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reveals the tragic guilt or the need for punishment while transference provides a stage where tragedy unfolds. This construction becomes connected to an historical construction (which the analyst arrives at by means of symptoms, screen memories and the transference) in the same way as Freud describes in Constructions in Analysis (1937b): “Up to your nth year you regarded yourself as the sole and unlimited possessor of your mother; then came another baby (…) your feelings towards your mother became ambivalent (…) “(p.261). If remembering is presented as the ultimate goal of the analysis, as it leads to establishing coherence, continuity and full range of choices, then, when it is not achievable, constructions can compensate for its failure and provide attempts at representing the repressed, traumatically dissociated, lost, ‘expelled’ or buried. The transference indeed works towards the possibility of bringing a lost object back to life from under the sway of repression, by representing it on the basis of clues: such work is carried out by the treatment. The transference in neurosis is therefore only sought as a form leading to remembering and not as an end in itself: there lies the border against a possible manipulative hijacking of transference. On this point Freud always remains curious and mindful of the links between transference and suggestion as well as between transference and occultism: how does a memory that belongs to the patient’s past become tied to the therapeutic situation via the person of the analyst and is thus shifted to the forefront of the psychic stage? Is there a misalliance in which the concurrent affect is of equal force and intensity as the affect that once begot the symptom? These early observations made by Freud initiated an ongoing debate about the recognition of the importance of psychic reality and its impact on all mental processes, including perception and memory.
III. EARLY DEVELOPMENTS AFTER FREUD
Defining transference is a difficult task, not only because of its rapid development within Freud’s views, but also because of the complexification yielded by various author’s perspectives, including the addition of qualifiers such as “lateral”, “positive”, “negative”, “adhesive”, “maternal”, “paternal”, etc. However, Freud’s account of the transference neurosis that develops preferentially in neurotics, even though it is also featured in other structures, remains an important landmark when identifying the other forms of transference. Other authors have gradually contributed different input or viewpoints following the development of theory and technique. Abraham was the first one who took an interest in transference in the area of psychosis. Ferenczi, for his part, develops the notion of narcissistic transference. He insists on introjection as the pivotal phenomenon in the constitution of transference: the subject seizes in the world and annexes external objects; therefore, for Ferenczi, every object-love or every transference
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