Changing conceptions of transference

Post date: 04-Nov-2014 15:15:28

Transference is a core concept of psychoanalysis. It is the most important and most useful concept to understand the relationship between patient and analyst during treatment. There, in treatment, Freud discovered it. He first described it in the paper "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (1905, SE Vol. VII, p 1- 122): Transferences, he says, "are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity... that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician. To put it another way: a whole series of psychological experiences are revived, not as belonging to the past, but as applying to the person of the physician at the present moment." (p. 116) For Freud transference is a process on the patient's side which the analyst is confronted with...