differentiation, of this new personality area. This is another way of describing the process that Buber and in Friednan, 1955, calls ‘making the other person present, seeing in the other persons potentialities of such even presents: Seeing in the other persons potentiality of which in him, that he is not aware of his helping him, by responding to those potentialities, to realize them.
Schizophrenic patient’s feelings start to become differentiated before they have found new and appropriate modes for expressing the new feelings, thus patient’s may use the same old stereotyped behaviour or utterance to express nuances of new feelings. This is identical with the situation in those schizophrenics’ familiar which is permeated with what Wynne (1958) termed ‘pseudo-mutuality’ or toward maintaining the sense of reciprocal perceiving expectations. Thus, the expectations are left unexplored, and the old expectations and roles, even though outgrown and inappropriate in one sense, continue to serve as the structure for the relation.
The therapist, through hearing the new emotional connotation, the new meaning, in the stereotyped utterance and responding in accordance with the new connotation, fosters the emerging differentiation. Over the course of months, in therapy, he may find the same verbal stereotype employed in th e expression of a whole gamut of newly emerging feelings. Thus, over a prolonged time-span, the therapist may give as many different responses to a gradually differentiating patient as are simultaneously given by the various members of the surrounding environment, to the patient who shows the contrasting ego-fragmentation (or, in a loose manner of speaking, over-differentiations).
Persistently stereotyped communications from the patient tend to bring from the therapist communications that, over a period of time, become almost equally stereotyped. One can sometimes detect, in recordings playing during supervisory hours, evidence that new emotional connotations are creeping into the patient’s verbal stereotypes, and into the therapist’s responsive verbal stereotypes, before either of the two participants has noticed this.
What the therapist does which assists the patient’s differentiation often consists in his having the courage and honesty to differ from whether the patient’s expressed feelings or, often most valuable, with the social role into which his sick behaviour tends to fix or transfix the therapist. This may consist in his candid disagreement with some of the patient, and s strongly felt and long-voiced views, or in his flatly declining to try to feel ‘sympathy’ - such as one would be conventionally expected to feel in response to behaviour, which seems, at first glance, to express the most pitiable suffering but which the therapist is convinced primarily expresses sadism on the patient’s part. Such courage to differ with the expected social role is what is needed from the therapist, in order to bring to a close the symbiotic phase of relatedness that has served, earlier, a necessary and productive function. Through asserting his individuality, and at many later moments in the therapeutic interaction, the therapist fosters the patient’s own development of more complete and durable ego-boundaries. At the same time he offers the patient the opportunity to identify with a parent-figure who dares to be an individual-dares to be so in the face of pressures from the working group of which he is part, and from his own reproachful superego, it can be of notice, that of a minor degree a consciously planned and controlled therapeutic technique wherefore, the content descriptions are rather a natural flow of events as in the transference evolution, with which the therapist must have the spontaneity to go along.
The patient, particularly in the symbiotic phase of the therapy but in preceding and succeeding phases as well, is notably intolerant of sudden and marked changes in the therapeutic relationship - that is, of suddenly seeing himself, or feeling that his therapist sees him, through new eyes. He rarely gives the therapist to feel that the latter have made an importantly revealing interpretation, or should be concealed, but when to arrive at by reasoning from evidence or from its premises that we can infer from that which he was derived as to a conclusion, that it conveys of a higher illumination of mind. Methodologically historical information is an approving acceptation by the therapist, he does so causally, he tends to experience important increments of depreciated material, yet not as every bit for reverential abstractions as to make a new, amended, or up-to-date reversion of the many problems involved in revising the earthly shuddering revelations in his development. The things that he has known all along and simply never happened to think of. His experience of an inherent perception of the world as surrounding him is often permeated by ‘deja vu’ sensations, and misidentification of the emphasizing style at which the expense of thought for taking the rhetorical rhapsody to actions or a single inaction of moving the revolutions of the earth around the sun is mostly familiar an act from his past.
The motional progressions in therapy, on the patient’s part, occur each time only after a recrudescence in his symptoms. It is as though he has to find reassurance of his personal identity, for being really the same hopeless person he has long felt himself to be, before he can venture into a bit or new and more hopeful identity.
Of what expressions are that object relations of state or fact of having independent reality whose customs that have recently come into existence, such by the actuality for something having existence from the beginning of life, being the mother’s breast that it splits into a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast; this splitting results in a division between love and hate. What is more, is that of the relation to the first object implies its introjection and projection, and thus, from the beginning object relations are moulded by an interaction between introjection and projection, between internal and external objects and situation.
. . . .With the introjection of the complete object in about the second quarter of the first year marked steps in integration are made. . . . The loved and hated aspects of the mother are no longer felt to be so widely separated, and the result is an increased fear of loss, a strong feeling of guilt and states akin to mourning, because the aggressive impulses are felt to be divorced against the love object, the depressive position has come to the fore . . .
. . . In the first few month of life anxiety is predominantly experienced as fear of persecution and . . . this contributes to certain mechanisms and defences that characterize the paranoid and schizoid positions. Outstanding among these defences is the mechanism of splitting internal and external objects, emotions and the ego. These mechanisms and defences are part of normal development and at the same time form the basis for later schizophrenic illness. The descriptive underlying identification by projection, i.e., projective identification, as a combination of splitting off parts of the self and projecting them onto another person . . .
Rosenfeld, a follower of Klein writes that, he presents detailed clinical data that serve to document the implicit point, among others, that whereas, the schizophrenic patient may appear to have regressed to such an objectless autoerotic level of development as was postulated by Freud (1911, 1914) and Abraham (1908), in actuality the patient is involved in object-relatedness with the analyst, object-relatedness of the primitive introjective and projective identification kind. For example, Rosenfeld concludes his description of, the data from one of the sessions as follows:
. . . The whole material of the session suggested that in the withdrawal state he was introjecting me and my penis, and at the same time was projecting himself into me. So here, again, it to suggest that it be something possible to detect the object-relation in an apparently autoerotic state.
. . . only at a later stage of treatment was it possible to distinguish between the mechanisms of introjection of objects and projective identifications, which so frequently go on simultaneously (1952).
We find, among the writings of the Kleinian analysts, a number of interesting examples of delusional transference interpretation, in all of which the keynote is the concept of projective (or introjective) identification. For instance, Rosenfeld writes at one juncture (1952),
The patient himself gave the clue to the transference situation, and showed that he had projected his damaged self containing the destroyed world, not only into all the other patients, but into me, and had changed me in this way. But, instead of becoming relieved by this projection he became more anxious, because he was afraid of what I was then putting back into him. Whereupon his introjective processes became severely disturbed. One would therefore expect a severe deterioration in his condition, and in fact his clinical state during the next ten days became very precarious. He began to get more and more suspicious about food, and finally refused to eat and drink anything. . . . Everything he took inside seemed to him bad, damaged, and poisonous (like faeces) as there was no point in eating anything. We knew that projection led again into reintroduction, so that also, it had felt as if he had inside himself all the destroyed and bad objects that he had projected into the outer world: And he indicated by coughing, retching and movements of his mouth and fingers that he was preoccupied with this problem . . . I told him that he was not only afraid of getting something bad inside him. But that he was also afraid of taking good things, the good orange juice and good interpretations, instead, since he was afraid that these would make him feel guilty again. When l said this, a kind of shock went right through his body; he gave a groan of understanding, and his facial expression changed. By the end of the hour he had emptied the glass of orange juice, the first food or drink he had taken for two days . . .
Bion (1956) defines projective identification as:
. . . a splitting off by the patient of a part of his personality and a projection of it into the object where it becomes installed, sometimes as a persecutor, leaving the psychic from which it has been split off correspondingly impoverished.
It now seems that the instances of verbal transference interpretation can be looked upon as one form of intervention, at times effective, which constitutes an appeal for collaboration to the non-psychotic area of the patient’s personality, an area of which both Katan (1954) and Bion (1957) has written. But, particularly among long hospitalized chronically schizophrenic persons, we are many a patient who is too ill to be able to register verbal statements, and even in th e foregoing examples from Rosenfeld’s and Bion’s experiences, it is impossible to know to what extent the patient is helped by an illuminating accurate verbal content in the therapist’s words, or to what extent that which is effective springs, rather from the feelings of confidence, firmness, and understanding which accompany these words spoken by a therapist who feels that he has a reliable theoretical value for formulating the clinical phenomena in which he finds himself.
In trying to conceptualize such ego-states in the patient, and such states of relatedness between patient and doctor. Additional value placed the concept presentation by Little in her papers, “On Delusional Transference” (Transference Psychosis) (1958) and “On Basic Unity” (1960).
One of the necessary development, in along-delusional patient’s eventual relinquishment of his delusions is for these gradually to become productions that the therapist sees no longer as essentially ominous and the subject for either serious therapeutic investigation, or argumentation, or any other form of opposition, rather, the therapist comes to react to these for being essentially playful, unmaligant, creatively imaginative, and he comes to respond to them with playfully imaginative comments of his own. Nothing helps more finally to detoxicate a patient’s previously self-isolating delusional state than to find in his therapist a capacity to engage him in a delightfully crazy playfulness - a kind of relatedness of which the schizophrenic patient had never a chance to have his fills during his childhood. Typically, such early childhood playfulness was subjected to massive repression, because of various intra-familial circumstances.
Innumerable instances of the therapist’s uncertainty how to respond to the patient’s communication turn upon the question of whether the communication is to be ‘taken personally’ - to be taken as primarily designed, for instance, toward filling the therapist with perplexity, confusion, anxiety, humiliation, rage, or some other negatively toned affective state, or whether it is to be taken rather as primarily an effort to convey some basically unhostile needs on the patient’s par. Just as it is often essential that the therapist become able to sense and respond to personal communications in a patient’s ostensibly stereotyped behaviour or utterance, so too it is frequently essential that he be able to see, behind the overt ‘personal’ reference to himself - often a stinging or otherwise emotionally evocative reference - some fundamental needs that the patient is hesitantly to communicate openly.
Some comments by Ruesch, although concerned primarily with nonverbal communication, are beautifully descriptive of the process that occurs in such patients as the transference evolves over the course of the therapy:
. . . .The primitive and uncoordinated movements of patient at th e peak of severe functional psychosis . . . may be viewed as attempts to reestablish the infantile system of communication through action. It is as if these were frustrating in early childhood, with the hope that this time there will be another person who will understand and reply in nonverbal terms. This thesis is supported by observations of the behaviour of psychotic children who tend to play with their fingers, make grimaces or assume bizarre body position. Their movements are rarely directed at other people but rather at themselves, something to the point of producing serious injuries. As therapy proceeds, interpersonal movements gradually replace the solipsistic movements, and stimulus becomes marching to response. Once these children have been satisfied in a nonverbal ways, they become willing to learn verbal forms of codification and begin to acquire mastery of discursive language.
It seems, but nevertheless, that there is widespread agreement concerning whose functional importance of dependency process in schizophrenia, for which the patient who is involved in a schizophrenic illness, probably nothing is harder to endure than the circumstance of his having intense dependency needs that he cannot allow himself to recognize, or which if recognized in himself he dare not express to anyone, or which are expressed by him in a fashion that, more often than not, brings an uncomprehending or actively rejecting response from the other person. For the therapist who is working with such a patient, certainly there is nothing that brings more anxiety, frustration, and discouragement than do these processes in the schizophrenic person with whom he is dealing.
The dependencies on which is focussed upon effectual acknowledge in the presence of which has its closest analogue, in terms of normative standards, is such that the personality development, in the experience and behaviour of the infant or of the young child. The dependency needs, attitudes, and strivings that the schizophrenic manifests may be defined in the statement that he seeks for another person to assume a total responsibility for gratifying all his needs, both physiological and psychological, while this person is to seek nothing from him.
Of the physiological needs, which the schizophrenic manifests, those centring about the oral zone of interaction are usually most prominent, analogous to the predominant place held by nursing in the life of the infant. Desires to be stroked and cuddled, likewise, so characteristic of the very early years of normal development, are prominently held within the schizophrenic. In addition, desires for the relief of genital sexual tensions, even though these have had their advent much later in the life history than have his oral desires, are manifested in much the same level of an early, infantile dependency. That is, such genital hungers are manifested in much the same small-child spirit of, ‘you ought to be taking care of this for me’ as are the oral hungers.
The psychological needs that are represented among the schizophrenic’s dependency processes consist in the desire for the other person to provide him with unvarying love and protection, and to assume a total guidance of his living,
In the course of furthering characterizations of the schizophrenic’s dependency processes will be defined much more fully, that is to say, it is to b e emphasized that no of the dependency processes are but described is characteristic only of the schizophrenic, or qualitatively different from processes operative at some level of consciousness in persons with other varieties of psychiatric illness and in normal persons. With regard to dependency processes, we find research in schizophrenia has its greatest potential value in the fact that schizophrenic shows us in a sharply etched form that which is so obscured, by years progressive adaptation to adult interpersonal living, in human beings in general. Wherefore, but in some degree, are about the patient’s anxiety about the dependency needs, are (1) As nearly as can be determined, the patient is unaware of pure dependency needs; for him, apparently, they exist in consciousness, if at all, only in the form of a hopeless conflictual combination of dependency needs plus various defences - defences that render impossible any thoroughgoing sustained gratification of these needs. These defences (which include, grandiosity, hostility, competitiveness, scorns and so forth) have so long ago developed in his personality, as a means of coping with anxiety attendant upon dependency needs, that the experiencing of pure dependency needs it, for him, lost in antiquity and so be achieved only relatively late in therapy after the various defences have been largely relinquished.
Thus it appears to be not only dependency needs ‘per se’ which arouses anxiety, but rather the dependency needs plus all these various defences (which tend in themselves to be anxiety-provoking) plus the inevitable frustration, to a greater or less degree, of the dependency needs.
Hostility as one of the defences against awareness of ‘dependency needs,’ that which for certainly repressed dependency needs are one of the most frequent bases of murderous feelings in the schizophrenic, in such instances the murderous feelings may be regarded as a vigorous denial of dependency. What frequently happens in therapy is that both patient and therapist become so anxious about the defensive murderous feelings that the underlying dependency feelings long remain unrecognized.
Every schizophrenic possesses much self-hatred and guilt that may serve as defences against the awareness of dependency feelings (‘I am too worthless for anyone possibly to care about me’), and which in any case complicate the matter of dependency. The schizophrenic has generally come to interpret the rejections in his past life as meaning that he is a creature who wants too much and, in fact, a creature who has no legitimate needs. Thus, he can accept gratification of his dependency needs, if at all, only if his needs are rendered acceptable to themselves by reason of his becoming physically ill or in a truly desperate emotional state. It is frequently found that a schizophrenic is more accessible to the gratification of his dependency needs when he is physically ill, or filled with despair, than at other times. In that way, th e presence of self-hatred, and guilt, one ingredient of the patient’s overall anxiety about dependancy needs has to do with the fact that these needs connote to him the state of feeling physical illness or despair.
In essence, then, we can see that the patient has a deep-seated conviction that his dependency needs will not be gratified. Further, we see that this conviction is based not alone on the fortunate past expedience of repeated rejection, but also, the fact that his own defences, called forth concomitantly with the dependency desires, make it virtually certain that this dependency needs will not be met. (2) The dependency needs are anxiety-provoking not only because they involve desires to relate in an infantile or small-child fashion (by breast - or penis sucking, being cuddled, and as so forth) which is not generally acceptable behaviour among adults, but also, and probably what is more important, because they involve a feeling that the other person is frighteningly important, absolutely indispensable to the patient’s survival.
This feeling as to the indispensable of importance of the other person derives from two main sources: (a) the regressed state of the schizophrenic’s emotional life, which makes for his perceiving the other for being all-important to his survival, just as in infancy the mothering one is all-important to the survival of the infant, and (b) certain additional disabling features of his schizophrenic illness, which render him dependent in various special ways that are not quite comparable with the dependency characteristic of normal infancy or early childhood. Thereof, a number of points in reference to (b) are, first, we can perceive that a schizophrenic who is extremely confused, for example, is utterly dependent on or upon the therapist or, some other relevantly significant person to help him establish a bridge between his incomparable, incongruent, conflicting, conditions in which things are out of their normal or proper places or relationships. Such are the complete mental confusions that the authenticity of a corresponding to known facts is to discover or rediscover the real reason for which such things as having no illusions and facing reality squarely face-to-face, a realistic appraisal of his chances for advancing to the reasonable facts as we can see the factional advent for understanding the absolutizing instinct to fancy of its reality.
Second, we can see also that the patient who is in transition between old, imposed values and not-yet-acquired values of his own, has only the relationship with his therapist to depend upon.
Third, is the concern and consideration that, in many instances, the schizophrenic appears to be what one might call a prisoner in th e present. He is so afraid both of change and of the memories that tend to be called forth by the present that he clings desperately to what in immediate. He is in this sense imprisoned in immediate experience, and looks to the therapist to free him so that he will be able to live in all his life, temporally speaking - present, past and future.
Forth, it might be surmised that an oral type of relatedness to the other person (with the all-importance of the other that this entails) is necessary for the schizophrenic to maintain, partly in order to facilitate his utilization of projection and introjection as defences against anxiety.
Anxiety, is the constructed foundation whose emotional state from which are grounded to the foundation structural called the ‘edifice’, that an emotional state in which people feel uneasy, apprehensive, or fearful. People usually experience anxiety about events they cannot control or predict, or about events that seem threatening or dangerous. For example, students taking an important test may feel anxious because they cannot predict the test questions or feel certain of a good grade. People often use the words fear and anxiety to describe the same thing. Fear also describes a reaction to immediate danger characterized by a strong desire to escape the situation.
The physical symptoms of anxiety reflect a chronic “readiness” to deal with some future threat. These symptoms may include fidgeting, muscle tension, sleeping problems, and headaches. Higher levels of anxiety may produce such symptoms as rapid heartbeat, sweating, increased blood pressure, nausea, and dizziness.
Bychowski (1952) says, ‘”The separation between the primitive ego and the external world is closely connected with orality, both form the basis for the mechanism that we call projection,” and would add, for introjection. , That Starcke (1921) for earlier comments “I might briefly allude to the possibility that in the repeated alternation between becoming one’s own and not one’s own, which occurs during lactation . . . the situation of being nursed plays a part in the origin of the mechanism of something that extends beyond its level or the normal outer surface in which serves to support projection.
The patient has anxiety, and, least of mention, his dependency needs lead him either to take in harmful things, or to lose his identity.
The schizophrenic does not have the ability necessary to tolerate the frustration of his dependency needs, so that he can, once they emerge into awareness, subject them to mature discriminatory judgement before seeking their gratification. Instead, like a voraciously hungry infant, his tendency is to put into his mouth (either literally or figuratively) whatever is at hand, whether nutritious or with a potential of being harmful, this tendency is about th e basis of some of his anxiety concerning his dependency needs, for the fear that they will keep him blindly into receiving harmful medicines, bad advice, electro-shock treatment, lobotomy, and so forth. Schizophrenic patients have been known to beg, in effect, for all these, and many a patients have been known to beg, yet these patients have been ‘successful’ in his dependency desires. A need for self-punishment is, of course, an additional motivation in such instances.
A statement by Fenichel (1945) indicates that, “The pleasure principle, that is, the need for immediate discharge, is incompatible with correct judgement, which is based on considerable and post postponement of the reaction. The time and energy saved by this postponement are used in the function of sound and stable judgments. That in the early states the weak ego has not yet learned to postpone anything.
In the same symptomatic of one that finds that th e extent that the schizophrenic projects onto other persons his own needs too such and to devour, he feels threatened with being devoured by these other persons.
To elaborate now in a somewhat different direction upon this fear of loss of identity. Th e schizophrenic fears that his becoming dependent on another person will lead him into a state of conformity that other person’s wishes and life values. A conformer is almost the last sort of person as the schizophrenic wishes to become, since his sense of individuality resides in his very eccentricities. He assumes that the therapist, for example, in the process, requiring him to give up his individuality for the kinds of parental future in his past had e been able to salvage his refuge used to pay the price.
It seems of our apparent need to give the impression of being without necessarily being so in fact that things are not always the way they seem, as things accompanied with action orient of doing whatever is apprehended as having actual, distinct and demonstrateable existence from which there is a place for each thing in the cosmological understanding idea in that something conveys to the mind a rational allotment of the far and near, such of the values and standards moderate the newly proposed to modify as to avoid an extreme or keep within bounds.
For what is to say, in that we need to realize, that the patient is not solely a broken, inert victim of the hostility of persons in his past life. His hebephrenic apathy or his catatonic immobility, for example, represents for one thing, an intense active endeavour toward unconscious regressive goals, as Greenson (1949, 1953) has for his assistance to make clear in the boredom and apathy in neurotic patients. The patient is, in other words, no inert vehicle that needs to be energized by the therapist; rather, an abundance of energy is locked in him, pressing ceaselessly to be freed, and a hovering ‘helpful’ orientation on the part of the therapist would only get in the way. We must realize that the patient has made, and is continually making, a contribution to his own illness, however unwittingly, and however obscure the nature of this contribution may long remain.
More than often, it has been found that the histories of schizophrenic patients, whether male or female, describe the father for being by far, the warmer, the more accessible, of the responsive parents, and the patient as having always been very much attached to the father, whereas the mother was always a relatively cold, rejecting, remote figure, but for the repetitive correlative coefficient, that it was to be found that, disguised behind the child’s idol or inseparable buddy, is a matter of the father’s transference to the child’s being a mother-figure that the father, in these instances, is an infantile individual who reacts both to his wife and to his child, as the mother-figure, and who, by striving to be both father and mother to the child, unconsciously seeks to intervene between mother and child, that in such a way as to have each of them to himself, in the considerations that suggest of a number of cases when both are in the transference-development with the patient and the selective prospect of the patient’s generalization that limits or qualifies an agreement or other conditions that may contain or depend on a conditioning need for previsional advocates that include the condition that the transference phenomena would effectually raise the needed situational alliance.
The various forms of intense transference on the part of the schizophrenic individual tend forcibly to evoke complementary feeling-responses, comparably intense, in the therapist. Mabel Blake Cohen (1952) has made the extremely valuable observation, for psychoanalysis in general, that:
. . . it seems that the patient applies great pressure to the analyst in a variety of nonverbal ways to behave like the significant adults in the patient’s earlier life, it is not merely a matter of the patient’s seeing the analyst as like his father, but of his actually manipulating the relationship in such away as to elicit the same kind of behaviour from the analyst. . . .
It is no too much to say that, in response to the schizophrenic patient’s transference, the therapist not only behaves like the significant adults in the patient’s childhood, but experiences most intimately, within himself, activated by the patient’s transference the very kind of intense and deeply conflictual feelings that were at work, however repressed, in those adults in the past, as well as experiencing, through the mechanisms of projection and introjection in the relationship between himself and the patient, the comparably intense and conflictual emotion that formed the seed-bed of psychosis in the child himself, years ago.
The accountable explanation in the support for reason to posit for the necessarily deep feeling-involvement on the part of the therapist is inherent in the nature of early ego-formation. The healthy reworking of which is so central to the therapy of schizophrenia. Spitz (1959), in his monograph on the early development of the ego, repeatedly emphasizes that emotion plays a leading role in th e formation of what he described as the ‘organizers of the psyche’ (which he defines as ‘emergent, dominant centres of integration’) during the first eighteen months of life. H e says, for example, that:
. . . the road that leads to this integration of isolated functions is built by the infant’s object relations, by experiences of an effective nature. Accordingly, the indicator of the organizer of the psyche will be of an effective nature, it is an effective behaviour that clearly precedes development in all other sectors of the personality by several months.
The phases comprising the overall course of psychotherapy with chronically schizophrenic persons, is that of recent years it has become increasingly reassuring that it is possible to delineate such phases in the complex, individualistic and dynamic events of clinical work. One can be said, that, in this difficult effort at conceptualization, from Freud’s delineation of the successive phases of libidinal development in healthy maturation, Erikson’s (1956) portrayal of the process of identity formation as gradual unfolding of the personality through phase-specific psycho-social crises of evolution of the reality principle in healthy development - the typical conflicts, the sequence of danger situations, and
the ways they are dealt with - can be traced in this process.
The successive phases of which are best characterised, the psychotherapy of chronic schizophrenia, are the ‘out-of-contact phases, the phase of ambivalent symbiosis, the phase of pre-ambivalent symbiosis, the phase of resolution of the symbiosis, and the late phase, - that of establishment, and elaboration, of the newly won individuation through selective new identification and repudiation of outmoded identifications.
The sequence of these phases retraces, in reverse, the phases by which the schizophrenic illness was originally formed: The way of thinking, the aetiological roots of schizophrenia are formed when the mother-infant symbiosis fails to resolve into individuation of mother and infant - or, still more harmfully fails even to become at all firmly established - because of deep ambivalence of the part of the mother that hindered the integration and differentiation of the infant’s and young child’s ego, the child fails then to proceed through the normative development phases of symbiosis and subsequent individuation. Instead the core of his personality remains uniform, and ego-fragmentation and dedifferentiation becomes powerful, though deeply primitive and unconscious defences against the awareness of ambivalence in the object and in himself. Even in normal development, one becomes separate person only by becoming able to face, and accept ownership of, one’s ambivalence with which he had to cope in his relationship with his mother was too great, and his ego-formation too greatly impeded, for him to be able to integrate his conflictual feeling-states into an individual identity.
Of these, the theoretical concept has been fostered by Mahler’s (1956) paper on autistic and symbiotic infantile psychosis and by Balint‘s (1953, 1955) writings concerning phenomena of early ego-formation that he encountered in the psychoanalysis of neurotic patients. From a purely descriptive viewpoint, schizophrenia can be seen to consist essentially in an impairment of both ‘integration’ and ‘differentiation’ - which are but opposite faces of a unitary growth-process. From a Psychodynamics view point seems basic to all the bewilderingly plexuity with which are a varying manifestations of schizophrenia.
Taking in, is the matter of integration; when we assess schizophrenia individual in terms of the classical structural areas of the personality - id, ego, and superego - we discover these to be poorly integrated with one another. The id is experienced by the ego as a Pandora’s box, the contents of which will overwhelm one if it is opened. The ego is, as many writers have stated, severely split, sometimes into innumerable islands that are not linked discernibly with one another. And the superego has the nature of a cruel tyrant whose assaults upon the weak and unintegrated ego are, if anything, even more destructive to it than are the assessions of the threatening id-impulses, as Szalita-Pemow (1951), Hill (1955), and others. Moreover, the superego is, like the ego, even in itself not well integrated; its utterances contain the most glaring inconsistencies from one moment to the next. Jacobson (1954) has shown that there is actually as dissolution of the superego, as an integrated destruction - a regressive transformation back into the threatening parental images whose conglomeration originally formed it.
Differentiation is a process that is essential to integration, and vice versa. For personality structure-functions or psychic contents to become integrated, they must first have emerged as partially differentiated or separate from one another, and differentiation in turn can emerge only out of a foundation of more or less integrated functions or contents. The intertwining mesh upon which is interwoven in the growth precesses of integration and differentiation, such that the impairment of both likewise interlocking. But in the schizophrenic these two processes tend to be out of step with one another, so that at one moment a patient’s more urgent need may be for increased integration, whereas at another he may more urgently need increased differentiation. And these are some patients who show for months end, a more urgent need in one of these areas, before the alternate growth-phase on the scene, that type is a modicum of validity in speaking and of two different ’types’ of schizophrenic patients.
One comes to realize, upon reasons of how premature have been one’s effort to find out what feelings the patient is experiencing or what thoughts he is having; one comes to realize that much of the time he has neither feelings nor thoughts differentiated as such and communicable to us.
Such differentiations as the patient posses of an inclining inclination that tend to break down when intense emotion enters his awareness. A paranoid man, for example, may find that when his hatred toward another person reaches a certain degree of intensity, he is flooded with anxiety because he no longer knows whether he hates, or instead ‘really loves’ the other individual. This is not based, on any line or its course, whereupon the primary mechanism that Freud (1911) outlined in his classical description of the nature of paranoid delusions of persecution, a description in which repressed homosexual love played the central role. The central difficulty is rather than the ego is too poorly differentiated to maintain its structure in the face of such powerful affects, and the patient becomes flooded with what can only be described as ‘undifferentiated passion’, precisely as one finds an infant to be overwhelmed at times with affect that the observer cannot be specifically identity as any one kind of emotion.
As for the feelings with which the therapist himself experiences in working within the variations in the differentiated patient, we find, again, a persistent threat of the therapist’s sense of identity. But, whereas in the unitary integration complex manifestations of such of a schizophrenic’s sense of identity. But as in the first instance that the threat was felt predominantly as a disturbance of one’s personal integration, it seems possible as a weakening of one’s sense of differentiation. In this instance, the ‘therapeutic symbiosis’ which implicates the necessary developments that it tends to occur earlier for which of the patient’s predominant mode of relatedness with other persons, at the developmental level at which we find him at the very beginning of our work, is a symbiotic one. Such descriptions, least of mention, agree with the necessary developments, in that it tends to occur for the patient ‘s predominant mode of relatedness with other persons, the symbiotic relatedness, with its subjective absence of ego-boundaries, involves not only special gratification, but anxiety-provoking disturbances on one’s sense of personal identity.
The comparatively rapid development of symbiotic relatedness is facilitated by the patient’s characteristically nonverbal, and physically more or less immobile, functioning during the therapeutic sessions. In response, the therapist’s own behaviour becomes more and more similar, is that each participant is now offering to the other, saying that over the hours of counselling, a silent, impassive screen that facilitates abundant mutual projecting and introjecting. Thus a symbiotic state is likely to be reached earlier than in one’s work with the typically much more verbal type of the patient when described for that instance, the patient’s and therapist’s more abundant verbalization’s tend persistently to stress the ego-boundaries separating the to persons from one another.
The applicability for which the predominantly non-differentiated patient, in that the therapist’s sense of identity as a complexly differentiated individual entity becomes further eroded, or undermined, as he finds the patient persistently operating on the unwavering conviction, that the hours of counselling are but an undifferentiated aspect of the whole vague mass of the institution, even in Psychodynamics terms, is in actuality the patient’s projection of his own poorly differentiated hostility, through which the patient’s tenaciously held view, is the way the world around him really is.
Further, since the patient typically verbalizes little but a few maddening monotonous stereotypes, the therapist tends to feel, over the course of time, with so little of his own intellectual content being explicitly tapped in the relationship, that his richness of intellect is progressively rusting away - becoming less differentiated, more stereotyped and rudimentary. Moreover, the patient presents but one of two emotional wavelengths to which the therapist can himself tune in, rather than a rich spectrum of emotion that calls into response a similarly wide range of feelings from the therapist himself. Thus not only the therapist’s intellectual resources, but his emotional capacities too, becomes subjectively narrowed down and impoverished, as he finds that, over the sessions of counselling, his patient in him neither any wide range of ideas, nor any emotions except, for example, rage, or contempt or dull hopelessness.
The feeling experience on his part, anxiety-provoking and discouraging though he finds it, is a necessary therapeutic development. It is for him thus to experience at first hand something of the patient’s own lack of differentiation; for, as in the therapy with the non-integrated patient, as, once, again, the healing process occurs external to the patient, as it was, at an intrapsychic level in the therapist, before it becomes established in the patient himself. That is, the therapist’s coming to view the patient, his relationship with the patient, and himself in this relationship, all for being largely non-differentiated, is a development that sets the stage for the patient’s gradually increasing differentiation. Now the therapist comes to sense, time and again, newly emerging tendrils of differentiation in the patient, before the latter are themselves and conscious of them. In responding to these with spontaneity as they show themselves, again, that in the therapist, helps the patient to become aware-theat they are a part of him.
To analyst and analytic student alike, the term ‘transference psychosis’ usually connotes a dramatic but dreaded development in which an analysand, who at the beginning of the analysis was overtly sane but who had in actuality a borderline ego-structure, becomes overtly psychotic, that the course of the evolving transference relationship. We generally blame the analyst for such as development and prefer not to think any more about such matters, because of our own personal fear that we, like the poor misbegotten analysand, might become, or narrowly avoid becoming, psychotic in our own analysis. By contrast, in working with the chronically schizophrenic patient, we are confronted with a person whose transference to us is no harder too identify partly for the very reason that his whole daily life consists in incoherent psychotic transference reactions, for which is to whatever, to everyone about him, including the analyst in the treatment session. Little’s comment (1960) that the delusional state ‘remains unconscious’ until it is uncovered in the analysts’ holds true only in the former instance, in the borderline schizophrenic patient; there, it is the fact that the transference is delusional which is the relative covert, hard-to-discern aspect of the situation, in chronic schizophrenia, by contrast, nearly everything is delusional, and the difficult task to foster the emergence of a coherent transference meaning in the delusional symptomatology. In other words, the difficult thing in the work with the chronically schizophrenic patient is to discover the ‘transference reality’ in his delusional experience.
The difficultly of discerning the transference aspect of one’s relationship with the patient can be traced to his having regressed to a state of ego functioning which is marked by severe impairment in his capacity either to differentiate among, or to integrate, his experiences. He is so incompletely differentiated in his ego functioning that he tends to feel, not that the therapist reminds him of, or is like, his mother or that of his father (or whomever, from his early life) but rather his functioning toward the therapist is couched in the unscrutinised assumption that the therapist is the mother or father. When, for example, in trying to bring to the attention of a paranoid schizophrenic women how much like she seemed to find the persons in her childhood on the one hand, and the person about her in the institution, including me, on the other, she dismissed this with an impatient retort, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, What difference does it make? For years subsequently in our work together, all the figures in her experience were composite figures, without any clear subjective distinction between past and present experiences, figures from the institutional scene peopled her memories of her past, and figures from what has become known to be her past were experienced by her as blended with the persons she saw about her in current life.
Transference situations in which the psychosis is manifested at a phase in therapy in which the deeply chronically confused patient, who in childhood had been accustomed to a parent’s during his thinking for him, is ambivalently (a) trying to perpetuate a symbiotic relationship wherein the therapist to a high degree does the patient’s thinking for him, and (b) expressing, by what the therapist feels to be sadistic and castrative and nullifying or undoing the therapist’s effort to be helpful, a determination to be a separately thinking, and otherwise separately functioning, individual
Difficult though it is to discern the nature and progressive evolution of the patient’s transference to the therapist, it is even more difficult to conceptualize that which is ‘new’ which the therapist brings into the relationship, and which, as J. M. Rioch (1943) has emphasized, is crucial to the patient’s recovery. Rioch is quite right in saying that, “Whether intentionally or not, whether conscious of it or not, the analyst does express, day in and day out, subtle or overt evidences of his own personality in relationship to the patient.”
The conjectural considerations for which inadequate evidences in the understanding of questionable intent is that there is a companion evolution of reality relatedness between patient and therapist, concomitant with such a transference evolution as having had the impression that it is only when the reality relatedness between patient and therapist has reached, finally and after many ‘real life’ vicissitudes between them, a depth of intense fondness that there now emerges, in the form of a transference development, a comparably intense and long-repressed fondness for the mother.
Presumably, a point that Freud (1922) concerning projection also holds true for transference, he stated that projection occurs no ‘into the sky, so to speak, where there is nothing of the sort already’, but rather the persons who in reality posses an attitude qualitatively like that which the projecting person is attributing to them. So it is with transference, we may presume that when a patient comes to react to us as a loved and loving mother, this phrase - as well as other phrases - of the transference is founded upon our having come to feel, in reality, thus toward him. M. B. Cohen (1952) stresses the importance of the therapist’s inevitable feeling response to the patient’s transference, and, if only to suggest, that an equally healthy source of the therapist’s feeling participation be the evolving reality relatedness that pursues its own course, related to and parallelling, but not fully embraced by, the evolving transference relatedness over the years of person’s working together. What is more, is the countertransference that has already been written, but as to indicate, there is a great need for us to become clear about the sequence that the recovery process in the schizophrenic adult, very roughly analogous to the growth process in normal infancy, childhood, and adolescence, tends innately to follow. When we have become clearer and surer about this, and particularly about the validity-relatedness element necessary to it, in that the frequently - though by no means always - various manifestations of feeling regarded as unwanted countertransference will be seen to be inevitable, and utterly essential, components of the recovery process.
Further, the opening view of the personality for being divisible into the areas, id, ego, and superego, tends to shield us from the anxiety-fostering realization that in psychoanalytic change is not merely quantitative and partial - where id was, there shall ego be - in Freud’s dictum - but qualitative and all-persuasive. That is, that in such passages as the following. Freud gives a picture of personality-structure, and of maturation, which leaves the inaccurate but comforting impression that at least a part of us - namely, as part of the id - is free from change. In his paper entitled “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” in 1915, he said,
. . . the evolution of the mind shows a peculiarity that is present in no other process of development. When a village grows into a town, a child into a man, the village and the child become submerged in the town and the man, . . . it is otherwise with the development of the mind . . . the primitive stages [of mental development] can always be reestablished, the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable (Freud, 1915).
In “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” he says that in psychoanalytic treatment,
. . . By means of the work of interpretation, which transforms what is unconscious into what is conscious, the ego is enlarged at the cos of this unconscious . . . (Freud, 1915-17)
In “The Ego and the Id” he said that,
. . . the ego is that part of the id that has been modified by the direct influence of the external world . . . the pleasure-principle . . . reigns unrestricted by the id . . . the ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions (Freud, 1923)
Glover, in his book on technique published in 1955, states similarly that,
. . . a successful analysis may have uncovered a good deal of the repressed . . . [and] have mitigated the archaic censoring functions of the superego, but it can scarcely be expected to abolish the id (Glover, 1955)
The state of developmental sciences, and about our own individual the individual therapeutic skills, should not cause us to understate the all-embracing extent of human personality-growth in normal maturation at least a few psychoanalysis. It is believed that all encountered, and, at lest a few fortunate instances that have made us wonder whether maturation really leaves any area of the personality untouched, leaves any steel-bound core within which the pleasure principle reigns immutably, or whether, instead, we have seen such a genuine metamorphosis, from an erstwhile hateful and self-seeking orientation to a loving and giving orientation, quite as wonderful and thoroughgoing the metamorphosis of the tadpole into the frog thoroughgoing as the metamorphosis of the tadpole into the frog or that of the caterpillar into the butterfly.
Freud himself, in his emphasis upon the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’ (1923), the repetition compulsion, and the resistance to analytic insight that he discovered in his work with neurotic patients, has shown the importance, in the neurotic individual, of anxiety concerning change, and him agrees with Jung’s statement that ‘a peculiar psychic inertia’ hostile to change and progress, is the fundamental condition of neurosis (Freud, 1915). This is, as we know, even more true of psychosis - so much as that only in very recent decades have psychotic patients achieved full recovery though modified psychoanalytic therapy. Finding it instructive to explore in detail the psychodynamics of schizophrenia in terms of the anxiety concerning change which one encounters, in a particular intense degree, at work in these patients, and in oneself in the course of treating them. What the therapy of schizophrenia can teach us of the human being’s standing concerning change, can broaden and deepen our understanding of the non-psychotic individual also.
This development can occur only after successive resolution of increasingly ancient personality-warp in the patient, and the establishment thereby, of a hard-won mutual trust and security. In this atmosphere the therapist relationship makes contact with the healthy ingredients of the patient’s symbiotic relationship with his mother, thus laying the foundation for subsequent new growth as a separate and healthy individual.
In such fashion the patient develops importance not merely as a separate object, but to a degree as a symbiotic partner, for the therapist as well as for other people, who participate with which the therapist himself, as well as such of the staff members, we hear from fellow-therapists and ward-personal of how ‘stunned’ or even ‘shocked’ them were at seeing dramatic improvements in a long-ill patient. Characteristically, too, the therapist notices only very belatedly various long-standing symptoms have dropped out of the patient’s behaviour. on looking back through his records, for example, prior to a staff-presentation, he finds to his surprise that a delusion, once long-familiar to him, has not been evidenced by the patient for several months. Thus, his feelings of personal loss are mitigated. Even so, that even among the most technically capable of therapists, is the initial reaction with dismay and discouragement to a patients, is the initial reacting with express verbally the depths of his despair, loneliness, confusion, infantile need, and so fort, typically, the therapist only belatedly recognizes the forward move this development constitutes. His initial response is traceable to the unconscious loss that this development inflicts upon him - the loss of the long-familiar and inevitable therefore cherished (unconsciously cherished) relatedness that therefor he had shared with the patient.
The patient, particularly in the symbiotic phrase of the therapy but in preceding and succeeding phase as well, is notably intolerant of sudden and marked changes in the therapeutic relationship - that is, of suddenly seeing himself, or feeling that his therapist sees him, through new eyes. He rarely gives the therapist to feel that the latter have made an importantly revealing interpretation, and when he himself conveys a highly illuminating nugget of historical information to his therapist, he does so casually, often feeling sure that he has already mentioned this before. He tends to experience important increments of de-repressed material not as earthshattering revelations in his development, yet the forward moves in therapy, on the patient’s part occur each time only after a recrudescence in his symptoms. It is as though he was to find reassurance of his personal identity, for being really the same hopeless person he has long felt himself to be, before he can venture into a bit of new and more hopeful identity.
There is a necessary phase of symbiosis between patient and doctor in the transference evolution followed by the recovering schizophrenic patient, a phase in which the ego boundaries between himself and the therapist are mutually relinquished to a large degree. This development can occur only after successive resolutions of increasingly ancient personality-wrap in the patient, and the establishment, thereby, of a hard-won in the patient, and his identity.
The following considerations, to be sure, the patient, in this reality and that this mutuality of a comparative participation is essentially inclined of a better understanding and a successful therapeutic outcome.
Freud (1911) made the comment that:
We have long observed that every neurosis has as its result, and probably therefore its purpose, a forcing of the patient out of real life, an alienating of him from reality . . . neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable - either the whole or parts of it. The most extreme type of this turning away from result is shown by certain cases of hallucinatory psychosis that seek to deny the particular event that occasioned the outbreak of their inanity. But in fact every neurosis does the same with some fragment of reality . . .
Bion, in his paper in 1957 concern the differentiation, in any one schizophrenic patient, between what he calls the psychotic personality and the non-psychotic personality, concludes the presentation of his theoretical formulations with,
. . . Further, I consider that this holds true for the severe neurotic, in whom believe there is a psychotic personality concealed by neurosis as the neurotic personality is screened by psychosis in the psychotic, that has to be laid bare and dealt with.
Bion conveys in his paper entitled “Language d the Schizophrenic” (1955) a warning of the patient’s tendency to project his own sanity upon the analyst and of the massive regression that follows if this is condoned by the analyst. He says:
. . . I have no doubt whatever that the analyst should always insist, by the way in which he conducts the case, that he is addressing himself to a sane person and is entitled to expect some sane reception . . . ,
There is wide spread agreement that it is inherent in therapy that the therapist functions as an auxiliary ego so the patient in the patent’s struggle with inner conflicts, until such time as to make this greater strength part of his own ego. To the extent that the schizophrenic patient does not posses an observing ego of sufficient strength to permit the therapist usefully to make transference interpretations, to that degree the therapist must be able to endure - and, eventually, to enjoy - various part-object transference role, until such time as the patient, through increasing ego-integration, becomes of the therapist. Another way of saying this is that the patient develops ego-strength. in the face of his own id impulses and pathogenic superego retaliations, in that, if identification with the therapist who can endure, and integrate into his own larger self, the kind of subjectively nonhuman part-object relatedness that the patient fosters in and needs from him.
Similarly, because the therapist has seen the patient to be, earlier in the therapy, such a deeply fragmented person, he tends to retain a lingering impression of the fragility, an impression that may interfere with his going along at the faster pace that the patient, now a very different and far stronger person, is capable of setting. But even this memory-image of the fragile patient, carried with the therapist, has a natural function in the course of the psychotherapy, for it is only very late in the work that the patient himself is able to realize how very ill, how very fragile, he once was, until he becomes strong enough to integrate his realization into his self-image, the therapist has to be the bearer of this piece of the patient’s identity. This process is analogous to the well-known phenomenon in which each major forward stride in the patient’s therapeutic growth is accompanied, or presaged, by the therapist’s suddenly seeing in the patient a new and healthier person, there, too, the impact of the development falls primarily, for a time, upon the therapist rather than the patient. The patient himself, because his sense of identity is still, during the earlier therapeutic phases to which is easily overwhelming, and relatively tenuous. By the realization of the extent to which he is now changed, even though this change is, in our view, a most beneficial and welcoming one.
More often than not, is that the histories of schizophrenic patients, whether male or female, describe the father for being by far the warmer, and more accessible of the two parents, the father, whereas the mother was always relatively cold, rejecting, remote figure. However, that the disguise behind the child’s idol inseparable ‘buddy’ is a matter of the father’s transference to the child for being a mother-figure upon whom he, the father makes insatiable demands. It seems that the father, in these instances, is an infantile individual, who reacts both to his wife and to his child unconscious ly seeks to intervene between mother and child in such a way as to have each of them to himself. The seeming evidence of this by now, in a considerable number of cases, both in the transference-development and interviews with the parents.
The point being made, is that the mother and child allow this interposition by the father to happen, because of their anxiety about their fondness for being a mother-figure who exasperatingly allows as an infantile ‘buddy’, a kind of father to keep intervening, placing impossible demands for mothering upon the patient; finally comes a phase of th e patient’s responding to the therapist as a mother with whom he can share unashamedly fond relatedness, no longer burdened by the father’s scornfully and demandingly coming between them.
So it is with transference, we may presume that when a patient comes to react to us as a love and loving mother, this phase - as well as other phases - of the transference is founded upon our having come to feel, in reality, as, M. B. Cohen (1952) stresses the importance of the therapist ‘s inevitable feeling response to the patient’s transference, only to suggest, that of the therapist’s feeling participation is the evolving reality relatedness that pursue its own course, related to and parallelling, but not fully embraced by, the evolving transcendence relatedness over which time to occur is, namely introduced as countertransference, nonetheless, in the realm, as situated as one crucial phase of the work - a symbiotic kind of mutual dependency, which he mutually comes to feel toward the patient, his acceptance of a mutual caring which amounts at times to an adoration, and his being able to acknowledge the patient’s contribution - inevitable, in successful therapy - to his own personal integration. It must be noted, that the schizophrenic patient responds with great regularity to the therapist’s material warmth for being a sure indication that the latter are a homosexual or a lesbian. The younger therapist needs to become quite clear that this is, in actuality, a formidable resistance in the patient again the very kind of loving mother-infant relatedness that offers the patient his only avenue of salvation from his illness. Not to say, that the therapist should depreciate the degree of anxiety, referable to the deep ambivalence of the patient’s early relationship with his mother, which is contained within this resistance, perhaps, that the therapist’s deep-seated doubts as to his own sexual identity - and what person is totally free of such doubt? - should not make him lose of the fact that the patient’s contempt (or revulsion, or what not) is basically a resistance against going ahead and picking up the threads of the loving infant-mother relatedness that were long ago severed.
Upon comment, the patient has in reference to a different person, and is often couched in terms of a different temporal era, that is intended by the preconscious or unconscious impulse striving for expression. The circumstance of the patient’s having regressed to a more or less early level of ego-functioning is explanatory of many of the idiosyncrasies of schizophrenic communication. The clinical picture is complicated, in most instances, by the fact that the level of regression varies unceasingly, at times from one moment to the next, and there are even instances where the patient is functioning on more than one developmental level simultaneously.
The fact of the patient’s regressed, mode of psychological functioning helps to account for the ‘concretization’, or contrariwise the seeming oversymbolization, of his communications; these phenomena represent his having regressed, in his thinking (and overall subjective experiencing), to a developmental level comparable with that in the young child who has not yet become able to differentiate between concrete and metaphorical (or similar forms of highly symbolic) thinking.
Similarly, the patient may tittle-tattle in a way that gives us to know that the content of his speech is relatively unimportant to him at the moment he is immersed in the pleasure of saying the words and hearing the sound of them, much like the young child who has not yet learned to talk but loves to babble and to hear the sound of his babbling. A nonverbal patient may usefully be regarded as having regressed even further, to the pre-verbal era of infancy or very early childhood.
The strikingly intense ambivalence, another fundamental aspect of the schizophrenic individual’s psychodynamics, contributes to a number of different typical kinds of schizophrenic communications. (1) The indirect communication, (2) Self-contradictory verbal and nonverbal communications, and (3) Verbal communications in which there is a split between content and vocal feeling-tone.
In assessing the meaning of such communications, one soon learns to brush aside the content and attend to the feeling-tone - o r, in still, more complex instances, tones - in which the words are said.
Incidently, a patient sometimes evidences a quite accurate grasp of the true import of such communications that they come from the therapist. at the end of each of the maddening points or the enduring intervals of times of silence. After this had happened several times dawning upon that which he was very accurately expressing the covert message contained in the parting comment to him, as to the (4) No-verbal expression of a feeling contrarily enacted to the one being verbalized? And (5) Expression of contradictory feeling at an entirely nonverbal level.
The archaically harsh, forbidding superego of the patient is another basic factor that helps to account for his heavily disguised and often fragmentary communications.
I can only surmise that there is a companion evolution of reality relatedness between parent and the therapist, concomitant with such a transference evolution, it is only when the real possibilities relatedness between patient and therapist has reached, of a final and after man a depth intensity that there is now emerging, in the form of a transference development a comparable intense and long-represented direction in the fondness for the mother. However, this brings us back to other topics comprising the overall course of psychotherapy as a chronically schizophrenic person, a person preceding in the complex individuality extended to dynamical events of clinical work.
The quality of the transference resistances is to a great extent deepened on the quantity of other resistances. Resistances have the tendency to accumulate wherever there is a favourable opportunity to withstand the analysis. In most cases the transference offers the best opportunity, for example, we see the resistance coming from the conscious repetition, from the unconscious feeling of guilt and from the resistance by repression, takes part of building up the transference resistance. Freud speaks of the transference of resistance into a negative, hostile transference: It is on account of this transformation that the dissolution that transference resistances so often because the chief task of the therapeutics work. In the case of our patient the analysis finally showed the development of anxiety in the transference to b e castration anxiety that had arisen from infantile masturbation with accompanying incestuous wishes toward the mother and the hared and castration wishes toward the father. In the analysis, if the resistance resulting factors in the development of anxiety in the analysis. If the resistance result from this anxiety is analysis the addition of other resistances, then the final resistance in the analysis cannot be considered as an index to the amount of the genuine infantile anxiety for the anxiety resulting from infantile masturbation, on account of the genuine infantile anxiety: For the anxiety resulting from infantile masturbation on account of its anxiety resulting from infantile masturbation, on account of its particular capacity for being used as a resistance in analysis, becomes the nucleus of crystallisation or the basis for the addition of all the other resistances. In a footnote to his paper “The Dynamics of th Transference,” this idea was alluded to by Freud, that, ‘Over and over again, when one draws near to a pathogenic complex, that part of it that is first thrust forward into consciousness will be some aspect of it that can be transferred, having been so, it will then be defended with the utmost obstinacy by the patient’. The footnote says: ‘From which however one need not infer in general any very particular pathogenic importance in the point selected for resistance by transference. In warfare, when a bitter fight is raging over the possession of some little chapel or a single farmhouse, we do not necessarily assume that the church is a national monument, or that the barns contain the military funds. Their value may be merely tactical; in the next onslaught they will very likely be of no importance’.
The dissolution of the transference resistance means then not only the dissolution of the resistance resulting from the genuine infantile castration anxiety but a liberation of the supporting resistance that often can only later be separately dissolved, because during the phase of the violent acting-out in the transference these resistances are not accessible to interpretation and dissolution.
For what is said about the psychology of metaphor is analogous to the transformational aspects of developed transferences and steadfast interpretations that both facilitate and organize them as transferences. Allowing that these transferences and ‘remembered’ experiences come into existence over a period of time, nothing that is identical with them has ever before been enacted, and nothing identical with them will ever be enacted again. They are creations that may be fully achieved only under specific analytic conditions. For example, at the time of his childhood scene with his father, the young man of the clinical example, could not have had the specific experience as recounted. strictly speaking, he was not reliving that moment. As a bo y, he must have experienced some of the main precursors and constituents of his present mode of experience, but he could not have done so in the present articulated and integrated manner. That present manner was the basis of his anguished outcry. words like re-creating, but re-experiencing and reliving simply do not do justice to the phenomena. In the way he was doing it, he was living that moment for the first time.
By making this claim, there is no constricting some of our well-established ideas about interpretation and insight, for example, disputing point that insight refers to more than the recovery of lost memories, and takes in, as well, a new grasp of the significance and interrelations of events one has always remembered. The latter connections that the analysand will say, as Freud pointed out, “As a matter of fact I’ve always known it, only I’ve never thought of” (1914). In fact, it is to develop that points further to say that the young child simply does not have the means of fully defining what we later regard as its own life experiences. It takes an adult to do that, especially with the help of an analyst. It was, after all, Freud’s analysis that made it possible to define infantile psychosexuality. in this respect, but without disrespect, child analysis retains a quality of applied psychoanalysis. The adult definition of infantile psychosexuality is ‘artificial’ in the same way that the interpreting transference neurosis is: Both are ways of describing as true something that was not truer in quite that way as, at the time of its greatest development significance. this apparent paradox about ‘remembering’ as a form of creating goes a long was, that saying, what it is this distinctive about psychoanalytic interpretation.
In steadfastly and perspicaciously making transference interpretation, the analyst helps constitute new modes of experience and new experiences. This newness characterizes the experience of analytic transference in them. Unlike extra-analytic transference, they can no longer be sheerly repetitive or merely new editions. Instead, they become repetitively new editions understood as such because defined as such by the simplification and steadfast transference interpretation, instead of responding to the analysand in kind, Which would actualize the repetition, the analyst makes an interpretation. This interpretation does not necessarily or regularly match something the analysand does often seem to have always represented often, but he does not seem to have done so at all. To think otherwise about this would, in effect, to claim that, unconsciously, every analysand is Freud or a fully insightful Freudian analyst. And that claim is totally absurd.
It would be closer to the truth to say this: Unconsciously, the analysand already knows or has experienced fragmentary, amorphous, uncoordinated constituents of many of the transference interpretations. Alternatively, one may say that, implicitly, the analysand has been insisting on some as yet unspecified certainties and, in keeping with this, following some set of as yet unspecified rules in his actions, these the transference interpretations now organize explicitly. Each transference interpretation thus refers to many things that have already been defined by the analysand, and it does so in a way that transforms them. That’s why one may call it interpretation. Otherwise, it would be mere repeating or sterile paraphrasing. Interpretation is a creative redescription that implicitly has the structure of a simile. It says, “This is like it,” Each interpretation does, therefore, add new actions to the life the analysand has already lived.
Technically, redescription in the terms of transference-repetition is necessary. This is so because, up to the time of interpretation and working through, the analysand has been, in one sense unable and, in another sense, unconsciously and desperately unwilling, to conduct his life differently, in and of them, the repetitions cannot after the symptoms, the subjective distress, the wasting of one’s possibilities rather they can only perpetuate a static situation by repeatedly confirming its necessity. They prove once again, the unconsciously maintained damaging certainties. But once they get to be viewed as historically grounded actions and subjectively defined situations. As they do upon being interpreted and worked through, they appear as having always been, in crucial respects, inventions of the analysand’s making and, so, as his responsibility. in being seen as versions one’ past life, they may be changed in significant and beneficial ways. Less of all, are they presented as purely inevitable happenings, as a fixed fate or as the well-established way of the world. However, we encounter a second paradox that goes to the heart of psychoanalysis interpretation, namely, that responsible, insightful change is possible through psychoanalysis just because, as a child the analysand mistakenly assumes and then denied responsibility for much that he encountered in the early formative environment and during maturation.
One major point remains to be made about the logic of viewing transference interpretation as simplifying yet innovative redescription. This point is that the interpretations bring about a coordination of the terms in which to state both the analysand’s current problems and their life-historical background. The analysand’s symptoms and distress are described as actions and modes of action, with due regard for the principle of multiple function or multiple meaning: In coordination with that description, the decisive developmental situation and conflicts are stated as actions and modes of action. Continuity is established between the childhood constructions of relationships and the self and the present constructions of these interpretations of transference shows who both are part of the same set of practices, that is, how they follow the same set of rules. Past and present are coordinated to show continuity rather than arranged in a definite sequence.
In the same way, the form of analytic behaviour and the content of association are given co-ordinated descriptions, say, as being defiant, devouring, or reparative. Or, in the case of depression, the depressive symptoms, the depressive analytic transference, the themes of present and past loss, destructiveness and helplessness, all will be redescribed under the aspect of one continuously developing self-presentation. And this coordination will be worked out in that hermeneutically circular fashion in which the analyst defines both th facts to be explained and the explanations to be applied to these facts. In the end, as is well known, both the paramount issues of the analysis and the leading explanatory account of them are likely to be significantly different from the provisional versions of them used at the beginning of the analysis.
The increasing influence of the modernist version of transference and its interpretation represents an adaptation to several long-term philosophical, scientific, and cultural shifts we can now recognize. this changing view of transference is also the most visible emblem of the deep changes in psychoanalytic theory that are now quietly taking place, and of their theoretical pluralism that is so prevalent today (Cooper, 1985).
One of these long-term changes in the climate in which psychoanalysis dwells results from a large philosophical debate concerning the nature of history, veridicality, and narrative. Kermode (1985) has written of the change during this century in our modes of understanding and interpreting the past and the present, “Once upon a time it seemed obvious that you could best understand how things are by asking how they got to be that way. Now attention [is] directed to how things are in their immediate plexuities. There is a switch to use the linguistic expressions, from the diachronic to the synchronic view. Diachrony, roughly speaking, studies things in their synchrony to be as they are, synchrony concerns itself with things as they are and ignores the question, how they got that way. This distinction, put forth by de Sasussure (1915), has achieved philosophical dominance today and is the clear source of the hermeneutic view so prevalent in psychoanalysis, proposed by Ricoeur (1970). From here, it is a short distance to Schafer (1981), and Gill (1982), or Spence (1982) who in varying ways adopt the synchronic view. In this view, the analytic task is interpretation, with the patient, of the events of the analytic situation - usually broadly labelled transference - with a construction rather than a reconstruction of the past. In effect, while there is a past of ‘there and then’ it is knowable only through the filter of the present, of ‘here and now’. There is no other past than the one as we construct, and there is no way of understanding the past but through its relation to the present.
Psychoanalysis, like history but unlike fiction, does have anchoring points, for history’s anchoring points are the evidences that events really did occur, There was a Roman empire, it did have dates, actual persons lived and died. These ‘facts’ place a limitation for the narratives an interpretations that may seriously be entertained. Psychoanalysis is anchored in its scientific developmental psychology and in the biology of attachment and affects. Biology confers regularities and limits on possible histories, and our constructions of the past must accord with this scientific knowledge. constructions of childhood that are incompatible with what we know of developmental possibilities may open our eye’s to new concepts of development, but more likely they alert us to maimed childhoods that have led our patients to usual narrative constructions in the effort to maintain self-esteem and internal coherence. A second, far less secure, anchorage is the enormous amount of convergent data that accumulate during the course of an analysis, which are likely to give the analyst the impression that he is reconstructing rather than constructing the figures and the circumstances of his patient’s past. While a diachronic view may no longer suffice, it may also not be fully dispensable if our patient’s histories are to maintain psychoanalytic coherence, rooted in bodily experience, and the loving, hating and terrifying affects accompanying the fantastic world of infantile psychic reality. Not all analysis are yet as ready as Spence, for example, to give up all claim to the truth value explanatory power of the understanding of the past, even if it is limited to knowing past constructions of the past. Nevertheless, the change in philosophical outlook during our century is profound and contributes to our changing view of the analytic process is exemplified in the transference and its interpretation.
Approaching the same issue from an entirely different vantage point, Emde (1981) speaking for the ‘baby-watchers’ and discussing changing models of infancy and early development, details a second source of the major change of climate to which he writes, The models suggest that what we reconstruct, and what may be extraordinarily helpful to the patient in making a biography, may never have happened. The human being, infant child, is understood to be fundamentally active in constructing his experience. Reality is neither given nor is it necessarily registered in an unmodified form. Perhaps it makes sense for the psychoanalysis to place renewed emphasis on recent and current experiences - first, as a context for interpreting early experience - first, as a context for interpreting the potential amelioration, . . . Psychoanalysts are specialists in dealing with the intrapsychic world not only particular with the dynamic unconscious, but we need to pay attention not only to the intrapsychic realm. conflicting-laden and conflict-free, but also to the interpersonal realm. He concludes, . . . we have probably placed far to much an emphasis on early experience itself as opposed to the process by which it is modified or made use of by subsequent experience.
This view of psychic developments, discarding the timeless unconscious and so powerful at odds with the views that were held by psychoanalysts during the time when most of our ideas of transference interpretation were formed, clearly suggests the modernist model of transference interpretation.
A change in the cultural environment of psychoanalysis provides a third source for the changing model of transference interpretation. Valenstein describes oscillations in psychoanalytic outlook between an emphasis on cognition at one end, and on affect at the other. One might see these as differences between old-fashioned scientific and romantic world views. Surely the period of ego psychology, perhaps reflected in the English translation of Freud, and certainly reflected in the effect to insist on the libidinal energetic point of view, represented the attempt to see psychoanalysis as Freud usually did, as an objective science in the nineteenth century style, with hypotheses created out of naïve observations. It accorded with that view to see the transference as an objective reflection of history. We are currently in one of our more romantic periods. It is consonant with that view to see transference as an activity - stormy, romantic, active, affective - a kind of adventure from which the two individuals emerge changed and renewed. In this romantic view, interpretation of the transference are intended to remove obstacles interfering with the heightening and intimacy of the experience, with the implication that self-knowledge and change will result from their encounter. A romantic figure, the patient and analyst set forth on a quest into the unknown, and whether or not one of them returns with a Holy Grail, they return with many new stories to tell and a new life experience - the analysis. Gardner’s (1983) book, “Self Inquiry” epitomizes this romantic view of analyst and patient as a poet-pair engaged in mutual self-inquiry. It is clear that many analysis would rather be artistic than scientist. By contrast, the older, cognitive view of the transference is of an intellectual journey, emotionally loaded of course, but basically a trip back in history, seeking truth and insight.
Finally, our newer ideas of transference interpretation come from the rereading and reinterpretations of Freud that necessarily accompany the changes in outlook in the corresponding pendulum of analytic techniques from Freud’s actual technique, as reconstructed from his notes and the report s of his patients, to the so-called ‘classical’ technique that held sway after Freud’s death, and again, to the currently changing technical scene. Lipton (1977) has insisted that in the 1940s andv1950s the so-called classical technique replaced Freud’s own more personal and relaxed technique, probably in reaction to Alexander’s suggestion of the corrective emotional experience. It was Lipton’s view that the misnamed ‘classical’ technique, in contrast to Freud’s, emphasized rules for the analyst’s behaviour and sacrificed the purpose of the analysis. Eissler’s 1953 description of analysis as an activity that ideally uses only interpretations became the paradigm for ‘classical’ analysis. It was, Lipton, says, a serious and severe distortion of the mature analytic technique developed by Freud. Freud regarded the analyst ‘s personal behaviour, the personality of the analyst exemplified for Lipton in the case of the Rat Man. The so-called ’classical’ (and in his view non-Freudian) techniques attempted to include every aspect of the analytic situation as part of technique and led to the model of the silent, restrained psychoanalyst. Lipton’s argument is persuasive.
These two different models of technique have obvious implications concerning the transference and its interpretation. Unless we believe in an extreme version of the historical model, we must expect that the silent, restraint, nonparticipatory psychoanalyst will elicit different responses from his patient than will the vivid, less-hidden, more responsive analyst. The range of personal behaviours available to the analyst before we need be concerned that the analyst is engaging in activities that are excessively self-revelatory or that force the patient into a social relationship is probably much broader than we thought a few years ago. But we also know that almost any behaviour of the analyst, including restraint or silence, immediately influences the patient’s responses. In these newer views of the analytic situation it is not easy to know that intrapsychically derived patient behaviours.
It is evident today that psychoanalyst’s under the sway of their theories and personalities, differ greatly concerning matters to which they are sensitive, and, of course, we can interpret only the transferences we perceive. Despite this limitation, a review of the literature reveals, along with the usual rigidities, a laudable tendency to describe one’s experience as fully as possible, without heed to how it contradicts belief, often blurring over when experience and theory do not match. However, we have always been better at what we do than at what we say we do. This is exemplified in Heimann’s (1956) paper. Speaking from a modified Kleinian perspective, and holding the historical theory of transference interpretation, Heimann managed 30 years ago to describe vividly and to support passionately much of what today is under discussion as the modernist version. That her position were contradictory bothered her not at all. While many of us prefer to think we are following our theories, like all good scientists, good psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud, have always seen and responded to far more than our theories admit. when we have seen too much, we change our theories.
Overall, during the last half of this century, these trends, as well as our ever-increasing knowledge of our increasing distance from Freud’s authority have led to specific theoretical developments (Cooper, 1984, 1985), many of them inferred in the newer transference model. Our current pluralistic theoretical world, in which almost all analysts are working, wittingly or not, with individual amalgams of Freud’s drive theory, ego psychology, interpersonal Sullivanian psychoanalysis, object-relationship theory, Bowlbyan or Mahlerian attachment theory, and usually smuggled-in versions of self-psychology, lies at the base of the newer ideas and disagreements concerning transference interpretation.
Although the historical definitions of transference and transference interpretation have the merit of seeming precision and limited scope, they are based on a psychoanalytical theory that no longer stands alone and has lost ground in at least, subsumed, by modernist conceptions that are more attuned to the theories that abound today.
As a prefatory remark about Freud and transference, the observations can be offered that Freud wrote briefly about transference and did so, in the main, before 1917. Another observation which can rarely be made about Freud’s work, what he did write on transference and did not reach the high level of analytical thought which has come to be regarded as standard for him. Some indication of what his contribution consist of is given by the editors of the Standard Edition, who list them in several places. One of the longer lists, in a footnote includes six reference ‘Studies on Hysteria’, with Breuer (1895),the Dora paper (1905), The Dynamics of Transference’ (1912), Observations on Transference-Love’ (1915), the chapter on transference in the Introductory Lectures (1917), and Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937). Although the editors in no sense suggest that these six papers include everything Freud wrote on the subject that these six papers include everything Freud wrote on the subject, it does seem evident that, considering the essential importance of transference to analysis, he wrote little. moreover, the three papers in which transference is the specific theme. `The Dynamics of Transference,`Transference-Love ; and the transference chapter in the Introductory Lectures, come across as perhaps his least significant contributions.
Freud’s first direct mention of transference occurs in “Studies on Hysteria” (1895), His first significant reference to it, however, did not appear until five years later when, in a lecture to Fliess on April 16, 1900, he said (Freud 1887-1902) he was ‘beginning to see that the apparent endlessness of the treatment is something of an inherent feature and is connected with transference. In a footnote to his letter the editors state that, ‘this is the first insight into the role of transference in psychoanalytic therapy’.
Despite these early references, it seems correct to say that yet another five yea s was to go by before the phenomenon of transference was actually introduced. Even then the introduction was far from prominent, for it was tacked like an afterthought as a four-page portion of a postscript to what was perhaps Freud’s most fascinating case history to date, the case of Dora (1905).
Using data from Dora’s three-month-long, unexpected terminated analysis, and especially from her dramatic transference reactions which had taken him quite unaware. Freud now gave to transference its first distinct psychological entity for th first time indicated its essential role in the analytic process. His account, although in general more than adequate - in fact elegant and remarkable ‘finished’ - was brief, almost Iaconic, and perhaps not an entirely worthy introduction to such a truly great discovery. What was uniquely great was his recognizing the usefulness of transference. In his analysis of Dora h e had noted not only that transference feelings existed and were powerful, but much to his dismay, he had realized that as serious, perhaps, even insurmountable, obstacle they could be,. Then, in what seems like a creative leap, Freud made the almost und unbelievable discovery that transference was in fact the key to analysis, that by properly taking the patient’s transference into account, an entirely new, essential and immensely effective heuristic and therapeutic force was added to the analytic method.
The impact on analysis of this startling discovery was actually much greater and much more significant than most people seem to appreciate. Although the role of transference as the ‘sine quo non’ of analysis was and is widely accepted, and was so stated by Freud from the first, It has almost never been acclaimed for having brought about an entire change in the nature of analysis. The introduction of free association to analysis, a much lesser change, received and still receives much more recognition.
Transference, he stares, is a special case of the mechanism of displacement, is ubiquitous in life but especially pronounced in neurotics, and makes its most explicit appearance in the relationship of patient to the analyst - in or outside the psychoanalysis. He relates the transference to other psychic mechanisms, most particularly projection and introjection, and defends the psychoanalysis against accusations of improperly generating transference reactions in its patients. ‘The critics who look on these transferences as dangerous should’, he says, ‘condemn the non-analytic modes of treatment more severely than the psychoanalytic method, since the former really intensifies the transference, while the latter strive to uncover and to resolve them when possible.
It was not until 1912, in The Dynamics of Transference; that Freud returned to the subject, in explaining, about libido economy and, while the topographic model of the mind the inevitable emergence of the transference in the analytic situation and its role as a primary mode of resistence. ;The transference idea has penetrated into consciousness in front of any other possible association because it satisfies the resistance’ - but only if it is a negative, or erotic transference. The analyst’s role is to ‘control’ or ‘remove’ the transference resistance. ‘It is’ Freud says, ‘on th at field that the victory must be won’.
None of Freud’s epochal discoveries - the power of the dynamic unconscious, the meaningfulness of the dream, the universality of intrapsychic conflict, the critical role of repression, the phenomena of infantile sexuality - has been more heuristically productive or more clinically valuable than his demonstration that humans regularly and inevitably repeat with the analyst and with other important figures in their current live pasterns of relationship, of fantasy, and of conflict with the crucial figures in their childhood - primarily their parents.
The transference has become a sort of projectve device, a vessel into which each commentators pour the essence of his or her approach to the clinical situation and to the understanding of that unique immuration process that makes up the analytic situation. The initial combinality (1909-36) that of the pioneers, marches the efforts of Freud and his early followers to grasp and to deal with the powerful phenomenon they were only beginning to recognize and to attempt to understand. The middle period (1936-60) reflects the consolidation of therapeutic technique and the attempt of both European and American analysts to bring the idea of transference into consonance with the increasingly important constructs of ego psychology. In the latest of periods (1960-87), we find a balance between reassertion of traditional views and various revisionist statements and reconsiderations of some classical position.
The productivity of the neurosis (during a course of psychoanalytic treatment) is far from being extinguished, but exercises itself in the creation of a peculiar sort of thought-formation, mostly unconscious, to which the name ‘transference’ may be given.
Despite radical implications for which theory has presented of psychoanalytic techniques and others of the dialectically discoursing involvement, is often without awareness. Where these psychoanalysts disagree in their conceptual reprehended frame of reference, creating the recognitions that the analyst and the patient cannot simply avoid having an impact upon one-another. Even so, that it cannot be removed, by that obstructions form whether we have related this to our deliberate technological interventions or intentional aspects as drawn on or upon the conceptual interactions. As for reasons that are useful and necessary to distinguish between theory of technological analysis, with which interconnectivity can be established through the conjunctive relationships having in relations of what seems allowable for us to expand our knowledge of the complex and subtle factors that account for therapeutic action. This, however, can ultimately become the most effective fight for regaining and developing our understanding of how best to serve ourselves to advance the analytic situation and too aculeate more profound and very acute satisfactions, as depictions in the psychoanalytic encounter, no matter whatever our accountable resultants may be of our therapeutical orientations.
An appreciation of its power of interactive forces addressed in the analytic fields of thought, not only challenges many traditionally held beliefs about the hidden natures of therapeutic actions. However, these take upon the requirement for us to recognize and acknowledge the untenability of the traditional view that analysts can be an object source in the works. They have better to understand it, for example, where patients’ and the analysts may express as a quality that which the analyst is in a possibility of a position to an objective interpreter of the patient’s experiential process. That in this may reflect a form of ‘collusive enactment’ and a convergence of need of both the analyst and the patient so see that the analyst as the authoritarian. If the patient and analyst submit to needs to believe that the analyst is the omniscient other or the benevolent authority, to which one can entrust one’s self-sufficiency, that in having to antecedent cause, is that of existing of itself that is itself self-existent.
As the foundational structure of the relationship might serve to obscure the acknowledging fact that it is involved to encourage the belief that, as one may say, that wherever a coordinate system is complicating and hardness to its plexuities, that its complexity has of recognizing of the mind, such that the immediate ‘indeterminacy’ arises, not necessarily because of some conditional unobtainability, but holds accountably to subjective matters that grow stronger in gathering the right prediction, least of mention, that of many things that are yet to be known. Such that th e stray consequences of studying them will disturb the status quo, and of not-knowing to what influential persuasions do really occur between the protective anatomy, therefore, that our manifesting of awareness cannot accord with the inclinations tat are beheld to what is meant in how. History, is not and cannot be determinate. Thus, the supposed causes may only produce the consequences we expect, this has rarely been more true of those whose thoughts and interactions in psychoanalytic interpretations but the interrelatedness is a way that no dramatist would dare to conceive.
In Winnicott (1969) has noted that there are times when ‘analysers’ can serve as holding operations and become interminable without any real growth occurring.
An attractive perspective helps to clarify ‘why’ sometimes the analysers ‘abstinence’ carries as much risk of negative iatrogenic consequences as carrying out active intervention. Although silence at times obviously can be respectful and facilitating, and yet, at times it can be cruel and sadistic, or it can be based on a fear of engagement, among a host of possible other meanings and equally attributive to distributional dynamic functions.
A strong appreciation of interacted factors also allow us to consider that whatever degree the patient’s perceptions of the analyst are plausible and even valid (Ferenczi 1933, Little 1951, Levenson 1973, Searles 1975, Gill 1982, and Hoffman 1983). This may be due to the patient’s expertise upon the stimulating precessions to this kind of responsiveness in the analyst. The reverse is true as well, although the patient and the analyst each will have some unique vulnerabilities, sensitivities, strengths, and needs, such that we must consider ‘why’ such peculiarities have elated the particular qualities or sensibilities of either patient or the analyst at a given moment and not at others. At any moment the patient that of the analyst might be involved in some kind of collusive enactment (Racker 1957, 1959, Grotstein 1981, and McDougall 1979), they have held that their considerations explain of reasons that posit themselves of why clinicians often seem to practice in ways that contradict their own shared beliefs and therapeutic positions, least of mention, principles by way of enacting to some unfiltered dialectic discourse.
Yet, these differences, which occur within and between the diverse analytic traditions, are that an interactive view of the analytic field has some theoretical and technological implications that bridge all psychoanalytic perceptivity, which each among us cannot ignore. Its premise lies in the fact that we recognize and do acknowledge that the analyst and patient cannot simply avoid having an impact on each other, even if both analyst and the patient are totally silent, requiring that we realize that even if a treatment is productive or successful, we cannot be clear of whether they have related this to our deliberated technological interventions or to aspects of the interaction that has eluded our awareness.
Psychoanalysts’ of diverse orientations increasingly have come to recognize is that the patient and the analysts are continually persuasive and being influenced by each other in a dialectic way, and often without awareness. This has radical implication for abstractive views as drawn on or upon psychoanalytic technique. Where their psychoanalytic philosophes disagree are comprised in the conception of what the specific implications of an interactive view of the analytic fields of thought that it might characterize.
It is, therefore, that distinguishing between its theoretical technique, which is useful and necessary, that relates to what we do with awareness and intention, as a theory of a theoretical action that deals in the accompaniment of our manifesting health and wholeness, that the psychoanalytic interaction has itself, that whether or not is to evolve from our technical and mechanistic forms of technique. The recognition as such, can allow us to expand our knowledge of the complications as set in the complex subtler factors that account for the therapeutic action. This, nonetheless, can ultimately become the most effective basis as a reason or justification for an action or option. That for refining and developing our understanding of how best to use ourselves to advance the analytic work and to simplify more profound and incisive kinds of psychoanalytic engagement, no matter what our therapeutic orientation.
An appreciation for which the power of interactive forces in the analytic subject field, not only challenges many traditionally held beliefs about the hidden dimensions through which times have hidden the nature of therapeutic action, but also requiring us to acknowledge and to recognize the untenability assembling on or upon the relational view that the analyst can be an objective participant in the work? It also helps us to grasp the extent upon which they are presupposed therapeutic interpretations, for example, can be ways of harassing, demeaning, patronizing, impinging on, penetrating or violating the patient, or the particular ways of gratifying, supporting, complying, among several other possibilities. Where the patient and analysts assume that the analyst can be an objective interpreter of the patient’s experience, this may factually reflect a form of collusive enactment and a convergence of the needs, whereof both analyst and the patient can see the analyst as an authoritarian. If the patient and the analyst have needs to believe that the analyst is the omniscient other or the benevolent authority to which one can entrust in one’s favour. The foundational structure of the relationship might serve to obscure recognition of the fact that they are enacting such a drama. In this regard, Winnicott (1969) has marked and noted that, at that point are times when the analyses can serve as holding operations and become interminable, without any real growth occurring.
The contentual meaning of the patient’s free association also has to be reconsidered from an interactive perspective. Usually viewed as the medium of analytic work, as for free association that may, at times be a profound frame of resistance, and to avoid, rather than engage in the analytic process. Alternative measures can reflect with a form of compliance or collusion, for being aware and affected by conscious or insensible of emotion or passion the unconsciousness, from which is held within the analyst’s needs, fears, and resistance.
Yet, the ongoing dialectic discourse of transference and its place in analytic theory and technique, was during the periods of the middle 1936 and 1960, where this period was to relate its phenomenology to the growing understanding of the ‘ego’, both on its defensive and in Hartmann’s terms, ‘autonomous aspects’, to new theories of early development and a growing concern in some quarters with ‘interpersonal’ as opposed too purely ‘intrapsychic’ aspects of personality function. A further stimulus was Alexander’s (1946) advocacy of active role playing by the analyst to send the patient a ‘corrective emotional experience’, at least, in psychoanalytic psychotherapy if not in analysis proper.
In her very practically orientated paper, Greenacre emphasizes the distinction, first shared by Freud, between the analytic transference and that which characterizes other modes of therapy. All manipulation, exploitation, all use of transference for ‘corrective emotional experience’, is excluded from the psychoanalytic situation, which relies exclusively on interpretation to achieve its therapeutic goal. Greenacre‘s view of the analyst’s role in analysis and in the world outside in a relatively austere one: She would preclude the analyst from publically participating in social or political activities that might tend to reveal aspects of the analyst’s person that would contaminate the transference. Like Freud, Stone, and others she distinguishes between ‘basic’, essentially nonconflictual transference derived from the early mother-child relationship and the analytic transference proper, which involves projection (for example, Brenner) challenge this distinction.
It is, however, echoed in Elizabeth Zetzel’s masterful review of what were, at the time of writing, the dominant trends in the field. She proposed, following the usage of Edward Bibring, the idea of the ‘therapeutic alliance’, derived, as was Greenacre’s basic transference, from the positive aspects of the mother-child relationship. Like nearly all other commentators she asserted the centrality of transference interpretation in the analytic process, but she outlines in sharp detail some differences in form and content of such interpretations between Freudian and Klemian analysis - that is, between those who are concerned with the role of the ego and the analysis of defence and those who emphasize the importance of early object relations and primitive instinctual fantasy.
Like Greenacre and Zetzel, Greenson distinguishes between what he calls the ‘working alliance’ and the ‘transference neurosis’. He contends that without the development of the working alliance the transference cannot be analysed effectively. The ‘working alliance’ depends not only on the patient’s capacity to establish adequate object ties and to assess reality. Nevertheless, is that, also on the analyst’s assumption of an attitude that permits such an alliance to emerge. Thus, Greenson advocates an analytic stance that, which of the adhering to the rule of abstinence, allows for more ‘realistic’ gratification and a less austere stance than Greenacre would encourage. Greenson’s definition of transference - that in any case or without exception it always represents a repetition of experience and that it is always ‘inappropriate to the present’ - will later be challenged by Gill, who contends that transference reactions may be appropriate responses to aspects of the psychoanalytic situation of which both patient and analyst is not necessarily aware.
It is, only to mention, that, at the outset, that resistance is, in certain foundational reference, an operational equivalence of defence, its scope is really far larger and more complicated. The thought of its nature and motivation on grounds that resistance in the psychoanalytic process, in using a variety of mechanisms that defy classification in the ways that genetically determine defences derived from important and common developmental progressions, as having a particular direction and character for having a growing tendency to underestimate the potential or strength of that notion, then it may be classified. From falling asleep to a brilliant argument there is a limitless mobility of developmental devices with which the patient may protect the current integration of his personality, including his system of permanent defences. In fact, resistance of a surface, for which a consciously related individual character and educationally cultural background, when presented of itself, are the patient’s first confrontations with a unique and as often puzzling treatment of methodological analysis. While some of these phenomena are continuous with deeper resistance, a closer and perhaps, a balancing sense of equilibrium, held in bondage to some forming mutuality within the continuity that we must meet, for which of others, are at their own level. All the same, it now leaves to a greater extent, the much neglected faculty of informed and reflective common sense, such that to a lesser extent as readily accessible and explicable dynamism that inevitably supervenes in the analytic work, evens though the surface resistance have been largely or wholly mastered. Its submissive providence lay order to a perfect commonality. This, premising with which is the specific type in influence to the immediacy in cultural climatically stressed of the general attitude of many young people (Anna Freud 1968) toward the psychoanalytic process and its goals.
However, an important factor responsible for the neglect of the theory of transference was the early preoccupation of analysis with showing the various mechanisms involved in transference. Interest in the genesis of transference was sidetracked by focussing research on the manifestations of resistance and the mechanisms of defence. These mechanisms and often explained the phenomenon of transference, and their operation was taken to explain its nature and occurrence.
What is more, is that, the neglect of this subject may in part be the result of the personal anxieties of analysts. Edward Glover comments on the absence of open discussion about psychoanalytic technique, and considers the possibility of subjective anxieties: . . .’this seems more likely in that so much technical discussion centres round th e phenomena of transference and counter-transference, both positive and negative. There may in addition the pinnacle of an unconscious attempt to avoid any active ‘interference’ or, more exactly, to remove any suspicion of methods reminiscent of the hypnotist.
That is saying, that there is no consensus about the use of the term ‘transference’ which is called variously ‘the transference’, ‘a transference’, ‘transferences’, ‘transference state’ and sometimes as ‘analytical rapport’.
Does transference embrace the whole affective relationship between an analyst and the patient, or the more restricted ‘neurotic transference’ manifestation? Freud used the term in both senses. To this fact, Silversberg recently drew attention to, and argued that transference should be limited to ‘irrational’ manifestations, maintaining that if the patient says ‘good morning’ to his analyst including such behaviour under the term transference is unreasonable. The contrary view is also expressed: That transference, after the opening stage, is everywhere, and the patient’s every action can be given a transference interpretation.
Can transference be adjusted to reality, or are transference and reality mutually exclusive, so that some action can only be either the one or the other, or can they coexist so that behaviour in accord with reality can be given a transference meaning as in forced transference interpretations? Alexander comes to the conclusion that they are, . . . truly mutually exclusive, just as the more general notion ‘neurosis’ is quite incompatible with that of reality adjusted behaviour.
Our next query arises from one special aspect of transference, that of ‘acting out‘ in analysis. Freud introduced the term ‘repetition compulsion’ and he says, ‘during a patient in analysis . . . it is plain that the compulsion too repeated in analysis the occurrence of his infantile life disregards in every way the pleasure principle’. In a comprehensive critical survey of the subject, Kubie comes to the conclusion that the whole conception of a compulsion to repeat for the sake of repetition is of questionable value as a scientific idea, and were better eliminated. He believes the conception if a ‘repetition compulsion’ involves the disputed death instinct, and that the term is used in psychoanalytic literature with such widely differing connotations that it has lost most, if not all, of its original meaning. Freud introduced the term for the one variety of transference reaction called ‘acting out’, but it is, in fact, applied to all transference manifestations. Anna Freud, defines transference as,‘ . . . all those impulses experienced by the patient in his relation with the analyst that are not newly created by the objective analytic situation but have their sources in early . . . relations and are now merely revived under the influence of the repetition compulsion. Ought, then, the term ‘repetition compulsion’ be rejected or retained and, if retained, is it applicable to all transference reactions, or to acting out only?
This leads to the question of whether transference manifestations are essentially neurotic, as Freud most often maintains: ‘The striking peculiarity of neurotic to develop affectionately and hostile feelings toward their analyst are called ‘transference’. Other authors, however, treat transference as an example of the mechanism of displacement, and hold it to be a ‘normal’ mechanism. Abraham considers a capacity for transference identical with a capacity for adaptation that ‘sublimated sexuality; transference’, and he believes that the sexual impulse in the neurotic is distinguishable from the normal only by as excessive strength. Glover states: ‘Accessibility to human influence depends on the patient’s capacity to establish transference, i.e., to repeat in current situations . . . altitudes develop in early family life’. Is transference, then, a consequent to trauma, conflict and repression, and so exclusively neurotic, or is it normal?
In answer to the question, is transference rational or irrational, Silverberg maintains that transference should be defined as something having the two essential qualities that it be ‘irrational and disagreeable to the patient’. Fenichel agrees that transference is bound up with the fact that a person does not react rationally to the influence of the outer world’. Evidently, no advantage or clarification of the term ‘transference’ has followed its assessment as ‘rational’ or otherwise. Unfortunately, the antithesis, ‘rational’ versus ‘irrational’, was introduced, as it was precisely the psychoanalysis that explained that rational behaviour can be traced to ‘irrational’ roots. What is transferred? : Affects, emotions, ideas, conflicts, attitudes, experiences? Freud says only effect of love and hate is included; but Glover finds that ‘Up to date (1937) discussion of transference was influenced for the most part by the understanding of one unconscious mechanism only, that of the displacement, and he concludes that an adequate conception of transference must reflect all the individuals’ development . . . ,. He displaces onto the analyst, not merely effectual acceptation of ideas but all he has ever learned or forgotten throughout his mental development. Are these transferred to the person of the analyst, or also to the analytic situation, is extra-analytic behaviour to be classed as transference?
Our positive and negative transference felt by the analyst to be an intrusive foreign body, as Anna Freud states in discussing the transference of libidinal impulses, or are they agreeable to the patient’s, a gratification as great that they serve as resistance: Alexander concludes that transference gratifications are the greatest source of unduly prolonging analysis, he reminds us that whereas Freud initially had the greatest difficulty in persuading his patients to continue analysis, he soon had equally greater difficulty in persuading them to give up.
Freud divides positive transference into sympathetic and positive transferences, as the relation between the two is not clearly defined, and sympathetic, or remain distinct, is sympathetic transference resolved with positive and negative transference? Debates concerning the importance of positive transference at the beginning of analysis and carrier of the whole analysis have largely been revived among child analyses. As this has extended to the question of whether or not a transference neurosis in children is desirable or even possible. While this dispute touches on the fundament of psychoanalytic theory, the definitions offered as a basis for the discussion are not very precise.
In the face of such divergent opinions on the hidden nature and manifestations of transference, one might expect several hypotheses and opinions about how these manifestations come about. Nevertheless, this is not so. On the contrary, there is the earliest approach to full unanimity and accord throughout the psychoanalytic literature on this point. Transference manifestations are held to arise within the patient’s spontaneously. ‘This peculiarity of the transference is not, therefore, says Freud, ‘to be placed to the account of psychoanalysis treatment, but is to be ascribed to the patient’s neurosis itself’. Elsewhere he states, ‘In every analytic treatment the patient develops, without any activity by the analyst, an intense affective relation to him . . . It must not be assumed the analysis produces the transference . . . ,. The psychoanalytic treatment does not produce the transference, it only unmasks it’. Ferenczi, in discussing the positive and negative transference says: ‘ . . . and it has particularly to be stressed that this process is the patient’s own work and is hardly ever produced by the analyst’. Analytical transference appears spontaneously; the analysts need only take care not to disturb this process. Rado states, ‘The analysis did not deliberately set out to affect this new artificial formation [the transference neurosis]: He merely observed that such a process took place and forthwith made use of it for his own purpose’. Freud further states, ‘The fact of the transference appearing, although neither wanted nor induced by either the analyst or the patient, in every neurotic who comes under treatment . . . has always seemed . . . proof that the source of the propelling forces of neurosis lies in the sexual life.
There is, however, a reference by Freud from which one has to infer that he had in mind another factor in the genesis of transference apart from spontaneity - in fact, some outside influence: The analyst ‘must recognize that the patient’s falling in love is induced by the analytic situation . . .’ He [the analyst] has evoked this love by undertaking analytic treatment to cure the neurosis, for him, it is an unavoidable consequence of a medical situation . . . Freud did not amplify or specify what importance he attached to this causal remark.
Anna Freud states that the children’s analysis has to woe the little patient to gain its love and affection before analysis can go on, and she says, parenthetically, that something similar takes place in the analysis of adults.
Another reference to the effect those transference phenomenons are not completely spontaneous is found in as statement by Glover, summarizing the effects of inexact interpretation. He says that the artificial phobic and hysterical formation resulting from incomplete or inexact interpretations is not an entirely new conception. Hypnotic manifestations had long been considered as induced hysteria and Abraham considered that states of autosuggestions were induced obsessional systems. He continues, ‘ . . . and, of course, the induction or development of a transference neurosis during analysis is regarded as an integral part of the process’. One is entitled from the context to assume that Glover commits himself to the view that some outside factors are operative which induce the transference neurosis. Still, it is hardly a coincidence that it is no more than a hint.
A few remarks about clinical considerations are the transference nauseosus, and the problem of transference interpretation, may be offered at this point. The whole situational structure of analysis (in contrast with other personal relationships), its dialogue of free association and interpretation, and its deprivations too most ordinary cognitive and emotions’ interpersonal striving tends toward the separation of discrete transferences from their synthesis with one another and with defences, in character or symptoms, and with deepening regression, toward the re-enactment of the essentials of the infantile neurosis, in the transference neurosis. In other relationships, the ‘exchange of ideas’ expression - gratifying, aggressive, punitive or otherwise is actively responsive, and the open mobility of search for alternative or greater satisfaction - exert a profound dynamic and economic influence, so that only extraordinary situations, or transference of pathological character, or both, occasion comparable regression.
If we, in considering the function of the transference in the analytical process, one is confronted by the apparent naïve, but nonetheless important question of the role of the actual (current) objects as compared with that of the object representation of the original personage in the past. We recall Freud’s paradoxical, somewhat gloomy, but portentous concluding passage in ‘The Dynamics of Transference’. This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomenon of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is the permanent cure of the neurosis. It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psychoanalysis with the greatest difficulties. However, it should be forgotten that they do us the inestimable service of making the patient’s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses immediate and manifest. For when all is said and done, destroying anyone in the absentia is impossible or in effigy.
Both object and representations are made necessary by the basic phenomenon of original separation. Even so, the existence of an image of the object, which persists without that object, is one important beginning of psychic life overall, certainly an indispensable prerequisite for object relationship, as generally considered. Whether this is viewed as (or at times demonstrable is) a wavering of introjects, which is always subject to alternative projection, or an intrapsychic object representation clearly distinguished from the self representation, or a firm identification in the superego, or in the ego itself, these phenomena are in various ways components of the system of mastery of the fact of separation, or separateness, from the originally absolutely necessary anaclitic or (in the earliest period) symbiotic ‘object’. In the light of clinical observation, it may be the relative stable (parental) object representation, at times drawing to varying degree on the more archaic phenomena, at moments, even in nonpsychotic patients, overwhelmed by them, sometimes a restoration from oedipal identification, which provides the preponderant basis for most demonstrable analytic transference, in neurotic patients. The transference is effectively established when this representation invests the analyst to a degree - depending on intensity of drive and mode of ego participation - which ranges from wishing and striving to remake the analyst, to biassed judgments and misinterpretations of data, finally in actual perceptual distortion.
However, richly and vividly the old object representation as such may be invested, however rigidly established the libidinal or aggressive cathexis if the image may be, his as such can become the actual and exclusive focus of full instinctual discharge, or of complicated and intense instinct-defence solution, only in states of extreme pathological severity. This is consistent with the usual and general energy-sparing quality of strictly intrapsychic processes. For the vast majority of persons, viable to a degree, including those with severe neurosis, character distortions, addictions, and certain psychoses, the striving is toward the living and actual object, even at the expense of intense suffering. In a sense, this returns us to the beginning, to the state in which the psychological ‘object-to-be’ (if you prefer) has to a grater extent of critical immensity never to be duplicated but in certain acute life emergence, even if the object is not firmly perceived as such, in the sense of later object relations. It does seem those trace impressions from the realistic contacts in the service of life preserving, and the associated instinctual gratifications, and innumerable secondarily associated sensory impressions, are vaster by the specific inborn urges of sexual maturation. There propels the individual to renew many earliest modes of actual bodily contact, about seeking specific instinctual gratification, or, to look away from clear-out instinctual matters to the more remote elaborations of human contact: Few regard loneliness as other than a source of suffering, even self-imposed, as an apparent matter of choice, and the forcible position of ‘solitary confinements’ is surely one of the most cruel of punishment.
Interpretation, recollection or reconstruction, and, of course, working through, is essential for the establishment of effective insight, but they cannot operate mutatively if applied only to memories of the strict sense, whether of highly cathected events or persons. For it is the thrust of wish or impulse or the elaboration of germane dynamic fantasies, and the corresponding defensive structure and their inadequacies, associated with such memories, which produce neurosis. It is a parallel thrust that creates the transference neurosis. Where memories are clear and vivid, through recall, or accepted as much through reconstruction, and associated with variable, optional, and adaptive, rather than rigidly ‘structuralized’ response patterns, the analytic work has been done.
This view does place somewhat heavy than usual emphasis on the horizontal coordinate of operations, the conscious and unconscious relation to the analyst as a living and actual object, who becomes invested with the imagery, traits, and functions of critical objects of the past. The relationship is to be understood in its dynamic, economic, and adaptive meanings, in its current ‘structuralized’ tenacity, the real and unreal carefully separated from one another. The process of subjective memory or of reconstruction, the indispensable genetic dimension, is, in this sense, invoked toward the decisive and specific autobiographic understanding of the living version of old conflict, rather than with the assumption that the interpretative reduction of the transference neurosis to gross mnemic elements is, in itself and automatically, mutative. At least, this of the problem seems appropriate to most chronic neurosis embedded in germane character structure of some Plexuity. That neurotic symptoms connected with isolated traumatic events, covering indisputably true, although the details of process, including the role of transference, are probably not yet adequately understood. Psychoanalysis was born in the observation of this type of process. Nonetheless, for some time, the role of the transference, in the early writings of both Freud and Ferenczi, seemed weighted somewhat in the direction of its resistance function (i.e., as directed against recall), although its affirmative functions were soon adequately appreciated, and placed in the dialectical position, which has obtained with time.
However, even if it is insufficient for exclusive reliance, in relation to the complicated neurotic problems faced, assigning it to the recall and reconstruction of the past an exclusively explanatory value would be fallacious (in the intellectual sense), important though that functions be, and difficult as its full-blown emotional correlate may be to come by. There is no doubt that, even in complicated neuroses, with equivalently complicated transference neuroses, the genuinely experienced linking of the past and present can have, at times, a certain uniquely specific dynamic effect of its own, a type of telescoping or merging of common elements in experience, which must be connected with the meaninglessness of time in unconscious life, compared with its stern authority in the life of consciousness and adaptation to everyday reality. Contributing decisively to such experience, to whatever degree it occurs, is of course, the vivid currency of thee transference neurosis, and central in this, the reincarnation of old objects in an actual person, the analyst.
Thus, an allied problem in the general sphere of transference is the fascinating and often enigmatic interplay of past and present. If one wishes to view this interplay as to a stereotyped formulation, the matter can remain relatively uncomplicated - as a formulation. Unfortunately, this is too often the case. The phenomenon, however, retains some important obscurities, which cannot thoroughly be to dispel, but to which would be to call of its attention. To concentrate on the dimension of time, only to omit reference to the many complicated and intermediate aspects of technique, is, however essential. For example, we can assume that the transference neurosis re-enacts the essential conflicts of the infantile neurosis in a current setting. If a reasonable degree of awareness of transference is established, the next problem is the genetic reduction of the necrosis to its elements in the past, through analysis of the transference resistance and allied intrapsychic remittances, ultimately genetic interpretations, recollection and reconstruction, and working through. As the transference is related to its genetic origins, the analyst by that emerges in his true, i.e., real, identity to the patient, the transference is putatively ‘resolved’. To the extent that one follows the traditional view that all remittances, including the transference itself, is ultimately directed against the restoration of early memories as such, this is a convincing formulation. Yet, in its own right, it has a certain tightly logical quality. However, we know that all this is not so readily accomplished, apart from the special intrapsychic considerations described by Freud in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’. Although in some favourable cases, much of the cognitive interpretative work can be accomplished, there remains the fact that cognition alone, in its bare sense, does not necessarily lead to the subsidence of powerful dynamics, to the withdrawal of ‘cathexes’ from important real objects. For, a short while ago, the analyst is a real and living object, apart from the representations with which the transference invests him, which agree interpretably as such. There is, seldom attempting, as for a confusing interrelation and commingling of the emergent responses due to an older significance in the seeking, and those directed toward a new individual in his own right. Both are important, furthermore, there are large and important zones of overlapping. Apart from such considerations, even the explicitly incestuous transference is currently experienced (at least in good part) by a full-grown adult (like the original Oedipus), instead of a total and actually a helpless child. To be sure, the latter state is reflected subjectively in the emergent transference elements of instinctual striving: But it is subject to analysis, and the residue is something significantly, if not totally, different. It is these as such, which, must be displaced to others. If, as generally agreed, the revival of infantile fantasies and striving in the biologically mature adolescent. This presents a new and special problem, one must assume distinctiveness of experience for the adult, although it is true that in most of instances, adequate solution is favoured by the effected state. There is, in any case, a residual real relationship between persons who have worked together in a prolonged, arduous, and intimate relationship, which, strictly speaking, is not a transference, but there may be mutual colouration, blending, and some confusion between the two spheres of feeling. The general tendency is, such as to ignore this dual aspect, in continuing relationships, probably both components are gratified often. Above all, there is the ubiquitous power of the residual primordial transference, the urge to cling to an omnipotent parent, to resist the displacement of its ‘sublimated’ analytic aspects, even if the various representations of the wishes for bodily intimacy have been thoroughly analysed and successfully displaced. The outcome is largely the ‘transference of the transference’. For example, reality can provide no actual answer to the man of faith finds this gratification in revealed religion, others in a wide range of secular beliefs and ‘leaders’, the modern rational and sceptical intellectual is less fortunate in this respect. Presumably free, he is prone to invest even intellectual disciplines or their proponents with inappropriate expectations and partisan passions. Elsewhere, in that of our own field does not provide exception to this tendency.
Of unequivocal importance, is the sheer fact of current continued physical proximity, as a dynamic and economic factor of great importance in itself, in the prolongation of transference effects. The flood of neurophysiological stimuli occasioned by the analyst’s presence causes an entirely different intrapsychic situation from the prevailing in is absence, no matter how one understands the difference. Thus, the gradual ‘weaning’ to independence, through the reduction of hours, is very useful in many instances: In some, it may be that the dissolution of the transference (in a practical sense), if well analysed, occurs, as Macalpine suggests, only after regular vistas cease. There are a certain number of patients who will never show a terminal phase (or incipient adaptation to the idea of termination as a reality), without relatively arbitrary setting of a termination date. Even though it has been tendentiously misunderstood in one or two instances. That is to say, that a predismissed period of varying duration, following what would ordinarily be regarded as termination, be devoted to vis-à-vis interviews, at reduced frequency, dealing in integrated fashion with whatever preoccupations the patient is impelled to bring to such valedictory. The vis-à-vis element adds the further advantage of testing tenacious transference images against the actuality.
The urge toward actual instinctual gratifications and allied satisfactions, the need to be rid of burdens of time and expense, the sheer urges toward independent functioning, often participate importantly in the dynamic of ultimately successful separation. Certainly, the analyst’s own nonarrogant but firm inaccessibility to residual transference wishes of the patient (however expressed), coupled with the conscious and unconscious wish to set him free for developments in his individual potentialities, also contributes to his important development.
Apart from and anterior to the indubitably important ancillary element in the dissolution of clinical transference, mediated in the sphere of reality, the restoration of the past in gross mnemic units, whether by recollection or reconstruction, finds specifying and augmenting support toward effectiveness in the increasingly detailed technical exploitation of the transference neurosis, in the sense of the analysis of the dynamic nuances that it presents. In other words, if the exposure of a man’s oedipus complex, or his passive homosexual solution of its vicissitudes. Is an important step in the analytic work, the further understanding of the determinants of the pathological augmenting elements in the incestuous fixation, or the specific determinants of the choice of solution in the crosscurrents of the childhood setting, is most liable to be accessible in a useful way in the details of the transference neurosis, where they lend themselves to reconstruction, which is often for more useful than the gross units of spontaneous recollection? In proceeding to such further analysis, such concepts as the universality of the oedipus complex, or intrinsic bisexuality, become only the more helpful, rather than suffering degradation to the position of stereotypic impediments. Such processes, in common with respect for the realities of the analytic (and extra-analytic) setting, serve not only to ease the genuine recollection and reconstruct of the past, but to provide a context in which recall and reconstruction can more often ‘cast the balance’, i.e., provide that mutative or at least, catalytic elements in insight that is distinctively psychoanalytic. Whether or not it serves to resolve the transference neurosis entirely. It contributes something not be dispensed with, toward its adequate understanding and resolution.
That in saying that Freud’s emphasis on remembering as the goal of the analytic work implies that remembering is the principal avenue to the resolution of the transference, but his delineation of the successive steps in the development as a change from an effort to reach memories directly to the use of the transference as the necessary intermediary of reaching the memories.
In contrast to remembering as the way the transference is resolved, that Freud, also, described resistance for being primarily overcomes in the transference, remembering following easily thereafter: ‘From the repetitive reactions that are exhibited in the transference we are led along the familiar paths to the awakening of the memories, which appear without difficulty, it was that, after the resistance has been overcome’, and ‘This revision of the process of repression can be accomplished only in part in connection with the memory traces of the process that led to repression. The decisive part of the work is achieved by creating in the patient’s relation to the analyst - in the transference - new edit in of the old conflicts . . . Thus, the transference becomes the battlefield on which all the mutually struggling forces should meet one another’. This is the primary insight of which Strachey (1934) clarified in his seminal paper on The Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis.
There are two main ways in which resolution of the transference can take place through work with the transference in the here and now. The first lies in the clarification of what are the cues in the current situation that are the patient’s point of departure for a transference elaboration. The exposure of the current point of departure at once raises the question of whether it is adequate to the conclusion drawn from it. The relating of the transference as a current stimulus is, after all, part of the patient’s effort to make the transference attitude plausibly determined by the present. The reserve and ambiguity of the analyst’s behaviour are what increases the ranges of apparently plausible conclusions the patient may draw. If an examination of the basis for the conclusion makes clear the actual situation on which the patient responds is subject to other meanings that the one the patient has reached, he will be more readily considered his pre-existing bias, that is, his transference.
Another critic of an early version of this paper suggests that, in speaking of the current relationship and the relation between the patient’s conclusions and the information on which they seem plausibly based, such that of implying to some absolute conception not what is real in the analytic situation, of which the analyst be the final arbiter. That is not the case. For which of saying, that what the patient must come to see is that the information he has is subject to other possible interpretations that implies the very contrary to an absolute conception of reality. In fact, analyst and patient engage in a dialogue in the spirit of attempting to arrive at a consensus about reality, and about some fictitious absolute reality.
The second way in which resolution of the transference can take place within the work with the transference in the here and now, is that in the very interpretations of the transference the patient has a new experience. He is being treated differently from how he expected to be. Analysts’ seem reluctant to emphasize this new experience, as though it endangers the role of insight and argues for interpersonal influence as the significant factor in change. Strachey’s emphasis on the new experience in the mutative transference interpretation has unfortunately been overshadowed by his views on introjection, which have been mistaken to advocate manipulating the transference. Strachey meant introjection of the more benign superego of the analyst only, as a temporary step on the road toward insight. Not only is the new experience not to be confused with the interpersonal influence of a transference gratification, but the new experience occurs together with insight into both the patient‘s biassed expectation and the new experience. As Strachey point out, what is unique about the transference interpretation, is that insight and the new experience take place in relation to the very person who was expected to behave differently and it is this that gives the work in the transference its immediacy and effectiveness. While Freud did stress the affective immediacy of the transference, he did not make the new experience explicit.
It is important to recognize that transference interpretation is not a matter of experience, in contrast to insight, but a joining of the two together. Both are needed to bring about and maintain the desired changes in the patient. It is also important to recognize that no new technological interventions are required to provide the new experience. It is an inevitable accompaniment of interpretation of the transference in the here and now. It is often overlooked that, although Strachey said that only transference interpretations were mutative, he also said with approval that most interpretations were outside the transference.
In a further explication of Strachey’s paper and entirely consistent with Strachey’s position, Rosenfeld (1972) has pointed out that clarification of material outside the transference is often necessary to know what is the appropriate transference interpretation, and those both genetic transference interpretations’ extra-transference interpretations play an important role in working through. Strachey said relatively little about working through, but surely nothing against the need for it, and he explicitly recognized a role for recovery of the past in the resolution of the transference.
Importantly, it is advantageous of our position to emphasize the role of the analysis of the transference in the here and now, both in interpreting resistance to the awareness of transference and in working toward its resolution by relating it to the actuality of the situation. However, it is agreed that extra-transference and genetic transference interpretations and, of course, working through are important too. The matter is one of emphasis, whereas, interpretations to resistance to awareness of the transference should figure in the majority of sessions, and that if this is done by relating the transference to the actual analysis situation, the very same interpretation is a beginning of work to the resolution of the transference. To justify this view more persuasively would require detailed case material.
Favourably, the Kleinians whom, many analysts feel, are in error in giving the analysis of the transference too great if not even in an exclusive role in the analytic process. It is true that Kleinians emphasize the analysis of the transference more, in their writings at least, that do the general run of analysts. Nonetheless, Anna Freud’s (1968) compliant that the concept of transference has become overexpanded seems to be directed against the Kleinians. One of the reasons the Kleinians consider themselves the true followers of Freud in technique are precisely because of the emphasis they put on the analysis of the transference. Hanna Segal (1967), for example, writes as follows: ‘To say that all communications are seen as communications about the patient’s phantasy as well as current external life is equivalent to saying that all communications contain something relevant to the transference situation. In Kleinian technique, the interpretation of the transference is often more central that in the classical technique’.
Despite their disclaimers to the contrary, in of looking into Kleinian case material leads one to agree with what is believed the general view that Kleinian transference interpretations often deal with a so-called deep and genetic analytic situation and thus, differs sharply from the kind of transference interpretation as advocating.
The insistence on exclusive attention to particular aspects of the analytic process, like the analysis of the transference in the here and now, can become a fetish, such that other kinds of interpretation should not be made, however, the emphasis on transference interpretation within the analytic situation needs to be interested or, at the very least, reaffirmed and that we need more clarification and specification on just when other kinds of interpretation are in order.
Of course, it is sometimes tactless to make a transference interpretation. Surely two reasons that would be included in a specification of the reasons for not making a particular transference interpretation, even if one seems apparent to the analyst, would be preoccupation with an important extra-transference event and an inadequate degree of rapport, to use Freud’s term, to sustain the sense of criticism, humiliation, or other painful feeling the particular interpretation might engender, even though the analyst had no intention of evoking such a response. The issue might be, is that, if not of whether or not an interpretation of resistance to the transference should be made, but whether the analyst can find that transference interpretation that the light of the total situation, both transference interpretations and current, the patient is able to hear and benefit from primarily as the analyst intends it.
Transference interpretation, like extra-transference interpretation, that like any behaviour on the analyst’s part, can have an effect on the transference, which in turn needs to be examined if the result of an analysis is to depend as little as possible on unanalysed transference. The result of any analysis depends on the analysis of the transference, persisting effects of unanalyzed transference, and the new experience that has been emphasized as the unique merit of transference interpretation in the here and now. It is especially important to remember this, lest one’s zeal to ferret and out the transference it becomes an unrecognized and objectionably actual behaviour on the analyst’s part, with its own repercussions on the transference.
In placing an emphasis on the analyst to resistance is that of a transference could easily be misunderstood as implying that it is always to recognize the transference as disguised by resistance or that the analysis would proceed without a hitch if only such interpretations were made. That is to say, that neither the analytic process will have the best chance of success if correct interpretation of resistance to the transference and work with the transference, in the here and now are the score of the analytic work.
Finally, with a statement of a conviction designed to set-forth into a broader perspective to psychoanalytic theory and research, as this point in varying degrees of clarity and emphasis throughout its literature, but like so many other aspects of psychoanalytic theory and practice, they fade in and out of prominence and are rediscovered again and again, possibly occasionally with some mooed conceptual advance, but often with a newness attributable only to ignorance of past contributions. There are doubtless many reasons for this phenomenon. But not the least, in my opinion, is the almost total absence of systematic and controlled research in the psychoanalytic situation, that such research in contrast to the customary clinical research findings becomes solid and secure knowledge instead of being subject to erosion again and again by waves of fashion and what Ernst Lewy (1941) long ago called the ‘return of the repression’ to designate the retreat by psychoanalysis from insight they had once reached.
Forward-looking, Laplanche and Pontalis (1973), in their dictionary, write, with some sense of despair, ‘The reason it is so difficult to propose a definition of transference be that for many authors the notion have taken on a very broad extension, even coming to connote all the phenomena that constituted the patients’ relationship with the psychoanalyst. As a result the concept is burdened down more than any other with each analyst’s particular views of the treatment - on its objective dynamics, tactics, scope, and so forth. The question of the transference is thus, beset by a whole series of difficulties that have been the subject of debate in classical psychoanalyses’.
Sandler (1983) has discussed how the term’s transference and transference resistance, as well as other terms have undergone profound changes in meaning, that its new discoveries and new trends in psychoanalytic technique assume ascendancy. He said,’ . . . major changes in technical emphasis brought about the extension of the transference concept, which now has dimensions of meaning which differ from the official definition of the term, ‘while a certain flexibility of definition make s conversation possible in a field of diverse views, that we may never be clear on what any two people mean when they use the term is a significant obstacle to our discourse’.
With this in mind we might review one of Freud’s last comments on transference. In ‘An Outline of Psycho-Analysis’ (1940) published posthumously, he wrote of the analytic situation:
The most remarkable thing is this. The patient is not satisfied with regarding the analyst in the light of reality as a helper and advisor who, moreover, is remunerated as that on a difficult mountain climb. The patient sees in him in him the return, the reincarnation. Content with some such role as that of the contrary, the patient sees in him the return, the reincarnation of some important figure and of his childhood or past, and consequently transfers onto him feelings and reactions that undoubtedly applied to this prototype, on the one hand an instrument of irreplaceable value and on the other an instrument of irreplaceable value and in the others that he set too out on a difficult undertaking without any suspicion of the extraordinary power that would be at his command.
Another advantage of transference, too, is that in it the patient produces before us with plastic clarity an important part of his life-story, of which he would otherwise have probably given us only an insufficient account. He acts it before us, as it was instead of reporting it to us.
Freud transference interpretation as a method of strengthening the ego against past unconscious wishes and conflict.
It is the analyst’s task constantly to view the patient out of his manacling illusion and show him again and again that what he takes to be new real life is a reflection of the past. And lest, he should fall into a state in which he is inaccessible to all evidence, the analysis transference that neither the love nor the poised reach and extreme height. This is affected by preparing him in good time for these possibilities and by not overlooking the first signs of them. If we succeed, as we usually can, in enlightening the patient on the true nature of the phenomena of the transference, we thus will have struck a powerful weapon out of the hand of his resistance and will have converted dangers into gains. For a patient never forgets again what he has experienced in the form of transference; it carries a greater force of conviction than anything he can acquire in other ways.
While Freud, at one or another time entertained almost all possible views of the transference, whereas, it is my belief that these statements at the end of his career give a clear sense of where he stood, he believed that the transferable represent a true reconstruction of the past, a vivid reliving of earlier desires and fears that distort the patient’s capacity to perceive the ‘true nature’ of the present reality. The analyst is a wise guide who already knows the path, and the task of the transference interpretation is cognitive ‘enlightenment’ that carries the emotional conviction of lived experience, while preventing excessive emotional regression.
Although it is a vast oversimplification and the division is not sharp, however, it is to suggest that there have been two major ideas about the transference. And interpretation during the history of psychoanalysis. One is explicit in Freud, as aforesaid, but the other is implicit in Freud , is that the transference is an enactment of an earlier relationship, and the task of transference interpretation is to gain insight into the ways that the early infantile relationships are distorting or disturbing the relationship to the analyst, a relationship that is, in turn, a model for the patient’s life relationship: Referring to this as the historical model of transference, implying both that it is older and that it is based on an idea of the centrality of history. Another view regards the transference as a new experience than an enactment of an older one. This purpose of transference interpretation is to bring to consciousness all aspects of this new experience including its colouring from the past: In reference to this as the ‘modernist model of the transference, implying both that it is newer, in fact still at an early stage, and found to distinguish this discussion of models of transference and transference interpretation from the debate on the ‘here and now’, interpretation that Gill has brought to the fore. Gill is primarily interested in issues of technique, and both models that will lend themselves to interpretative work in the here and now. These models are not entirely mutually exclusive, but they do imply significant differences in basic assumptions and in treatment goals. Although the historical view is clearer and prettier, wherefor it is believed that the modernist version of transference interpretation is more interesting and more promising.
In the historical view, the importance of transference interpretation lies in the opportunity it provides in the transference neurosis for the patient of re-experience and undoes the partiality encapsulated, one might say ‘toxic’, neurosogenic early history. As such, modernist view the purpose of transference interpretation is to help the patient see, on the intensity of the transference, the aims, character, and mode of his current wishes and expectations of influenced by the past.
The historical view is more likely to regard the infantile neurosis as a ‘fact’ of central importance for the analyst work, to be uncovered and undone. The modernist view regards the infantile neurosis, if acknowledged at all, as an unprivileged act of current fantasies than historical acts. From this modernist perspective, the transference resistance is the core of the analysis, to be worked through primarily because of the rigidity it imposes on the patient, not because of an important secret that it conceals.
Similarly, it is a corollary of the historical conception to view the transference neurosis as a distinct phenomenon that develops during the analysis as a consequence of the expression of resistance to drive-derived aims that are aroused toward the analyst. That holding the modernist view, much more influenced by object-relational ideas of development, are likely to blur the idea of a specific transference neurosis in favour of viewing all transference response as reflecting shifting self-and object representation as they are affected by the changing analytic relationship, and significant transference may be available for interpretation very early in the analysis. There is no doubt that the modernist view also reflects the scarcity of the once classical neurotic patient.
The historical view is more likely to see the analyst as a more or less neutral screen upon which drive-derived needs will enact themselves. He is observer and interpreter, not co-participant in the process of change. The person of the analyst is of lesser importance. That taking the modernist views hold that the analyst is an active participant, a regulator of the analytic process, whose personal characteristics powerfully influence the content and shape of the transference behaviour, and who will himself be changed in the course of the treatment.
The historical view emphasizes the content and precision of the transference interpretation, especially as it reconstructs the past. The modernist view, at least in some hands, is likely to de-emphasize reconstructive content and see the transference interpretation as one aspect of the interpersonal relationship in the present, acting as a new emotional and behavioural regulator, when past relationships have been inadequate or absent. Incidentally, this concept of an organismic regulator is consonant with current research on grieving men and motherless mice and monkeys, in all of whom a missing relationship creates vast neuroendocrine and emotional consequences.
The increasi8ng influence of the modernist version of transference and its interpretation represents an adaptation to several long-term philosophical, scientific and cultural shifts we can now recognize. This changing view of transference is also the most visible emblem of the deep changes in psychoanalytic theory that are now quietly taking place, and of the theoretical pluralism that is so prevalent today (Cooper 1985).
One of these long-term changes in the climate in which psychoanalysis dwells results from a large philosophical debate concerning the nature of history, veridicality, and narrative. Kermode (1985) has written of the changes during this century in our modes of understanding and interpreting the past and the present: ‘Once upon a time it seemed obvious that you could best understand how things are by asking how they became that way’. Now attention [is] directed to how things are in all their immediate complexity. There is a switch, to use the linguistics expression, from the diachronic to th synchronic view. Diachrony, roughly speaking; studies things in their coming to be as they are. Synchrony concerns itself with things as they are and ignores the question how they got that way. This distinction, put forth by de Saussure (1915), had achieved philosophical dominance today and is the clear source of the hermeneutic view so relevant in psychoanalysis, proposed by Ricoueur (1970). From here it is a short distance to Schafer (1981) or Gill (1982), or Spence (1982), who in varying ways adopt the synchronic view. In this view, the analytic task is interpretation, with the patient, of events is of the analytic situation - usually broadly as labelled transference - with a construction rather than a reconstruction of the past. In effect, while there is a past of ‘there and then’ it is knowable only through the filter of the present, of ‘here and now’. There is no other past than the one we construct, and there is no way of understanding the past but through its relation to the present.
Its emphasis, that psychoanalysis, like history but unlike fiction, does have anchoring points. History’s anchoring points are the evidence that events did occur. There was a Roman empire, it did have dates, actual persons lived and died,. These ‘facts’ place a limit on the narratives and interpretations that may seriously be entertained. Psychoanalysis is anchored in its scientific base in developmental psychology and in the biology of attachment and affects. Biology confers regularities and limits on possible histories, and our constructions of the past must accord with this scientific knowledge, constructions of childhood that are incompatible with what we know of developmental possibilities may open our eyes to new concepts of development, but more likely they alert us to maimed childhood that have led our patients to unusual narrative construction in the effort to maintain self-esteem and internal coherence. A second, far less secure, anchorage is the enormous amount of convergent data that accumulate during the course of an analysis is, which are likely to give the analysis to the impression that is reconstructing, than constructing the figures and the circumstances of his patient’s past. While a diachronic view may no longer suffice, and may not be fully dispensable if our patients’ histories are to maintain psychoanalytic effects accompanying the fantastic world of infantile psychic reality. Not all analysts are yet as ready as Spence, for example, to give claim to the truth value of explanatory power of the understanding of the past, even if it is limited to knowing past constructions of the past. Nevertheless, the change in a philosophical outlook during our century is profound and contributes to our changing view of the analytic process as exemplified in the transference and its interpretation.
Approaching the same issue from an entirely different vantage point, Emde (1981), speaking for the ‘baby-watchers’ and discussing changing models of infancy and early development, details a second source of the major change of climates to which he spoke, that, . . . ‘The models suggest that what we reconstruct, and what may be extraordinarily helped to the patient in ‘making a biography’. May never have happened? The human being, infant and child, is understood to be fundamentally active in constructing his experience. Reality is neither given nor necessarily registered in an unmodifiable form. Perhaps it makes sense for the psychoanalyst to place renewed emphasis on recent and current experience - first, as a context for interpreting early experience and second, because it contains within it the ingredients for potential amelioration . . . Psychoanalysts are specialists in the dealing with the intrapsychic world and in particular with the dynamic unconscious. But we need to pay attention not only to the intrapsychic realm, conflict-laden and conflict-free, but also to the interpersonal realm. He concludes,‘ . . . we have probably placed far too much emphasis on early experience itself as opposed to the process by which it is modified or made use of by subsequent experience’.
This view of psychic development, discarding the timeless unconscious and so powerfully at odds with the views that were held by psychoanalysts during the time when most of our ideas of transference interpretation were formed, clearly suggests the modernist model of transference interpretation.
A change in the cultural environment of psychoanalysis provides yet a separate and unlike in kind or character , for which could hardly be a more different source for the changing model of transference interpretation. Valenstein describes oscillations in a psychoanalytic outlook between an emphasis on cognition at one end, and an affect a the other. One might see these as differences between old-fashioned scientific and romantic world views. Surely, the period of ego psychology, may, as, perhaps, reflected in the English translation of Freud, and certainly reflected in the effort to insist on the libidinal energid point of view, represented the attempt to see psychoanalysis as Freud usually did, as an objective science, in the nineteenth century style, with hypotheses created on naïve observation, it accorded with the view to see the transference as an objective reflection of history. We are currently on one of our more romantic periods. It is consonant with that view to see transference as an activity – stormy, romantic, affective - a kind of adventure from which the two dividual’s emerge changed and renewed. In this romantic view, interpretations of the transference are intended to remove obstacles interfering with the heightening and intimacy of the experience, with the implication that self-knowledge and change will result from the encounter. As romantic figures, the patient and the analyst set forth on a quest into the unknown, and whether or not one of then returns with the Holy Grail, it is, nonetheless, their returning with many new stories to tell and a new life experience - th e analysis. Gardner’s (1983) book ‘Self Inquiry’, epitomizes this romantic view of the analyst and the patient as a poet-pair engaged in mutual self-inquiry. It is clear, nevertheless, that many analysts would rather be artists that scientists. By contrast, the older, cognitive view of the transference is of an intellectual journey, emotionally loaded of course, but basically a trip back in history, for which in the seeking of truth and insight.
Finally, our newer ideas of transference interpretation come from the rereading and reinterpreting of Freud that necessarily accompanies the changes in outlooks that are those in the aforesaid context. Corresponding, to the swings of analytic culture between classical and romantic, there were swings in psychoanalytic technique from Freud’s actual technique, as reconstructed from the notes and the reports of his patients, to the so-called ‘classical’ technique that held sway after Freud’s death, and again, to the currently changing technological scene. Lipton (1977), has insisted that in the 1940's and 1950's the so-called ‘classical’ technique replaced Freud’s own more personal and relaxed technique, probably in relation to Alexander’s suggestion of the corrective emotional experience. It was Lipton’s view that the misnamed ‘classical’ techniques, in contrast to Freud’ emphasized rules for the analyst’s behaviour and sacrificed the purpose of the analysis. Eissler’s 1953 description of the analysis as activity that in which ideally uses only interpretation, became the paradigm for ‘classical’ analysis. It was, Lipton saying, in that of a serious and severe distortion of the mature analytic technique developed by Freud. As, Freud regarded the analyst’s personal behaviour, the personality of the analyst, and the living conditions of the patient as nontechnical parts of every analysis, as exemplified for Lipton in the case of the ‘Rat Man’. The so-called ‘classical’ (and in his view non-Freudian) techniques attempted to include every aspect of the analytic situation as a part of technique and led to the model of the silent, restrained psychoanalysis. Lipton’s argument is persuasive.
These differentiated models of technique have obvious implications concerning the transference and its interpretation. Unless we believe in an extreme version of the historical model, we must expect that the silent, restrained, and non-participatorial, for which the psychoanalyst will elicit different responses from his patient than will the vivid, less-hidden and more responsive analyst. The range of personal behaviour available to the analyst before we need be concerned that the analyst is engaging in activities that are excessively self-revelatory or that force the patient into a social relationship, as for being probably much broader than we thought a few years ago. However, we also know that almost any behaviour of the analyst, including restraint or silence, immediately influences the patient’s response. In these newer views of the analytic situation it is not easy to know what in the transference is iatrogenic consequences of analytical behaviour than are to intra-psychically derived patient behaviour.
It is evident today that psychoanalysts, under the sway of their theories and personalities, differ greatly concerning matters to which they are sensitive, and, of course, we can interpret only the transferences we perceive. Despite this limitation, a reviews of the literature reveal, along with the usual rigidness, a laudable tendencies to describe one’s experience as fully as possible, without heed to how it contradicts belief, often blurring over when experience and theory do not match. Nonetheless, we have always been better at what we do than at what we say we do. This is exemplified in Heimann’s (1956) paper. Speaking from a modified Kleinian perspective, and holding the historical theory of transference interpretations, Heimann managed, 30 years ago, to describe vividly and to support passionately much of what today is under discussion as the modernist version. That her positions were contradictory bothered her not at all. While many of us prefer to think we are following our theories, like all good scientists, good psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud, have always seen and, responded to far more than our theories admit. When we have seen too much, we change our theories.
Our current pluralistic theoretical world, in which almost all analysts are working, wittingly or not, with individual amalgams of Freud’s drive theory, ego psychology. By interpersonal Sullivanian psychoanalysis, object-relations theory, Bôwlbyan or Mahlerian theory, and usually smuggled-in of self-psychology, lies at the base of the newer ideas and disagreements concerning transference interpretation.
Although the historical definitions of transference and transference interpretation have the merit of seeming precision and limited scope that are based on a psychoanalytic theory that no longer stands alone and has lost ground to competing theories. Of requisite, the historical definition for being replaced, or at least, subsumed, by modernist conceptions that are more attuned to the theories that abound today.
In this odds and ends of setting, it might help in our thinking about transference interpretations and in our understanding of the theories we hold, if we are dialectically aware, in that of an awakening spark inflamed from the ambers fire, that we become apparent of our conceptions of the modernist view, we have not abandoned the historical perspective, rather, it our’s have become a characterized component to a more complicated and complex plexuity as drawn on or upon the transference.
One of the reasons for the relatively unheralded entry of transference into analysis my have been the circumstances of its discovery. Although Freud’s new ideas were recorded as if they arose as a sudden inspiration during the Dora analysis, they may in fact have developed somewhat later. In the paper’s prefatory remarks, for instance, Freud said he had no t discussed transference with Dora at all, and in the postscript, he said he had been unaware of her transference feelings. Also pointing to a later discovery date is the extraordinary delay in the paper’s publication. According to the editors’ note, the paper had been completed and accepted for publication by late January 1901, but this date was actually set back more than four and half years until October 1905. The editors’ said: ‘We have no information as to how it happened that Freud . . .deferred publication’. As, perhaps, that this reason may have been that only during those four and half years, as a consequence to his own self-analysis, did he come to an understanding of the significance of the transference. Only then may it have been possible for him to turn again to the Dora case, to apply to it what he had learned in himself, to write his essay as part of the postscript, and, at last, to release the paper for publication.
Freud’s self-analysis has been considered from many angles, but not significantly, is that from the standpoint of transference. Opponents of the idea that there is such a thing ass definite self-analysis, some of whom say it is impossible, generally object on grounds that without an analyst there can be no transference neurosis. Freud clearly demonstrated, such as the situation that may be necessary to fill this need, self-analysis may require at least a half-way satisfactory transference object. In Freud’s case, the transference at this times seem to have been Fliess, who filled the role rather well. As with any analyst., his, ‘real’ impact on Freud was slight . He was essentially a neutral figure, relatively anonymous and physically separate. All of this, plus Fliess’s own reciprocal transference reactions, make it possible for Freud to endow Fliess with whatever qualities and whatever feelings were essential to the development of Freud’s transference, and it should be added. His transference neurosis, in the end, of course, the transference was in part resolved. Freud’s eventual awakening to the realization on of the presence within him such strange and powerful psychological forces must have come as a stupendous disillusionment, directed not only toward Fliess but toward himself, and yet his subsequent working out of some of these transference attachments must have been both an intellectual triumph and an immensely healing and releasing process.
It was this event, the development, the discovery, and then the resolution within himself of the complexities of the transference neurosis, that constitute the actual centre of his self-analysis, and it was this event that was the beginning of analysis as we know it.
In the years following this revolutionary discovery, the central role of transference in analysis gained remarkably wide acceptance, and it has, long since for becoming to change from a closed to an open condition, however is something of a mystery, there is nothing about analysis that is less known than how individual analysts actually use transference in their day-to-day handling in the work with patients. Ast first glance, because each analyst’s conception of transference derives various, but significantly from the analysts own inner experience, Transference probably means many different things to many different analysts.