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Every human being is an active agent of transport (a notion connected to the term transference) towards an object, an agent of substitutions. Transference (Übertragung), according to Abadi, is the substitution and displacement (Verschiebung) of affects from an object to another, substitute, object. Not only transference is responsible for the analysand’s love, but any kind of love is transference love. Within transference a ‘process of presentification’ is produced, an evanescent presence that actualises the past, dissolves absence and makes things happen in a magical, illusory way. These are phantoms from childhood that hold the subject captive. Abadi, by using the model of staging, expresses the view that transference hardly involves the mere recovery of experiences, but rather constitutes a kind of collage where the infantile aspects are combined, connected, with aspects that belong to the subsequent development of the individual, which offer new meaning and significance to the former ones ( Nachträglichkeit ). During the process of transference two people become changed by it: the patient that ‘transfers’ to himself the image of the child he once was, and the relationship he had with the object, and the ‘other’, the relational object onto whom the patient transfers the image. Thus, Abadi suggests that there is transference of images and transference of relationships. This ‘other’ that appears in transference will be invested with affects, imagos, and parts of the Ego, which will transform the relationship into a narcissistic one. That is to say that transference constitutes a narcissistic relationship with a supporting object (an anaclitic relationship) without which transference would be impossible. This narcissistic relationship will try to take possession of an object that initially presents itself as an other; in other words: there is a relationship with someone who, by virtue of not being me, can therefore protect me. However, narcissism encourages one to transform this other into a part of oneself, thus refusing to acknowledge the painful, distressing dependence (disavowal). The ‘other’ is therefore invaded, penetrated, colonized, and infiltrated by parts of one’s own Ego. Abadi traces the origins of transference back to the early times of the child’s experience of abandonment, with which he/she deals by introducing this ‘other’ while at the same time disavowing his own dependence. Therefore, the analytic process consists in helping the patient acknowledge, at some point, that the other is another and not a part of himself. According to Abadi, it is this that marks the difference between psychoanalysis and other kinds of therapies. When transference is dissolved, reality can be appreciated as ‘otherness’. Although there is a tendency to get to know the other, and transference is a kind of bridge that encourages this, in the same movement the other goes unacknowledged, it is ‘covered’ by transference in order to preserve the narcissistic illusion. An illusion: this is what transference is about. As a result of compromise formation, transference is both a symptom and a daydream, one among other artificial structures created by the Ego with which it attempts to work through an underlying conflict.
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