PROBLEMS IN THE USE OF THE COUNTER-TRANSFERENCE: GETITNG IT ACROSS

As work in the counter-transference is so closely linked with work in the transference, it may be useful to comment on some developments and difficulties in the notion of transference. In Freud’s earliest thinking, in the Studies on Hysteria, and in the Dora case, the transference is seen mostly as an obstacle, a resistance, a symptom to be removed, decontaminated (1895d) (1905). Gradually it changes. What starts, in the Studies on Hysteriu, as a transference of a woman’s compulsive wish for a kiss, and is consistent with libido theory, changes by the time of the Wolf Man to a transference on to Freud of the wish to have the love (frequently it is still only the sexual love) of a valued father (1918). The gradual humanization of Freud‘s general conceptual structure was accompanied by a major change in his view of the source of the forces of repression. Thus, in me Ego and the Id, the controlling, restraining forces are no longer seen as issuing from external reality, as a sort of lid on the cooking pot, but as a conscience speaking with a human voice to the child in the patient (1923).