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IV. B. Kleinian influences in North America The classical concept of transference analysis in North America has been expanded significantly by the concept of the analysis of the “total transference situation” proposed by the Kleinian approach (Joseph, 1985). It involves a systematic analysis of the transference implications of the patient’s total verbal and nonverbal manifestations in the hours, the patient’s direct and implicit communicative efforts to influence the analyst in a certain direction, and the consistent exploration of the transference implications of material from the patient’s external 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 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” (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 (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
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