Concept
Psychotic transference
The transference formed by psychotic patients, and the psychotic parts of other patients, in analysis. Freud had held that in the narcissistic neuroses the libido is withdrawn from objects, so that no analysable transference arises. From the 1940s Kleinian analysts, Herbert Rosenfeld foremost among them, with Hanna Segal and Wilfred Bion, showed that such patients do form an intense transference, but a concrete and delusional one: through massive projection, and projective identification, of phantasies and parts of the self, the analyst is experienced as actually being the persecuting or idealized figure rather than as standing for it. They held that this transference could be understood and interpreted, which opened the way to analysing schizophrenic patients without changing the method.
- Broader concept
- Transference
- Key works
- 2
- Related
- Projective identification
developed by
- Herbert Rosenfeld Against the view that psychotic patients form no transference, Rosenfeld analysed schizophrenic patients without changing the classical setting and showed that they form an intense transference, in which the analyst is treated as the bearer of the patient's projected parts; he called it the transference psychosis and made its interpretation the core of his technique.
derives from
- Projective identification In Rosenfeld's account the psychotic transference is carried by projective identification: the patient puts split-off parts of the self into the analyst, who is then experienced as those parts rather than as a separate person.