TRANSFERENCE: THE TOTAL SITUATION

My intention in this paper is to discuss how we are using the concept of transference in our clinical work today. My stress will be on the idea of transference as a framework, in which some- thing is always going on, where there is always movement and activity. Freud’s ideas developed from seeing trans- ference as an obstacle, to seeing it as an essential tool of the analytic process, observing how the patient’s relationships to their original objects were transferred, with all their richness, to the person of the analyst. Strachey (1934), using Melanie Klein’s discoveries on the way in which projection and introjection colour and build up the individual’s inner objects, showed that what is being transferred is not primarily the external objects of the child’s past, but the internal objects, and that the way that these objects are construc- ted help us to understand how the analytic process can produce change.