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on the analyst, in the second instance, transference is truly an unprecedented event: the patient would not wish for analysis anymore nor wants to ‘know’ anything regarding ‘meaning’. The difference between the two cab be formulated, using Laplanche’s terminology: In the first kind of transference – a ‘filled-in’ transference, the patient tends to repeat what was already noticeable in her own previous relationships to significant figures. This form lends itself easily to interpretation (e.g., “you reject my interpretations just like you rejected your father’s advice…”) but it may not go very far into the heart of the matter. In the second and most important kind of transference – a ‘hollow’ (or ‘hollowed-out’) transference, where neither the patient nor the analyst has any notion of what is being repeated: the analysand is experiencing the fact of being confronted with the enigmas that puzzled her in the past. What is ‘repeated’ here has never actually been experienced in a subjectively comprehensible way before. This is very close, if not identical, with what Winnicott reports in his paper “Fear of breakdown” (Winnicott, 1974; see also Clare Winnicott, 1980) wherein something happened in the past but there was no “I” to register/experience it. As a result, it must be experienced for the first time in the analysis in order to become something of the past. This is therefore the most important kind of transference, one where what lurks in an unrepresented form and which needs to be lived through and worked through for the first time in the patient’s life.
VI. SPECIFIC NORTH AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES AND DEVELOPMENTS
Freud’s early idea of the ‘transference neurosis’, its establishment and cure by the therapeutic work, became one of the hallmark ideas of North American psychoanalysis during the much later period of hegemony of ‘classical psychoanalysis’ (a term denoting American Ego psychology of the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s). Although this idea has since lost much of its influence, during the ‘classical’ era the establishment and resolution of a transference neurosis was virtually defining of psychoanalytic treatment. Treatments lacking in a clear transference neurosis and its ‘cure’ were commonly questioned as to whether they were ‘truly’ psychoanalytic. At this time Strachey’s view still had many adherents among the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) analysts of the “classical” period, who found themselves largely limiting their comments to analysands to the transference or needing special reasons for doing otherwise. Analytic technique based on Strachey’s principle was widely taught to students at APsA institutes. Nonetheless, acceptance of Strachey was not universal, and analytic work in the extra-transference was widely if more quietly practiced. It is important in discussing the evolution of the transference concept that one keep track of the evolution of its ever-present partner,. It has been widely accepted (although
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