Concept

Transference

Also known as Übertragung

Freud first described transference in 1895, in his chapter on psychotherapy in the Studies on Hysteria, as a ‘false connection’: the patient attaches to the physician ideas that belong elsewhere.

In the postscript to the Dora case (1905) he traced the end of the treatment to a transference he had not mastered in time. By 1912 he saw transference as the most powerful resistance to treatment and, at the same time, the field on which the treatment had to be won; he distinguished positive from negative transference.

Later schools kept the term and changed what is transferred. For Melanie Klein it is a ‘total situation’ rooted in the earliest object relations; for Jacques Lacan it attaches to the analyst as the ‘subject supposed to know’; for Heinz Kohut narcissistic patients form mirror and idealizing transferences. The analyst's side of the relationship came to be studied as countertransference.

Development

1895

Sigmund Freud introduced by

Describes the patient attaching to the physician ideas that belong elsewhere: a ‘false connection’.

In Studies on Hysteria (1895)
1905

Sigmund Freud developed by

In the postscript to the Dora case, traces the end of the treatment to a transference he had not mastered in time.

In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905)
1912

Sigmund Freud developed by

Distinguishes positive from negative transference and treats transference as the most powerful resistance to treatment.

In The Dynamics of Transference (1912)
1915

Sigmund Freud developed by

Treats the patient’s love for the analyst as transference, to be neither gratified nor suppressed.

In Observations on Transference-Love (1915)
1943

Susan Isaacs developed by

Isaacs treats the transference as made almost wholly of unconscious phantasy, so that its changes in the session let the analyst read the patient's phantasies.

In The Nature and Function of Phantasy (1948)

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1952

Melanie Klein reworked by

Roots transference in the earliest object relations and treats it as a ‘total situation’ carried from past to present.

In The Origins of Transference (1952)
1964

Jacques Lacan reworked by

Locates transference in the analyst’s position as the ‘subject supposed to know’ (Seminar XI, given 1964, published 1973).

In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973)
1971

Heinz Kohut reworked by

Describes mirror and idealizing transferences in narcissistic personality disorders.

In The Analysis of the Self (1971)

Relations

introduced by

1895 Sigmund Freud
Describes the patient attaching to the physician ideas that belong elsewhere: a ‘false connection’.

developed by

1905 Sigmund Freud
In the postscript to the Dora case, traces the end of the treatment to a transference he had not mastered in time.
1912 Sigmund Freud
Distinguishes positive from negative transference and treats transference as the most powerful resistance to treatment.
1915 Sigmund Freud
Treats the patient’s love for the analyst as transference, to be neither gratified nor suppressed.
1943 Susan Isaacs
Isaacs treats the transference as made almost wholly of unconscious phantasy, so that its changes in the session let the analyst read the patient's phantasies.

gave rise to

1910 Countertransference
Parataxic distortion
Sullivan put his own term in place of Freud's transference and widened it: parataxic distortion colours every relationship, not only the patient's relation to the analyst.

reworked by

1952 Melanie Klein
Roots transference in the earliest object relations and treats it as a ‘total situation’ carried from past to present.
1964 Jacques Lacan
Locates transference in the analyst’s position as the ‘subject supposed to know’ (Seminar XI, given 1964, published 1973).
1971 Heinz Kohut
Describes mirror and idealizing transferences in narcissistic personality disorders.

diverged into

1971 Narcissistic transference
Treats what is transferred as thwarted developmental needs rather than conflict.

Works

1895
Studies on HysteriaJosef Breuer and Sigmund Freud
1905
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of HysteriaSigmund Freud

Freud's case history of "Dora", an eighteen-year-old Viennese woman (later identified as Ida Bauer) whom he treated for about eleven weeks at the end of 1900; written in 1901, it appeared in 1905 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. Dora suffered from a nervous cough, loss of voice, shortness of breath and low moods, and her father brought her to Freud after her parents found a letter in which she hinted at suicide. Behind the symptoms Freud uncovers a family entanglement: her father's affair with Frau K., and the advances of Frau K.'s husband, Herr K., whom Dora slapped after a proposal by a lake and whose earlier kiss had filled her with disgust. Freud reads her symptoms as the expression of repressed sexual wishes — love for Herr K., a revived childhood attachment to her father and, at the deepest layer, love for Frau K. — and builds the case around the interpretation of two dreams: a burning house from which her father rescues her while her mother wants to save her jewel case, and a wandering through a strange town after her father's death. Dora broke off the treatment on 31 December. In the Postscript Freud attributes the failure to his not having recognised and interpreted in time the transference of her feelings for Herr K. onto himself, and gives his first sustained account of transference as a new edition of old impulses directed at the physician.

Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie
1910
The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic TherapySigmund Freud
1912
The Dynamics of TransferenceSigmund Freud
1915
Observations on Transference-LoveSigmund Freud

"Observations on Transference-Love" is the third of Freud's "Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis", published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse in 1915. It takes up a situation that Freud counts among the only really serious difficulties of analytic work: a woman patient declares that she has fallen in love with her analyst. Freud sets aside the layman's solutions, marriage, an end to the treatment or a secret affair, and argues that the analyst must neither return the love nor suppress it with moral appeals or demands for renunciation. The love is induced by the analytic situation, not by the analyst's personal qualities, a fact that should warn him against his own countertransference. It breaks out as a resistance, often just when a painful memory is drawing near; yet resistance does not create it, but finds it already present, exploits it and exaggerates it. Freud lays down the rule that the treatment must be carried out in abstinence: the patient's need and longing are to be left in place as forces that drive the work, not stilled by substitutes. The analyst holds on to the transference-love but treats it as something unreal, to be traced back to its unconscious and infantile origins, so that the patient can reveal her conditions for loving and the phantasies bound up with them. He then asks whether such love is genuine, and answers that it is: like all love it repeats infantile prototypes, and it differs from ordinary love only in being provoked by the analytic situation, intensified by resistance and heedless of reality. Because the analyst called it forth by beginning the treatment, he may draw no personal advantage from it, and here ethical and technical reasons coincide. The paper ends by likening the analyst to a chemist who works with explosive forces, and by defending psychoanalysis at full strength against milder methods.

Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse

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1940
Conceptions of Modern PsychiatryHarry Stack Sullivan

Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry is Harry Stack Sullivan's text of the first William Alanson White Memorial Lectures, given in Washington in the autumn of 1939 and printed in the journal Psychiatry in February 1940; the book of 1947 adds a foreword by the author and Patrick Mullahy's extended exposition of the theory. It was the only general statement of Sullivan's theory published in his lifetime. The first lecture traces psychiatry's double descent, from medicine and from the social traditions of healers and sages, credits Freud, Adolf Meyer and William Alanson White with the move toward a complete psychiatry, and defines the field as the study of interpersonal relations, which the psychiatrist can know only as a participant observer. Conduct is organised around the pursuit of satisfactions, tied to the body, and of security, tied to culture. Anxiety, first caught empathically from the disapproval of the adults who care for the infant, shapes the self-dynamism: built from the appraisals of others, it controls what enters awareness, and what it cannot admit persists as dissociated. The second and third lectures follow the person's growth within a necessary environment of others, through infancy, childhood, the juvenile era, preadolescence, with its first love for a chum of the same sex and the consensual validation it brings, and adolescence. They then sketch ten developmental syndromes, among them the self-absorbed, the incorrigible, the negativistic, the ambition-ridden, the asocial, the inadequate and the chronically adolescent person, offered as better guides to a person's future than the categories of mental disease. The fourth lecture explains mental disorder as patterns of interpersonal process: parataxic distortion of situations; the substitutive states, such as obsessional, hypochondriacal and paranoid conditions; panic as the collapse of the self's power to dissociate; and schizophrenic states, which Sullivan distinguishes from dementia praecox and holds to depend on the situation for their outcome. The fifth lecture derives therapy from Freud, Meyer and White. It presents the interview as a situation both parties shape, whose work is to bring into the patient's awareness what anxiety has kept out, leading to insight into parataxic distortions, including those directed at the psychiatrist. In the foreword Sullivan calls the developmental sketch the weakest part, admits that his accounts of anxiety, the self and selective inattention are inadequate, and attacks the "delusion of unique individuality".

Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and Pathology of Interpersonal Relations, vol. 3, no. 1 (February 1940)
1948
The Nature and Function of PhantasySusan Isaacs

Read to the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1943 as the opening paper of the Controversial Discussions, and later reprinted in Developments in Psycho-Analysis (1952).

International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 29: 73–97
1952
The Origins of TransferenceMelanie Klein
1971
The Analysis of the SelfHeinz Kohut
1973
The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoanalysisJacques Lacan

The seminar Lacan gave in 1964 at the École Normale Supérieure, after the International Psychoanalytical Association had made his removal from the list of training analysts the condition for admitting the Société Française de Psychanalyse. Established by Jacques-Alain Miller, it was published by Éditions du Seuil in 1973 as Book XI of Le Séminaire, and in English in Alan Sheridan's translation. Speaking to a larger and less specialised audience than before, Lacan set out to bring coherence to four concepts on which psychoanalysis rests: the unconscious, repetition, transference and the drive. He opens with his 'excommunication', and moves from asking whether psychoanalysis is a science to asking what kind of science could include it. The seminar treats the unconscious and repetition, the gaze as objet petit a, transference and the drive, and the field of the Other, where alienation, aphanisis and the subject supposed to know are taken up.

Le Séminaire, Livre XI

References

Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud Studies on Hysteria1895 Evidence for a relation
Sigmund Freud Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria1905 Evidence for a relation
Sigmund Freud The Dynamics of Transference1912 Evidence for a relation
Sigmund Freud Observations on Transference-Love1915 Evidence for a relation
Melanie Klein The Origins of Transference1952 Evidence for a relation
Jacques Lacan The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis1973 Evidence for a relation
Heinz Kohut The Analysis of the Self1971 Evidence for a relation
Sigmund Freud The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy1910 Evidence for a relation
Harry Stack Sullivan Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry1940 Evidence for a relation
Susan Isaacs The Nature and Function of Phantasy1948 Evidence for a relation

Agents at work

Nodes

Relations

Transference

Development

Relations

introduced by

developed by

gave rise to

reworked by

diverged into

Works

See also

Links in this article

People

References