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“copies”, of “re-impressions” – “the transferences” would stem from some kind of “sublimation” which would allow them to become conscious – the transference (with a shift to the singular form) from then on refers to the side of the analytic relationship infused with reminiscences that escape speech and subjectivity, but are translated into act. Hence the pivotal place, which, as early as the Dora case, Freud assigns to the interpretation of the transference, insofar as the elucidation of this mode of hallucinatory fulfilment may grant access to the most opaque area of the libidinal apparatus (Freud, 1905). In his Postscript to Dora case Freud blames his not having recognized and interpreted Dora’s paternal transference to him as the cause of her unexpected flight from the treatment. He might later have said that her transference served as a resistance to the analysis. He also underlined the role of the homoerotic transference, i.e the crucial place of the ‘other’ woman. II. A. Freud’s Further Development of the Concept In keeping with the development of analytic practice, the definition acquires increasing complexity. The first shift from the plural to the singular in Freud’s writings points to the ubiquity of the phenomenon, and it is closely followed (Freud, 1909, 1912, 1914, 1915, 1917a) and combined with another breakthrough: if the transferences are no longer “copies”, they become the “prototypes” of the relations to infantile figures, the patient thus reliving with the analyst the conflictual impulses that have inherited the ties to parental imagos. Such imagos are loved or hated, the object of displays of tenderness and/or hostility, in positive or negative transference, and they present themselves in a “newly created and transformed neurosis” (Freud, 1917a, p. 444) at the heart of which the patient places the analyst and which becomes the very space of interpretation (Freud, 1912). While in the ‘Rat Man case’, Freud (1909) had already mentioned that both positive and negative feelings can be part of transference, it is in ‘The Dynamics of Transference’ (Freud, 1912) that he presents the first composite and clearly formulated account of the theoretical side of the phenomenon, within the (First) Topographic theory. In it, Freud made the following points: 1. Transference emanates from the portion of libidinal impulse that has remained unexpressed and/or unconscious; 2. Transference is ubiquitous, and it occurs not only in the course of psychoanalysis, but also outside it. The difference is that in psychoanalysis it is made the subject of study; 3. Transference is “the strongest weapon of resistance” (ibid, p. 104); 4. Transference can be positive or negative; 5. The ‘Positive Transference’ can be divided into an affectionate type, which is an ‘unobjectionable ally’ of the treatment, and an erotic type, which needs interpretive resolution; 6. Predominance of negative transference presents a challenge to the successful outcome of analysis; 7. The patient getting insight into how the Transference-based wishes/desires fit into “the nexus of the treatment and of his life history” (ibid, p. 108) frees him from the tendency to re-create such situations. This is necessary to dissolve early fixations since “it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigy” (ibid, p. 108). The move from transference-resistance to transference interpretation as a central element of technique is implicit here. It became explicit with the concept of ‘transference neurosis’, a technical elaboration of which appeared in “Remembering, Repeating and
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