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III. EARLY DEVELOPMENTS AFTER FREUD
Defining transference is a difficult task, not only because of its rapid development within Freud’s views, but also because of the increasing complexity yielded by various author’s perspectives, including the addition of qualifiers such as “lateral”, “positive”, “negative”, “adhesive”, “maternal”, “paternal”, etc. However, Freud’s account of the ‘transference neurosis’ that develops preferentially in neurotics, even though it is also featured in other structures, remains an important landmark when identifying the other forms of transference. Other authors have gradually contributed different input or viewpoints following the development of theory and technique. Karl Abraham (1911) was the first one who took an interest in transference in the area of psychosis. Sandor Ferenczi (1909a, 1909b), for his part, develops the notion of narcissistic transference. In “Introjection and Transference” Ferenczi (1909a, 1909b) insists on introjection as the pivotal phenomenon in the constitution of transference: the subject seizes in the world and annexes external objects; therefore, for Ferenczi, every object-love or every transference is an extension of the ego or introjection. His view is centred on the child’s individual history and elaborated on the basis of the child’s auto-erotic investment of his organs: there lies the matrix of what is being repeated in the transference. “The first ‘object-love’ and the first ‘object-hate’ are, so to speak, the primordial transferences, the root of every future introjection” so that transference is not a characteristic of neurosis but the exaggeration of a normal mental process (Ferenczi 1909b, p. 41). In his “Clinical Diary” and later writings, Ferenczi (1932/1988) pleads in favour of deepening the theorisation of technique and for metapsychological reflection on the analyst’s psychic processes, thus paving the way for many forthcoming developments. III. A. James Strachey How important, then, was the identification and ‘interpretation’ of transference to the qualities and outcomes of psychoanalytic treatments? Leaving aside what might be meant by the activity of “interpreting,” the degree of attention an analyst paid to indications of his patient’s transference became a matter of controversy. James Strachey famously argued that in his view the “ultimate instrument of psychoanalytic therapy” (Strachey, 1934, p. 142), the only class of “mutative” interpretations is the one comprised solely of transference interpretations (p. 154). By transference interpretations he meant those comments made by an analyst that helped to make unconscious aspects of his patient’s transference conscious. No other kind (extra-transference) could have a mutative effect. Notably, according to Strachey, the mutative effect derived from its creating an opportunity for the analysand to correct his error when confronted by the contrasts between his unconscious transference image of the analyst and the “real nature of the analyst” (p. 143). Of course, Strachey’s simple and straightforward assertion of the ‘real’ nature of the analyst would later collapse (to some extent) in the face of more contemporary views of contingency, reality, and the power of the analytic field to induce ‘real’
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