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life that, at any point, he brings into the session. The inclusion of a systematic consideration of the patient’s total functioning at the point of the activation of a predominant transference is an important reinforcement of the centrality of transference interpretation and it also points to an important implicit consequence of transference interpretation, namely, the analysis of character. IV. C. Donald W. Winnicott The term ‘ transference ’ is practically absent from the titles of D.W. Winnicott’s writings, with the exception of his 1955-1956 article entitled “Clinical Varieties of Transference.” The term is not featured either in the chapter headings of Jan Abram’s “The Language of Winnicott: A Dictionary of Winnicott’s Use of Words” (Abram, 1996). Yet, Winnicott’s treatment of transference deserves significant attention; it is closely tied to the notions of frame and counter-transference. Originally a paediatrician, Winnicott directs his analytic reflection to the mother-infant relationship. Distancing himself from the Kleinian perspective on the new-born baby’s nascent intrapsychic life, he privileges the infant’s earliest environment and studies the interactions between ‘the good enough mother’ and the baby, along with the transitional phenomena that refer to them. In the treatment, the analytic frame endows the analysand with this kind of containing (holding) environment, an environment within which the transference and the counter-transference unfold. Focusing on deficiencies in these earliest environments (i.e., especially cases in which the mother could not be attuned to the little child’s needs), Winnicott develops his notion of the false self, which is at once a protective organisation sheltering the true self, but which also hinders the establishment of an authentic ego. He introduces a breach in the continuous feeling of being. Such patients who were not the recipients of the kind of care appropriate to early childhood and whose ego cannot be envisioned as an established entity – i.e. those experiencing borderline states and psychotic episodes as adults – can no longer be discussed in terms of transference neurosis or the lifting of repression. The concept of transference needs to be broadened for “the analyst finds himself… confronted with the patient’s primary process, ” , with the original breach (Winnicott, 1955-1956, p. 298). In such cases where the earliest environment featured a deficiency, the ordeal that aims at overcoming the deficiency must take place in the transferential relation. Good attunement on the part of the analyst may elicit the implementation of intense dependence in the patient, from which sufficient trust and safety can emerge so that the experience of the original trauma – the primal agony of falling forever – may be re-played in the transference, yielding a shift from false self to authentic self. As Winnicott (1963) writes, it is impossible for such patients to remember something that has not happened yet since the infant’s ego was too immature to experience it. In this case, the only way for the patient to ‘remember’ is to go through the experience of that past thing for the first time, in the present, i.e. in the transference.
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