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feelings of, say, hostility toward the patient that in fact may match the analysand’s transference image.
III. B. Ida Macalpine Ida Macalpine (1950) can be credited with having underlined, in “The development of transference”, for the first time, the fact that psychoanalysis does not merely ‘reap’ the transference. Through the frustrating and infantile environment that it creates, the analytic situation ‘produces’ the transference and reaps what it sows. Accordingly, some of Freud’s major successors, such as Melanie Klein, Bion and Winnicott, each develop perspectives on transference that contribute meaningfully to the current understanding of the transference phenomena in the treatment.
IV. THE BRITISH CONTRIBUTION
IV. A. Kleinian perspective The work of Melanie Klein (1929, 1946, 1952) contributes to the development of the concept of ‘transference’ in three ways: Klein senses that the transference onto the analyst originates in the same processes as the ones which determine object relations at their earliest stages; secondly, she stresses the importance of unconscious phantasy; and lastly, she theorises a technique in which the unconscious elements of the transference are being inferred on the basis of the whole of the presented material, which she refers to as the ‘total situation’. Klein posits object relations as the origin of the transference. Freud understands the transference as a direct reference to the analyst in the analytic session and as a re-enactment of the past. For Klein, the primitive internal object relations are at the origin of the transference and she views psychic life as a constant changing and reshaping of internal imagos. Through her work with very young children (Klein, 1929), she comes to understand that the material displayed in play therapies is not a re-enactment of a distant past, but of an immediate present, for the traumatizing events appear to be living on. Klein takes children’s play seriously: it is their way of relating to themselves, to their own fears and anxieties as well as to their deepest desires. The child expresses his effort to encompass experiences and phantasies through the relations enacted in the play session with the analyst. In the same way, the transference in adult analysis becomes a re-enactment of current phantasy experiences, made from unconscious and conscious phantasies, internal objects and the interplay of emotions directed at them as well as the defences protecting them. The object is always at the heart of emotional life from the very start, as it is in the transference situation, and defence mechanisms are from the beginning indelibly linked with
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