Transference and Countertransference

Freud's Definition of Transference

Freud's earliest discussion of transference was in the case of Dora, whom he saw late in 1900. After interpreting some of her behavior toward him as a repetition of her behavior toward her father, he said that transferences were “new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis [and] 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” (Freud, 1905, p. 116). Here Freud did not tie transference to any complex theory of neurosis, and in his further discussion [Page 929]of the case he did not go beyond the proposition that neuroses are based on repressed sexual ideas.

The first theoretical context in which Freud formulated the notion of transference was in his unpublished correspondence between 1897 and 1901 with Wilhelm Fliess, after Freud partially (and secretly) abandoned the proposition that neuroses were due to repressed memories of perverse childhood sexual experiences—the so-called seduction theory. In place of the apparently real seduction memories that Freud claimed to have discovered, Freud now substituted the notion of a perverse childhood sexual drive that generated the same oral, anal, and genital sensations as the supposed real seduction, and which provided the basis of childhood fantasies from which the symptoms of neuroses formed. Thus Dora's late recall of the smell of smoke as part of her dream was actually determined by the repressed oral component of her childhood sexual drive being directed into a longing for a kiss from the cigar-smoking Freud (as well as her attempted seducer) rather than to its original object, her father, who also smoked.

For Freud, Dora's transference was explained entirely within this early theory of childhood sexuality, and his explanation became even more complete in his fully developed sexual theory. In it, the oral, anal, and genital components of the childhood sexual drive pass through a phylogenetically determined series of stages at any of which there can be some degree of fixation and perverse choice of object. Together with abnormalities in the associated ego and superego structures, these processes contribute causally to later adult neuroses, determining their symptoms as well as the content of the transferences and the transference neurosis.

Transference Neurosis and Its Resolution

The term transference neurosis refers to the temporary neurosis created in psychoanalysis as the revived, but unconscious, sexual feelings and object choices of the patient's past are transferred on to the analyst. Freud introduced the concept in 1914 when discussing patients whom he believed were rejecting his interpretations and avoided remembering past repressed unconscious conflicts, but unconsciously repeated behaviors based on them. In 1920, he extended the meaning to include what he saw as the patient's compulsion to repeat earlier, unpleasant experiences that helped to maintain the neurosis.

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