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the analyst’s interpretive activity be limited exclusively to interventions concerning transference. While there are a minority of North American analysts today who believe that transference interpretations are the therapeutically effective ones, most feel that there are many problems in the patient’s life that may draw the analyst’s attention because they are affectively dominant in the communications of the hour and are linked with the transference. Consequently, these analysts hold that the interpretation of the corresponding unconscious conflict focused on that extratransference relationship can be helpful because the affective dominance is located there. Eventually, however, major pathogenic unconscious conflicts tend to be anchored in characterological defensive structures that will become transference resistances. Thus, systematic analysis of the transference is widely viewed as the essential, but not exclusive focus of the analyst’s interpretive activity. The Kleinian approach always has tended to maximize systematic transference analysis, but the trend has today also evolved in both ego psychological and relational approaches. French analysis, too, has increased this aspect of the work. VI. E. Object Relations Approaches – Advanced and Archaic Transferential Configurations Comprehension of the nature of transference regression also has shifted to the conceptualization of primitive, early, archaic object relations-determined transferences, in contrast to later, advanced oedipal transferences. Oedipal and pre-oedipal conflicts tend to be condensed in regressive transferences with dominance of aggressive developments, in contrast to clearer differentiation of stage of development in less regressive transferences with dominance of infantile sexual conflicts. In the light of contemporary object relations theory, the understanding of identificatory and projective aspects of transference developments, as in those seen in the treatment of severe personality disorders, has been clarified and enriched. In the case of neurotic personality organization, the predominant enactments in the transference/countertransference binds that develop during treatment involve the patient’s identification with an aspect of his infantile self, while projecting the corresponding object representation onto the analyst. Reversals of this enactment, where the patient identifies with the object representation while projecting the corresponding self representation onto the analyst, are less frequent. In contrast, in the case of severe psychopathology, such reversals are frequent, and the consistent alternating reversals of self and object representations the rule, which gives an apparently chaotic character to the transference developments (Kernberg, Yeomans, Clarkin et al., 2008). In addition, other complications emerge in these cases: the reciprocal activation of the patient’s grandiose self and his depreciated self representation as dominant object relations pathology in the transference manifestations of narcissistic pathology; and the regression to symbiotic relations in which the patient cannot tolerate any differences of views and relatedness in the therapist, experiencing all triangulations as intolerable traumatic situations. The
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