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Transference, in regard to the content(s), mechanisms, and methodology of clinical engagement within the context of psychoanalytic setting. This entry first follows the multiply dimensional evolution of the concept and concludes with outlining some convergences in the current theoretical and clinical plurality across the continents.
II. ORIGIN OF THE CONCEPT OF TRANSFERENCE IN FREUD
Historically, the notion of transference developed at the time when psychoanalysis was expanding and distancing itself from hypnosis, suggestion and the cathartic method, even though the issue of psychic transmission remained and would later return, envisioned then from the perspective of telepathy. In his translation of Bernheim’s “De la suggestion et de ses applications à la thérapeutique” (1886) into German, Freud opts for the term Übertragung to translate the French word “ transfert ” used in the field of hypnosis. When it is featured in the Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in the context of the work of disguise in dreams, transference refers to the displacement of a repressed wish, under the guise of a trivial representation borrowed from “indifferent” day’s residues (1900:563). Therefore, transference firstly consists in the displacement of a sum of libidinal energy from one pole of cathexis to another, confusing matters in the process, imposing, for example, a distinction between manifest content and latent content but, by the same token, signalling how, in all the spheres of psychic life, desire is mobile in all its various forms and how it is ready to recombine. This initial hypothesis returns, not anymore in terms of disguise but with a focus on the fulfilment of an unconscious wish: whether it is a love wish (as illustrated most blatantly and for the first time by the case of Anna O. treated by Breuer (Freud & Breuer, 1895)) or the transference of a desire for revenge, as in the Dora case in which Freud becomes the target of the return of disappointment and hate (Freud, 1905). Confronted with the interruption of the treatment, which Dora inflicts on him, Freud is led to change his understanding of the transferential phenomenon (M. Neyraut, 1974). Whereas, until then, he sees it as embedding the reproduction of former psychic states in the form of “copies”, of “re-impressions” – “the transferences” would stem from some kind of “sublimation” which would allow them to become conscious – the transference (with a shift to the singular form) from then on refers to the side of the analytic relationship infused with reminiscences that escape speech and subjectivity, but are translated into act. Hence the pivotal place, which, as early as the Dora case, Freud assigns to the interpretation of the transference, insofar as the elucidation of this mode of hallucinatory fulfilment may grant access to the most opaque area of the libidinal apparatus (Freud, 1905). In his Postscript to that case Freud blames his not having recognized and interpreted Dora’s paternal transference to him as the cause of her unexpected flight from the treatment. He might later have said that her transference served
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