Behavioural therapies differ dramatically from Psychodynamic and humanistic therapies. Behavioural therapists do not explore an individual’s thoughts, feelings, dreams, or past experiences. Rather, they focus on the behaviour that is causing distress for their clients. They believe that behaviour of all kinds, both normal and abnormal, is the product of learning. By applying the principles of learning, they help individuals replace distressing behaviours with more appropriate ones.
Typical problems treated with behavioural therapy include alcohol or drug addiction, phobias (such as a fear of heights), and anxiety. Modern behavioural therapists work with other problems, such as depression, by having clients develop specific behavioural goals - such as returning to work, talking with others, or cooking a meal. Because behavioural therapy can work through nonverbal means, it can also help people who would not respond to other forms of therapy. For example, behavioural therapists can teach social and self-care skills to children with severe learning disabilities and to individuals with schizophrenia who are out of touch with reality.
Some researchers suggest that all therapies share certain qualities, and that these qualities account for the similar effectiveness of therapies despite quite different techniques. For instance, all therapies offer people hope for recovery. People who begin therapy often expect that therapy will help them, and this expectation alone may lead to some improvement (a phenomenon known as the placebo effect). Also, people in psychotherapy may find that simply being able to talk freely and openly about their problems helps them to feel better. Finally, the support, encouragement, and cared about, that clients feel from their therapist let them know they are care about and respected, which may positively affect their mental health.
Although different therapeutic approaches may be equally effective on average, mental health researchers agree that some types of therapy are best for particular problems. For panic disorder and phobias, behavioural and cognitive-behavioural therapies seem most effective. Behavioural techniques, often in combination with medication, are also an effective treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and sexual dysfunction. Cognitive-behavioural, Psychodynamic, and humanistic approaches all provide moderate relief from depression.
Mental health professionals agree that the effectiveness of therapy depends to a large extent on the quality of the relationship between the client and therapist. In general, the better the rapport is between therapist and client, the better the outcome of therapy. If a person does not trust a therapist enough to describe deeply personal problems, the therapist will have trouble helping the person change and improve. For clients, trusting that the therapist can provide help for their problems is essential for making progress.
The founder of person-centred therapy, Carl Rogers, believed that the most important qualities in a therapist are being genuine, accepting, and empathic. Almost all therapists today would agree that these qualities are important. Being genuine means that therapists care for the client and behave toward the client as they really feel. Being accepting means that therapists should appreciate clients for whom they are, despite the things that they may have done. Therapists do not have to agree with clients, but they must accept them. Being empathic means that therapists understand the client’s feelings and experiences and convey this understanding back to the client.
In helping their clients, all therapists follow a code of ethics. First, all therapy is confidential. Therapists notify others of a client’s disclosures only in exceptional cases, such as when children disclose abuse by parents, parents disclose abuse of children, or clients disclose an intention to harm themselves or others. Also, therapists avoid dual relationships with clients - that is, being friends outside of therapy or maintaining a business relationship. Such relationships may reduce the therapist’s objectivity and ability to work with the client. Ethical therapists also do not engage in sexual relationships with clients, and do not accept as clients people with whom they have been sexually intimate.
As more immigrants to the United States and Canada have entered therapy, psychotherapists and Counsellors have learned the importance of taking a client’s cultural background into account when assessing the problem and determining treatment. Scholars recognize that most psychotherapies are based on Western systems of psychology, which stress the desirability of individualism and independence. However, cultures of Asia and other regions commonly emphasize different values, such as conformity, dependency on others, and obeying one’s parents. Thus, techniques that might be effective for someone from North America, Europe, or Australia might be inappropriate for a recent immigrant from Vietnam, Japan, or India. In order to provide effective treatment, therapists must be aware of their own cultural biases and become familiar with their client’s ethnic and cultural background.
Anxiety, is the emotional state in which people feel uneasy, apprehensive, or fearful. People usually experience anxiety about events they cannot control or predict, or about events that seem threatening or dangerous. For example, students taking an important test may feel anxious because they cannot predict the test questions or feel certain of a good grade. People often use the word’s fear and anxiety to describe the same thing. Fear also describes a reaction to immediate danger characterized by a strong desire to escape the situation.
The physical symptoms of anxiety reflect chronic ‘readiness’ to deal with some future threat. These symptoms may include fidgeting, muscle tension, sleeping problems, and headaches. Higher levels of anxiety may produce such symptoms as rapid heartbeat, sweating, increased blood pressure, nausea, and dizziness.
All people experience anxiety to some degree. Most people feel anxious when faced with a new situation, such as a first date, or when trying to do something well, such as give a public speech. A mild to moderate amount of anxiety in these situations is normal and even beneficial. Anxiety can motivate people to prepare for an upcoming event and can help keep them focussed on the task at hand.
However, too little anxiety or too much anxiety can cause problems. Individuals who feel no anxiety when faced with an important situation may lack alertness and focus. On the other hand, individuals who experience an abnormally high amount of anxiety often feel overwhelmed, immobilized, and unable to accomplish the task at hand. People with too much anxiety often suffer from one of the anxiety disorders, a group of mental illnesses. In fact, more people experience anxiety disorders than any other type of mental illness. A survey of people aged 15 to 54 in the United States found that about 17 percent of this population suffers from an anxiety disorder during any given year.
The Foundation of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a handbook for mental health professionals, describes a variety of anxiety disorders. These include generalized anxiety disorder, phobias, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
People with generalized anxiety disorder feel anxious most of the time. They worry excessively about routine events or circumstances in their lives. Their worries often relate to finances, family, personal health, and relationships with others. Although they recognize their anxiety as irrational or out of proportion to actual events, they feel unable to control their worrying. For example, they may worry uncontrollably and intensely about money despite evidence that their financial situation is stable. Children with this disorder typically worry about their performance at school or about catastrophic events, such as tornadoes, earthquakes, and nuclear war.
People with generalized anxiety disorder often find that their worries interfere with their ability to function at work or concentrate on tasks. Physical symptoms, such as disturbed sleep, irritability, muscle aches, and tension, may accompany the anxiety. To receive a diagnosis of this disorder, individuals must have experienced its symptoms for at least six months.
Generalized anxiety disorder affects about 3 percent of people in the general population in any given year. From 55 to 66 percent of people with this disorder are female.
A phobia is an excessive, enduring fear of clearly defined objects or situations that interferes with a person’s normal functioning. Although they know their fear is irrational, people with phobias always try to avoid the source of their fear. Common phobias include fear of heights (acrophobia), fear of enclosed places (claustrophobia), fear of insects, snakes, or other animals, and fear of air travel. Social phobias involve a fear of performing, of critical evaluation, or of being embarrassed in front of other people.
Panic is an intense, overpowering surge of fear. People with panic disorder experience panic attacks - periods of quickly escalating, intense fear and discomfort accompanied by such physical symptoms as rapid heartbeat, trembling, shortness of breath, dizziness, and nausea. Because people with this disorder cannot predict when these attacks will strike, they develop anxiety about having additional panic attacks and may limit their activities outside the home.
In obsessive-compulsive disorder, people persistently experience certain intrusive thoughts or images (obsessions) or feel compelled to perform certain behaviours (compulsions). Obsessions may include unwanted thoughts about inadvertently poisoning others or injuring a pedestrian while driving. Common compulsions include repetitive hand washing or such mental acts as repeated counting. People with this disorder often perform compulsions to reduce the anxiety produced by their obsessions. The obsessions and compulsions significantly interfere with their ability to function and may consume a great deal of time.
Post-traumatic stress disorder sometimes occurs after people experience traumatic or catastrophic events, such as physical or sexual assaults, natural disasters, accidents, and wars. People with this disorder relive the traumatic event through recurrent dreams or intrusive memories called flashbacks. They avoid things or places associated with the trauma and may feel emotionally detached or estranged from others. Other symptoms may include difficulty sleeping, irritability, and trouble concentrating.
Most anxiety disorders do not have an obvious cause. They result from a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors.
Studies suggest that anxiety disorders run in families. That is, children and close relatives of people with disorders are more likely than most to develop anxiety disorders. Some people may inherit genes that make them particularly vulnerable to anxiety. These genes do not necessarily cause people to be anxious, but the genes may increase the risk of anxiety disorders when certain psychological and social factors are also present.
Anxiety also appears to be related to certain brain functions. Chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters enable neurons, or brain cells, to communicate with other. One neurotransmitter, gamma-amino butyric acid (GABA), appears to play a role in regulating one’s level of anxiety. Lower levels of GABA are associated with higher levels of anxiety. Some studies suggest that the neurotransmitter’s norepinephrine and serotonin play a role in panic disorder.
Psychologists have proposed a variety of models to explain anxiety. Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud suggested that anxiety result from internal, unconscious conflicts. He believed that a person’s mind represses wishes and fantasies about which the person feels uncomfortable. This repression, Freud believed, results in anxiety disorders, which he called neuroses.
More recently, behavioural researchers have challenged Freud’s model of anxiety. They believe one’s anxiety level relates to how much a person believes events can be predicted or controlled. Children who have little control over events, perhaps because of overprotective parents, may have little confidence in their ability to handle problems as adults. This lack of confidence can lead to increased anxiety.
Behavioural theorists also believe that children may learn anxiety from a role model, such as a parent. By observing their parent’s anxious response to difficult situations, the child may learn a similar anxious response. A child may also learn anxiety as a conditioned response. For example, an infant often startled by a loud noise while playing with a toy may become anxious just at the sight of the toy. Some experts suggest that people with a high level of anxiety misinterpret normal events as threatening. For instance, they may believe their rapid heartbeat indicates they are experiencing a panic attack when in reality it may be the result of exercise.
While some people may be biologically and psychologically predisposed to feel anxious, most anxiety is triggered by social factors. Many people feel anxious in response to stress, such as a divorce, starting a new job, or moving. Also, how a person expresses anxiety appears to be shaped by social factors. For example, many cultures accept the expression of anxiety and emotion in women, but expect more reserved emotional displays from men.
Mental health professionals use a variety of methods to help people overcome anxiety disorders. These include psychoactive drugs and psychotherapy, particularly behaviour therapy. Other techniques, such as exercise, hypnosis, meditation, and biofeedback, may also prove helpful.
Psychiatrists often prescribe benzodiazepines, a group of tranquillizing drugs, to reduce anxiety in people with high levels of anxiety. Benzodiazepines help to reduce anxiety by stimulating the GABA neurotransmitter system. Common benzodiazepines include alprazolam (Xanax), clonazepam (Klonopin), and diazepam (Valium). Two classes of antidepressant drugs—tricyclics and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) - also have proven effective in treating certain anxiety disorders.
Benzodiazepines can work quickly with few unpleasant side effects, but they can also be addictive. In addition, benzodiazepines can slow down or impair motor behaviour or thinking and must be used with caution, particularly in elderly persons. SSRIs take longer to work than the benzodiazepines but are not addictive. Some people experience anxiety symptoms again when they stop taking the medications.
Therapists who attribute the cause of anxiety to unconscious, internal conflicts may use psychoanalysis to assist in filling the ‘gap’ with which people and their added understanding and resolve their conflicts, other types of psychotherapy, such as cognitive-behavioural therapy, have proven effective in treating anxiety disorders. In cognitive-behavioural therapy, the therapist often educates the person about the nature of their particular anxiety disorder. Then, the therapist may help the person challenge, but irrational thoughts that lead to anxiety. For example, to treat a person with a snake phobia, a therapist might gradually expose the person to snakes, beginning with pictures of snakes and progressing to rubber snakes and real snakes. The patient can use relaxation techniques acquired in therapy to overcome the fear of snakes.
Research has shown psychotherapy to be as effective or more effective than medications in treating many anxiety disorders. Psychotherapy may also provide more lasting benefits than medications when patients discontinue treatment.
Unconscious, in psychology, hypothetical region of the mind containing wishes, memories, fears, feelings, and ideas that are prevented from expression in conscious awareness. They manifest themselves, instead, by their influence on conscious processes and, most strikingly, by such anomalous phenomena as dreams and neurotic symptoms. Not all mental activity of which the subject is unaware belongs to the unconscious; for example, thoughts that may be made conscious by a new focussing of attention are termed foreconscious or preconscious.
The concept of the unconscious was first developed in the period from 1895 to 1900 by Sigmund Freud, who theorized that it consists of survivals of feelings experienced during infantile life, including both instinctual drives or libido and their modifications by the development of the superego. According to the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, the unconscious also consists of a racial unconscious that contains certain inherited, universal, archaic fantasies belonging to what Jung termed the collective unconscious.
A defining understanding of the states of consciousness is not at all simple, is agreed-upon definition of consciousness exists. Attempted definitions tend to be tautological (for example, consciousness defined as awareness) or merely descriptive (for example, consciousness described as sensations, thoughts, or feelings). Despite this problem of definition, the subject of consciousness has had a remarkable history. At one time the primary subject matter of psychology, consciousness as an area of study, that the idea that something conveys to the mind, from which of critics has endlessly debated the meaning of the ascribing interactions that otherwise to ascertain the quality, mass, extent or degree of terminological statements that its standard unit or mixed distributive analysis, is such, that a conceptualized form of its reasons to posit of a direct interpretation whose interference became of the total demise, even so, there is the result reemerging to become a topic of current interests.
Most of the philosophical discussions of consciousness arose from the mind-body issues posed by the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes in the 17th century. Descartes asked: Is the mind, or consciousness, independent of matter? Is consciousness extended (physical) or unextended (nonphysical)? Is consciousness determinative, or is it determined? English philosophers such as John Locke equated consciousness with physical sensations and the information they provide, whereas European philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant gave a more central and active role to consciousness.
The philosopher who most directly influenced subsequent exploration of the subject of consciousness was the 19th-century German educator Johann Friedrich Herbart, who wrote that ideas had quality and intensity and that they may suppress or may facilitate or place of one another. Thus, ideas may pass from ‘states of reality’ (consciousness) to ‘states of tendency’ (unconsciousness), with the dividing line between the two states being described as the threshold of consciousness. This formulation of Herbart clearly presages the development, by the German psychologist and physiologist Gustav Theodor Fechner, of the psychophysical measurement of sensation thresholds, and the later development by Sigmund Freud of the concept of the unconscious.
The experimental analysis of consciousness dates from 1879, when the German psychologist Wilhelm Max Wundt started his research laboratory. For Wundt, the task of psychology was the study of the structure of consciousness, which extended well beyond sensations and included feelings, images, memory, attention, duration, and movement. Because early interest focussed on the content and dynamics of consciousness, it is not surprising that the central methodology of such studies was introspection; that is, subjects reported on the mental contents of their own consciousness. This introspective approach was developed most fully by the American psychologist Edward Bradford Titchener at Cornell University. Setting his task as that of describing the structure of the mind, Titchener attempted to detail, from introspective self-reports, the dimensions of the elements of consciousness. For example, taste was ‘dimensionalized’ into four basic categories: sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. This approach was known as structuralism.
By the 1920's, however, a remarkable revolution had occurred in psychology that was to essentially remove considerations of consciousness from psychological research for some 50 years: Behaviourism captured the field of psychology. The main initiator of this movement was the American psychologist John Broadus Watson. In a 1913 article, Watson stated, ‘I believe that we can write of some psychology and never use the term’s consciousness, mental states, mind . . . imagery and the like.’ Psychologists then turned almost exclusively to behaviour, as described in terms of stimulus and response, and consciousness was totally bypassed as a subject. A survey of eight leading introductory psychology texts published between 1930 and the 1950's found no mention of the topic of consciousness in five texts, and in two it was treated as a historical curiosity.
Beginning in the later part of the 1950s, are, however, the grounded interests in the foundational subject of consciousness, for returning from its absence were subjects and techniques relating to altered states of consciousness: sleep and dreams, meditation, biofeedback, hypnosis, and drug-induced states. Much in the surge in sleep and dream research was directly fuelled by a discovery relevant to the nature of consciousness. A physiological indicator of the dream state was found: At roughly 90-minute intervals, the eyes of sleepers were observed to move rapidly, and at the same time the sleepers' brain waves would show a pattern resembling the waking state. When people were awakened during these periods of rapid eye movement, they almost always reported dreams, whereas if awakened at other times they did not. This and other research clearly indicated that sleep, once considered a passive state, were instead an active state of consciousness.
American psychiatrist William Glasser developed reality therapy in the 1960s, after working with teenage girls in a correctional institution and observing work with severely disturbed schizophrenic patients in a mental hospital. He observed that psychoanalysis did not help many of his patients change their behaviour, even when they understood the sources of it. Glasser felt it was important to help individuals take responsibility for their own lives and to blame others less. Largely because of this emphasis on personal responsibility, his approach has found widespread acceptance among drugs - and alcohol-abuse counsellor’s, correction’s workers, school counsellors, and those working with clients who may be disruptive to others.
Reality therapy is based on the premise that all human behaviour is motivated by fundamental needs and specific wants. The reality therapist first seeks to establish a friendly, trusting relationship with clients in which they can express their needs and wants. Then the therapist helps clients explore the behaviours that created problems for them. Clients are encouraged to examine the consequences of their behaviour and to evaluate how well their behaviour helped them fulfill their wants. The therapist does not accept excuses from clients. Finally, the therapist helps the client formulate a concrete plan of action to change certain behaviours, based on the client’s own goals and ability to make choices.
During the 1960's, an increased search for ‘higher levels’ of consciousness through meditation resulted in a growing interest in the practices of Zen Buddhism and Yoga from Eastern cultures. A full flowering of this movement in the United States was seen in the development of training programs, such as Transcendental Meditation, that were self-directed procedures of physical relaxation and focussed attention. Biofeedback techniques also were developed to bring body systems involving factors such as blood pressure or temperature under voluntary control by providing feedback from the body, so that subjects could learn to control their responses. For example, researchers found that persons could control their brain-wave patterns to some extent, particularly the so-called alpha rhythms generally associated with a relaxed, meditative state. This finding was especially relevant to those interested in consciousness and meditation, and a number of ‘alpha training’ programs emerged.
Another subject that led to increased interest in altered states of consciousness was hypnosis, which involves a transfer of conscious control from the character interpretation belonging in the dependent sector, whose occasions, as basic of an idea or the principal object of attention, in the course of its immediate composition, and like the substance to a particular individual finds to the subject that the modification as when of transferring to that of another person. Hypnotism has had a long and intricate history in medicine and folklore and has been intensively studied by psychologists. Much has become known about the hypnotic state, relative to individual suggestibility and personality traits; the subject has now largely been demythologized, and the limitations of the hypnotic state are fairly well known. Despite the increasing use of hypnosis, however, much remains to be learned about this unusual state of focussed attention.
Finally, many people in the 1960's experimented with the psychoactive drugs known as hallucinogens, which produce deranging disorder of consciousness. The most prominent of these drugs is lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD; mescaline; and psilocybin; the latter two have long been associated with religious ceremonies in various cultures. LSD, because of its radical thought-modifying properties, was initially explored for its so-called mind-expanding potential and for its psychotomimetic effects (imitating psychoses). Little positive use, however, has been found for these drugs, and their use is highly restricted.
Scientists have long considered the nature of consciousness without producing a fully satisfactory definition. In the early 20th century American philosopher and psychologist William James suggested that consciousness is a mental process involving both attention to external stimuli and short-term memory. Later scientific explorations of consciousness mostly expanded upon James’s work. In the article from a 1997 special issue of Scientific American, Nobel laureate Francis Crick, who helped determine the structure of DNA, and fellow biophysicist Christof Koch explains how experiments on vision might deepen our understanding of consciousness.
As the concept of a direct, simple linkage between environment and behaviour became unsatisfactory in recent decades, the interest in altered states of consciousness may be taken as a visible sign of renewed interest in the topic of consciousness. That persons are active and intervening participants in their behaviour has become increasingly clear. Environments, rewards, and punishments are not simply defined by their physical character. Memories are organized, not simply stored, an entirely new area called cognitive psychology has emerged that centre on these concerns. In the study of children, increased attention is being paid to how they understand, or perceive, the world at different ages. In the field of animal behaviour, researchers increasingly emphasize the inherent characteristics resulting from the way a species has been shaped to respond adaptively to the environment. Humanistic psychologists, with a concern for self-actualization and growth, have emerged after a long period of silence. Throughout the development of clinical and industrial psychology, the conscious states of persons in terms of their current feelings and thoughts were of obvious importance. The role of consciousness, however, was often de-emphasised in favour of unconscious needs and motivations. Trends can be seen, however, toward a new emphasis on the nature of states of consciousness.
We have used the term ‘transference’ several times, in that we attributed the therapeutic results to the transference without further definition of the word. We will now consider more closely the emotional relationship which is thus designed. During a psychoanalytic treatment, the patient allows the analyst to play a predominating role in his emotional life. This is of great importance in the analytic process. After his treatment is over, this situation is changed. The patient builds up feelings of affection for and resistance to his analyst which, in their ebb and flow, so exceed the normal degree of feeling that the phenomenon has long attracted the theoretical interest of the analyst. Freud studied this phenomenon thoroughly, explained it, and gave it the name ‘transference’, we most probably will understand the significance of the transference phenomenon impressed Freud so profoundly that he continued through the years to develop his ideas about it.
In all afforded efforts, to refuse to consider the demise of forebears as too merely disdain, that we cannot reproduce of all Freud’s research about transference but for an instance of obligation, would be used to indicate the requirement by the immediate need or purpose upon such condition that might point beyond a normal or acceptable limit, as to an excessive amount of which something does not or cannot extend to their essentials. When we speak of the transference in connexion with social reeducation, we mean the emotional responses of the education or counsellor or therapist, as the case maybe, without meaning that it takes place in exactly the same way as in an analysis. The ‘countertransference‘ is emotional aptitude of the teacher toward the pupil, the counsellor toward his charge, the therapist toward the patient. The feeling which the child develops for the mentor is conditioned by a much earlier relationship to someone else. We must take cognisance of this fact in order to understand these relationships. The tender relationships which go to up the child’s love life are no longer strange to us. Many of these have already been touched upon in the foregoing literature. We have learned how the small boy takes the father and mother as love objects. We have followed the strivings which arise out of this relationship, the Oedipus situation, we have seen how this runs its course and terminates in an identification with the parents. We have also had opportunity to consider the relationship between brothers and sisters, how their original rivalry is transformed into affection through the pressure of their feeling for the parents. We know that the boy at puberty must give up his first love object within the family and transfers his libido to individuals outside the family.
Our present purpose is to consider the effects of these first experiences from a certain angle. The child’s attachment to the family, the continuance and the subsequent dissolution of these love relationships within the family, not only leave a deep effect on the child through the resulting identifications, they determine at the same the actual forms of this love relationships in the future. Freud compares these forms, without implying too great a rigidity, to copper plates for engraving. He has shown that in the emotional relationships of our later life we can do nothing but make an imprint from one or another of these patterns which we have established in early childhood.
Why Freud chose the term ‘transference’ for the emotional relationship between patient and analyst is easy to understand. The feelings which arose long ago in another situation are transferred upon the analyst. To the counsellor of the child, the knowledge of the transference mechanism is indispensable. In order to influence the dissocial behaviour, he must bring his charge into the transference situation. The study of the transference in the dissocial child shows regularly a love life that has been disturbed in early childhood by a lack of affection or an undue amount of affection. A satisfactory social adjustment depends on certain conditions, among them an adequate constitutional endowment and early love relationships which have been confined within certain limits. Society determines these limitations, just as definitely as the later love life of an individual is determined by early form his libidinal development. The child develops normally and assumes his proper place in society, if he can cultivate within the privacy to such relationships as can favourably be carried over into the schools and from there into the ever-broadening world around him. His attitude toward his parents must be such that it can be carried over onto the teacher, and that toward his brothers and sisters must be transferred to his schoolmates. Every new contact, according to the degree of authority or maturity which the person represents, repeats a previous relationship with very little deviation. People whose early adjustment to succeed or supervene from such a normative course have no difficulties in their emotional relations with others, and they are able to form new ties, to deepen them, or to break them off without conflict when the situation demands it.
We can easily see why an attempt to change the present order of society always meets with resistance and where the radical reformer will have to use the greatest leverage. Our attitude to society and its members has a certain standard form. It gets its imprint from the structure of the family and the emotional relationships set up within the family, therefore, the parents, especially the father, assume overwhelming responsibility for the social orientation of the child. The persistent, ineradicable libidinal relationships carried over from childhood are facts with which social reformers must reckon. If the family represents the best preparation for the present social order, which seems to be the case, then the introduction of a new order means that the family must be uprooted and replaced by a different personal world for the child. It is beyond our scope to attempt a solution of this question, which concerns those who strive to build up a new order of society. We are remedial educators and must recognize these sociological relationships. We can ally ourselves with whatever social system will, but we have the path of our present activity well marked out for us, to bring dissocial youth into the line with present-day society.
If the child is harmed through too great disappointment or too great indulgence in his early life, he builds up reaction patterns which are damaged, incomplete, or too delicate to support the wear and tear of life. He is incapable of forming libidinal object relationships which are considered normal by society. His unpreparedness for life, his inability to regulate his conscious and unconscious libidinal striving and to confine his libidinal expectations within normal bounds, creates an insecurity in relation to his fellow men and constitute one of the first and most important condition’s fo r their development of delinquency. Following this point of view, we look for the primary causes of dissocial behaviour in early childhood, where the abnormal libidinal ties are established. The word ‘delinquency’ is an expression used to describe a relationship to people and things which are at variance with what society approve in the individual.
It is not immediately clear, from which are pointed from the particular form of the delinquency, just what libidinal disturbances in childhood have given rise to the dissocial expression. Until we have a psychoanalytically construed scheme for the diagnosis of delinquency, we may content ourselves by separating these forms into two groups: (1) Borderline neurosis cases with dissocial symptoms, and (2) dissocial cases for which are in part, the ego giving to develop of the dissocial behaviour, and showing no trace of neurosis. In the first type, the individual finds himself in an inner conflict because of the nature of his love relationships, a part of his own personality forbids the indulgence of libidinal desires and strivings. The dissocial behaviour results from this conflict. In the second type, the individual finds himself in open conflict with his environment, because the outer world has frustrated his childish libidinal desires.
The differences in the forms of dissocial behaviour are important for many reasons. At present, they are significant to us because of the various ways in which the transference is established in these two types, we know that with a normal child the transference takes place of itself through the kindly efforts of the responsible adult. The teacher in his attitude repeats the situations long familiarly to the child, and thereby evokes a parental relationship. He does not maintain this relationship at the same level, but continually deepens it as long as he is the parental substitute.
When a neurotic child with symptoms of delinquency comes into the institution, the tendencies to transfer his attitude toward his parents to the persons in authority are immediately noticeable. The worker will adopt the same attitude toward the dissocial child as to the normal child, and bring him into positive transference, if he acts toward him in such a way as to prevent a repetition with the worker of the situation with the parents which led to the conflict. In psychoanalysis, on the other hand, it is of greatest importance to let this situation repeat itself. In a sense the worker becomes the father or the mother, but still not wholly so, he represents their claims, but in the right moment he must let the dissocial child know that he has insight into his difficulties and that he will not interpret the behaviour in the same way as do the parents. He will respond to the child’s feeling of a need for punishment, but he will not completely satisfy it.
He will conduct in himself be entirely differently in the case of the child who in open conflict with society. In this instance he must take the child’s part, be in agreement with his behaviour, and in the severest cases even give the child to understand that in his place he would behave just the same way. The guilt feelings found so clearly in the neurotic cases with dissocial behaviour are present in these cases also. These feelings do not arise, however, from the dissocial ego, but have another source.
Why does the educator conduct himself differently in dealing with this second type? These children, too, he must draw into a positive transference to him, but what is applicable and appropriate for a normal or a neurotic child would achieve opposite results. Otherwise the worker would bring upon himself all the hate and aggression which the child bears toward society, thus leading the child into a negative instead of positive transference, and creating a situation in which the child is not amenable to training.
Nevertheless, what was said about psychoanalysis theory is only a bare outline, that much deeper study of the transference is necessary to anyone interested in re-educational work from the psychoanalytic point of view. The practical application of this theory is not easy, since we deal mostly with mixed types, such that the attitude of the counsellor cannot be as uniform as having enough verbal descriptions for evincing of individual forms of dissociated behaviour to enable us to offer detailed instructions about how to deal with them. At present our psychoanalytic knowledge is such that a correct procedure cannot be stated specifically for each and every dissocial individual.
The necessity for bringing the child into a good relationship to his mentor is of prime importance. The worker cannot leave this to chance, he must deliberately achieve it and he must face the fact thus no effective work is possible without it. It is important for him to grasp the psychic situation of the dissocial child in the very first contact he makes with him, because only this can be known in what attitude to adopt. There is a further difficulty in that the dissocial child takes pains to hide his real nature: He misrepresents himself and lies. This is to be taken for granted, it should not surprise or upset us. Dissocial children do not come to us of their own volition but are brought to us, very often with the threat, ‘You’ll soon find out what’s going to happen to you.’ Generally parents resort our help only after every other means, including corporal punishment, have failed. To the child, we are only another form of punishment, an enemy against whom he must be on his guard, not a source of help to him. There is a great difference between this and the psychoanalytic situation, where the patient comes voluntarily for helping. To the dissocial child, we are a menace because we represent society, with which he is in conflict. He must protect himself against this terrible danger and be careful what he says in order not to give himself away. It is hard to make some of these delinquent children talk, remain unresponsive and stubborn. One thing they all have in common: They do not tell the truth. Some lie stupidly, pitiably, others, especially the older ones, show great skill and sophistication. The extremely submissive child, the ‘dandily’, the very jovial, or the exaggeratedly sincere, some especially hard to reach. This behaviour is so much to be expected that we are not surprised or disarmed by it, the inexperienced teacher or adviser is easily irritated, especially when the lies are transparent, but he must not let the child be aware of this. He must deal with the situation immediately without telling the child that he can see that coming through were attributive values about his attitudinal behaviours.
There is nothing remarkable in the behaviour of the dissocial, but it differs only quantitatively from normal behaviour. We all hide our real selves and use a great deal of psychic energy to mislead our neighbours. We masquerade more or less, according to necessity. Most of us learn in the nursery the necessity of presenting ourselves in accordance with the environmental demands, and thus we consciously or unconsciously build up a shell around ourselves. Anyone who has had experience with young children must have noticed how they immediately begin to dissimulate when a grown-up comes into the room. Most children succeed in behaving in the manner which they think is expected of them. Thus they lessen the danger to themselves and at the same time they are casting the permanent moulds of their mannerisms and their behaviour. How many parents really bother themselves about the inner life of their children? Is this mask necessarily for life? I do not know, but it often seems that the person on whom childhood experiences have forced the dissocial individual masquerades to a greater extent, and more consciously, then the normal. He is only drawing logical deductions from his unfortunate disagreeable authority? Why should he be sincere with those people who represent disagreeable authority? This is an unfair demand.
We must look further into the differences between the situation of social retraining and the analytic situation. The analyst expects to meet in his patient unconscious remittances which prevent him from being honest or make him silent: But the treatment is in vain when the patient lies persistently. Those who work with dissocial children expect to be lied to. To send this child away because he lies are only giving in to him. We must wait and hope to penetrate this mask which covers the really psychic situation. In the institution it does not matter if this is not achieved immediately, it means merely that the establishment of the transference is postponed. In the clinic, however, we must work more quickly. Taking with the patient does not always suffice, and we must introduce other remedial measures. Generally, we see the delinquent child, only, in at least as infrequent to a smattering of times, but we are forced to take some steps after the first few interviews, to formulate some tentative conception of the difficulty and to establish a positive transference as quickly as possible. This means we must get at least a peep behind the mask. If the child is not put in an institution, he remains in the old situation under the same influences which caused the trouble. In such cases we wish to establish the transference as quickly as possible, to intensify the child`s positive feelings for us that are aroused while the child is with us, and to bring them rapidly to such a pitch that they can no longer be easily disturbed by the old influences. To carry on such work successfully presupposes a long experience.
Let us now violate our theoretical concerns and considerations and see how the analyst and the patient seek to grasp upon a try to solve situational thoughts for which the transference, and, moreover, its mask on which can be understood that feelings and a better understanding the differentiation that intentionality that allies with others and exclusively its need to achieve to some end.
Even so, there are few current problems concerning the problem of transference that Freud did not recognize either implicitly or explicitly in the development of the theoretical and clinical framework. For all essential purposes, moreover, his formulations, in spite of certain shifts in emphasis, remain integral to contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. Recent developments mainly concern the impact of an ego-psychological approach, the significance of object relations, both current and infantile, external and internal, the role of aggression in mental life, and the part played by regression and the repetition compulsion in the transference. Nevertheless, analysis of the infantile Oedipal situation in the setting of a genuine transference neurosis is still considered as a primary goal of psychoanalytic procedure.
Originally, transference was ascribed to displacement on the analyst of repressed wishes and fantasies derived from early childhood. The transference neurosis was viewed as a compromise formulation similar to dreams and other neurotic symptoms. Resistance, defined as the clinical manifestation of repression, could be diminished or abolished by interpretation mainly directed toward the content of the repressed. Transference resistance, both positive and negative, was inscribed to the threatened emergence of repressed unconscious material in the analytic situation. Presently, as with the development of a structural approach, the superego had been portrayed as the heir to the genital Oedipal situation, also was the recognition as playing a leading role in the transference situation. The analysis was subsequently viewed not only as the object by displacement of infantile incestuous fantasies, but also as the substitute by projection for the prohibiting parental figures which had been internalized as the definitive superego. The effect of transference interpretation in mitigating undue severity of the superego has, therefore, been emphasized in many discussions of the concept of transference.
Certain expansions in the structural approach related increasingly to the recognition of the role that had earlier objective relations, in the development of the superego. This had affected the current concepts of transference, in that this connection, the significance of the analytic situation as a repetition of the early mother-child relationship has been stressed from different points for viewing to such equally important developments related to Freud’s revised concept of anxiety which can only lead to theoretical developments in the field of ego psychology. However, this brought about their related clinical changes in the work of many analysts. As a result, attention was no longer the main attraction that had focussed on the content of the unconscious. In addition, increasing importance was attributed to the defence processes by means of which the anxiety which would be engendered if repression and other related mechanisms were broken down, was avoided in the analytic situation. Differences in the interpretation of the role of the analyst and the nature of transference developed from emphasis, on the one hand, on the importance of early object relations, and on the other, from primary attention to the role of the ego and its defences. These defences first emerged clearly in discussion of the technique of child analysis, in which Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, the pioneers in the fields of thought as playing the leading roles.
From a theoretical point of view, discussion foreshadowing the problems which face us today was presented in 1934 in a well-known paper by Richard Sterba and James Strachey, and further elaborated at the Marienbad Symposium at which Edward Bibring made an important contribution. The importance of identification with, or introjection of, the analyst in the transference situation of identification with, or introjection of, the analysts in the transference situation were clearly indicated. The therapeutic results were attributed to the effect of this process In mitigating the need for pathological defences. Strachey, however, considerably influenced by the work of Melanie Klein, regarded transference as essentially a projection onto the analyst of the patient’s own superego. The therapeutic process was attributed to subsequent introjection of a modified superego as a result of ‘mutative’ transference. Sterba and Bibring, on the other hand, intimately involved with development of the ego-psychological approach, reemphasised the central role of the ego, postulating a therapeutic split and identification with the analyst as an essential feature of transference. To some extent, this difference of opinion may be regarded as semantic. If the superego is explicitly defined as the heir of the genital Oedipus conflict, then earlier intra-systematic conflicts within the ego, although they may be related retrospectively to the definite superego, much, nevertheless, are defined as contained within the ego. Later divisions within the ego of the type indicated by Sterba and very much expanded by Edward Bibring in his concept of therapeutic alliance between the analyst and the healthy part of the patient’s ego, must also be excluded from superego significance. In contrast, those whom attribute pregenital intra-systemic conflicts within the ego primarily to the introjection of objects, consider that the resultant state of internal conflict appears like the dynamic idea that something conveys to the mind as having an endless meaning attached to the coherence of the therapeutic situation and seen in the later conflicts between ego and superego. They, therefore, believe that these structures developed simultaneously and suggest that no sharp distinction should be made between pre-oedipal, oedipal, and post-oedipal superego.
The differences, however, are not entirely verbal, since those whom attribute superego formations to the early months of life tend to attribute significantly too early object relation which differs from the conception of those who stress control and, neutralization of instinctual energy as primary functions of the ego. This theoretical difference necessarily implies some disagreement as how the dynamic situation both in childhood and in adult life, inevitably reflected in the concept of transference and in hypotheses as to the hidden nature of the therapeutic process. From one point of view, the role of the ego is central and crucial at every phase of analysis. A differentiation is made between transference as therapeutic alliance and the transference neurosis, which, on the whole, is considered a manifestation of resistance. Effective analysis depends on a sound and stable therapeutic alliance, a prerequisite for which is the existence, before analysis, of a degree of mature superego functions, the absence of which in certain severely disturbed patients and in young children may preclude traditional psychoanalytic procedure. Whenever indicated, interpretation’s manifestations, which means, in effect, that the transference must be analysed. The process of analysis, however, is not exclusively ascribed to transference interpretation. Other interpretations of unconscious material, whether related to defence or to early fantasies, will be equally effective provided they are accurately timed and provide a satisfactory therapeutic alliance has been made. Those, in contrast, whom stress the importance of early object relations emphasizes the crucial role of transference as an object relationship, distorted though this may be of a variety of defences against primitively unresolved conflicts. The central role of the ego, both in the early stages of development and in the analytic process, are definitely accepted. The hidden nature of the ego is, however, considered at all times to be determined by its external and internal objects. Therapeutic process indicated changes in ego function results, therefore, primarily from a change in object relations though interpretation of the transference situation, finds of less differentiation as made between transference as for being the therapeutic alliance and transference neurosis as a manifestation of resistance. Therapeutic progress depends almost exclusively on transference interpretation. Other interpretations, although at times, are not, in general, considered an essential feature of the analytic process. From this point of view, the preanalytic maturity of the patient’s ego is not stressed as considered potentially suitable for traditional psychoanalytic procedure.
These differences in theoretical orientation are not only reflected in the approach to children and disturbed patients. They may also be recognized in significant variations of technique in respect to all clinical groups, which inevitably affect the opening phases, understanding of the inevitable regressive features of the transference neurosis, and handling of the germinal phases of analysis. By its emphasis as drawn on or upon the main problems, and, by contrast, rather than similarity, our efforts will be to avoid to detailed discussions of controversial theory regarding the hidden nature of early ego development by a somewhat arbitrary differentiation between those who relate ego analysis to the analysis of defences and those who stress the primary significance of object relations both in the transference, and in the development and definitive structure of the ego. Needless to say, this involves some oversimplification, where I hope that it may, at the same time, clarify certain important issues. To take, on or upon the analysis of patients we are generally agreeing to be suitable for classical analytic procedure, the transference neurosis. Those which emphasis the role of the ego and the analysis of defences, not only maintain Freud’s conviction that analysis should proceed from surface to depth, but also consider that early material in the analytic situation derives, that, in general, from defensive processes rather than from displacement onto the analyst of early instinctual fantasies. Deep transference interpretation in the early instinctual fantasies. Deep transference interpretation in the early phases of analysis will, therefore, rather be meaningless to the patient since its unconscious significance is so inaccessible, or, if the defences are precarious, will lead to premature and possibly intolerable anxiety. Premature interpretation of the equally unconscious automatic defensive processes by means of which instinctual fantasy kept unconscious is also ineffective and undesirable. There are, nonetheless, differences of opinion within this group, as to how far analysis of defence can be separated from analysis of content. Waelder, for example, has stressed the impossibility of such separation. Fenichel, however, considered that at least theoretical separation should be made and indicated that, as far as possible, analysis of defence should precede analysis of unconscious fantasy. It is, nevertheless, generally agreed that the transference neurosis develops, as a rule after ego defences have been sufficiently undermined to mobilize previously hidden instinctual conflict. During both the early stages of analysis, and at frequent points after development of the transference neurosis, defences against the transference will become a main feature of the analytic situation.
This approach, has already been indicated, is based on certain definite premises regarding the hidden natures and function of the ego in respect to the control and neutralization of instinctual energy and unconscious fantasies, while the importance of early object relations is not neglected, the conviction that early transference interpretation is ineffective and potentially relations are not neglected, the conviction and unconscious fantasy. The conviction that early transference interpretation is ineffective and potentially dangerous is related to the hypothesis that the instinctual energy available to the mature ego has been neutralized from unconscious fantasies, meaning at the beginning of analysis, for all effective purposes, relatively or absolutely divorced from its unconscious fantasy, as yet, there are a number of analysts of differing theoretical orientation of ego function from unconscious sources, but consider that unconscious fantasy continues to operate in all conscious mental activity. The analysts also construct upon the whole of their existing in the emphasis to the crucial significance of primitive fantasies, in respect to the development of the transference situation. The individual entering analysis will inevitably have unconscious fantasies concerning the analyst derived from primitive sources. This material, although deep in a sense, is, nevertheless, strongly current and accessible to interpretation. Klein, in addition, creates the development and definitive structure of the superego to unconscious fantasy determined by the earliest phases of object relationships. She emphasizes the role of early introjective and projective processes in relation to primitive anxiety ascribed to the death instinct and related aggression drive fantasies. The unresolved difficulties and conflict of the earliest period continue to colour object relations throughout life. Failure to achieve an essentially satisfactory object relationship in this early period, and failure to master relative loss of that object without retaining its good internal representative, will not only affect all object relations and definitive ego function, but more specifically determine the nature of anxiety-provoking fantasies on entering the analytic situation. According to this point of view, therefore, early transference uninterpreted, even thought it may relate to fantasies derived from an early period of life, should result not in an increase, but a decrease of anxiety
In considering next problems of transference in relation to analysis of the transference neurosis, two main points must be kept in mind. First, as already indicated, those who emphasize the analysis of defence tend to make a definite differentiation between transference as therapeutic alliance and the transference neurosis as a compromise formation which serves the purposes of resistance. In contrast, those who emphasize the importance of early object relations view the transference primarily as a revival or repetition, sometimes attributed to symbolic processes of early struggles in respect to objects. Still, there is no sharp differentiation made between the early manifestations of transference and the transference neurosis. In view, moreover, of the weight given to the role of unconscious fantasy and internal objects in every phase of mental life, healthy and pathological functions, though differing in essential respect, do not differ with regard to their direct dependence on unconscious sources.
In the second place, the role of regression in the transference situation is subject to wide differences of opinion. It was, of course, one of Freud’s earliest discoveries that regression had of its earliest points of fixation, and is a cardinal feature, not only in the development of neurosis and psychosis, but also in the revival of earlier conflicts in the transference situation. With the development of psychoanalysis and its application to an ever increasing range of received increased attention. The significance of the analytic situation as a means of fostering regression as a prerequisite for the therapeutic work has been emphasized by Ida Macapline in a recent paper. Differing opinions as to the significance, value, and technical handling of regressive manifestoes from the basis of important modifications of analytic technique, which will be considered, however, in respect to the transference neurosis, the view recently expressed by Phyllis Greenacre, that regression, and indispensable features would be generally accepted. It is also a matter of generally based agreement that a prerequisite for successful analysis is revival and repetition in the analytic situation of the struggle of primitive stages of development. Those who emphasize defence analysis, however, tend to view regression as a manifestation of resistance, as a primitive mechanism of defence employed by the growth sets of the transference neurosis. Analysis of these regressive manifestations with their potential dangers depends on the existing and continued functioning of adequate ego strength to maintain therapeutic alliance at an adult level. Those, in contrast, who stress the significance of transference as a revival of the early mother-child relationship does not emphasize regression as an indication of resistance or defence, the revival of these primitive experiences in the transference situation is, in fact, regarded as can essential prerequisite for satisfactory psychological maturation and true geniality. The Kleinian school, as already indicated features the continued activity of primitive conflicts in determining essential features of the transference at every stage of analysis. Their increasing overt revival in the analytic situation, therefore, signifies a reopening of the analysis, and in general, is regarded as an indication of diminuation rather than increase of resistance. The dangers involved according to this point of view and are determined more but to the failure to mitigate anxiety by suitable transference interpretation. By this failure to obtainably achieve, in the early phases of analysis, a sound and stabling therapeutic alliance is based on the maturity of the patient’s essential ego characteristics.
In considering, briefly, the terminal phases of analysis, many unresolved problems concerning the goal of the therapy and definition of a completed psychoanalysis must be kept in mind. Distinction must also be made between the technical problems of the terminal phase and evaluation of transference after the analysis has been terminated, there is widespread agreement as to the frequent revival in the terminal phases of primitive transference manifestations apparently resolved during the early phases of primitive transference manifestation, apparently resolved during the early phase of analysis has been terminated. Balint, and those who accept Ferenczi’s concept of primary passive love, suggest that some gratification of primitive passive needs may be essential for successful termination. To Klein, the terminal phases of analysis also represent a repetition of important features of the early mother-child relationship. According to her point of view, this period represents, in essence, a revival of the early weaning situation. Completion depends on a mastery of early depressive struggles culminating in successful introjection of the analysis as a good object. Although, in this connection, emphasis differs considerably, it should be noted that those who stress the importance of identification with the analyst as a basis for therapeutic alliance, also accept the inevitability of some permanent modifications of a similar nature. Those, however, who make a definite differentiation between transference of the transference neurosis as a main prerequisite for successful termination. The identification based on therapeutic alliance must be interpreted and understood, particularly with reference to the reality aspects of the analyst’s personality. In spite, therefore, of significant important differences there are, as already indicated in connection with the earlier papers of Sterba and Strachey, important points of agreement in respect to the goal of psychoanalysis.
The differences already considered indicate some basic current problems of transference. So far, however, discussion has been limited to variations within the framework of a traditional technique. We must consider problems related to overt modifications, so as the essential expanding context of use between variations introduced in respect to certain clinical conditions. Often as a preliminary to classical psychoanalysis, and modifications based on changes on basic approach which lead to significant alterations with regard both to the method and to the aim of therapy. It is generally agreed that some neurosis, borderline patients and the psychosis. The nature and meaning of such changes are, however, viewed differently according to the relative emphasis placed on the ego and its defences, on underlying unconscious conflicts, and on the significance and handling of regression in the therapeutic situation.
In ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, Freud suggested that certainly inaccessible to psychoanalytic procedure. Hartmann has suggested that in addition to these primary attributes, other ego characteristics, originally develop for defensive purposes, and the related neutralized instinctual energy at the disposal of the ego, may be relatively or absolutely divorced from unconscious fantasy. This not only explains the relative inefficacy of early transference interpretation, but also hints of possible limitations in the potentialities of analysis attributable to secondary autonomy of the ego which is considered to be relatively irreversible. In certain cases, moreover, it is suggested that analysis of precarious or seriously pathological defences - particularly those concerned of aggressive impulses - may be not only ineffective, but dangerous. The relative failure of ego development in such cases not only precludes the development of a genuine therapeutic alliance, but also raises the risk of a serious regressive, often predominantly hostile transference situation. In certain cases, therefore, preliminary period of psychotherapy is recommended in order to explore the capacities of the patient to tolerate traditional psychoanalysis. In others, as Robert Knight in his paper on borderline states, and as many analysts’ working with psychotic patients have suggested, psychoanalytic procedure is not considered applicable. Instead, a therapeutic approach based on analytic understanding which, in essence, utilizes an essentially implicit positive transference as a means of reinforcing, rather than analysing the precarious defences of the individual, is advocated. In contrast, Herbert Rosenfeld approached even severely disturbed psychotic patients with minimal modifications of psychoanalytic techniques. Only changes which the severity of the patient’s condition enforces are introduced. The dangers of regression in therapy are not emphasized since primitive fantasy is considered to be active under all circumstances. The most primitive period is viewed in terms of early object relations with special stress on prosecutory anxiety related to the death instinct. Interpretation of this primitive fantasy in the transference situation, is best offered the opportunity of strengthening the severity-threatened psychosis mainly to serve traumatic experiences, particularly of deprivation in early infancy. According to this point of view, profound regression offers an opportunity to fulfil, in the transference situation, primitive needs which had not been met at the appropriate level of development. Similar suggestions have been proposed by Margolin and others, in the concept of anaclitic treatment. Serious psychosomatic diseases, that approach the premise that the inevitable regression is shown by certain patients and should be utilized in therapy, as a means for gratifying, in their extremely permissive transference situation. Having distinctive or certain limits in the burdensome instant for demanding to that which has not been met in infancy, as this must, in the connection of being taken to understand that the gratifications recommended in the treatment of severely disturbed patients are determined by their conviction. Of these patients are incapable of developing transference as we understand it, in the connection with neurosis and must therefore be handled by a modified technique.
The opinions so far considered, however, much of them, as mine differ in certain respects, are, nonetheless, all based on the fundamental premise that an essential difference between analysis and other methods of therapy depends on whether or not interpretation of transference is an integral feature of technical procedure. Results based on the effects of suggestions are to be avoided, as far as possible, whenever traditional technique is employed. This goal has, however, tp establish a point by appropriate objective means, that corroborated evidence that proved the need for better a state of being even more difficult to achieve than Freud expected when he first discerned the significance of symptomatic recovery based on positive transference. The importance of suggestion, even in the most strict analytic methods, has been repeatedly stressed by Edward Glover and others. Widespread and increasing emphasis as to the part played by the analyst’s personality in determining the nature of the individual transference also implies recognition of unavoidable suggestive tendencies in the therapeutic process. Many analysts today believe that the classical conception of analytic objectivity and anonymity cannot be maintained. Instead, thorough analysis of reality aspects of the therapist’s personality and point of view is advocated as an essential feature of transference analysis and an indispensable prerequisite for the dynamic changes already discussed in relation to the termination of analysis. It thus remains the ultimate goal of psychoanalyst’s whenever their theoretical orientation, to avoid, as far as is humanly possible, results based on the unrecognized or unanalysed action of suggestion, and to maintain, as a primary goal, the resolution of such results through consistent and careful interpretation.
There are, however, a number of therapists, both within and outside the field of psychoanalysis, who consider that the transference situation should not be handled only or mainly as a setting for interpretation even in the treatment or analysis of neurotic patients. Instead, they advocate utilization of the transference relationship for the manipulation of corrective emotional experience. The theoretical orientation of those utilizing this concept of transference may be closer to, or more distant form, a Freudian point of view according to the degree to which current relationships are seen as determined by past events. At one extreme, current aspects and cultural factors are considered of predominant importance, at the other, mental development is viewed in essentially Freudian terms and modifications of technique are ascribed to inherent limitations of the analytic method rather than to essentially changed conceptions of the early phases of mental development. Of this group, Alexander is perhaps the best example. It is thirty years since, in his Salzburg paper, he indicated the tendency for patients to regress, even after apparently successful transference analysis of the oedipus situation to narcissistic dependent pregenital levels which prove stubborn and refractory to transference interpretation. In his more recent work, the role of regression in the transference situation has been increasingly stressed. The emergence and persistence of dependent, pregenital commands for something as or is if one’s right or due requirements are challenged in measuring moderations of a wide range of clinical conditions. It is argued, that its indications that the encouragement of a regressive transference situation is undesirable and therapeutically ineffective. The analyst, therefore, should when this threatens adopt a definite role explicitly differing from the behaviour of the parents in early childhood in order to bring about therapeutic results through a corrective emotional experience in the transference situation. This, it is suggested, will obviate the tendency to regression, thus curtailing the length of treatment and improving therapeutic results. Limitations of regressive manifestations by active steps modifying traditional analytic procedure in a variety of ways are also frequently indicated, according to this point of view.
It will be clear that to those who maintain the conviction that interpretation of all transference manifestations remain an essential feature of psychoanalysis, the type of manifestation as described, even though based on a Freudian reconstruction of the early phases of mental developments, and represent a major modification. It is determined by a conviction that psychoanalysis, as a therapeutic method, has limitations related to the tendency to regression, which cannot be resolved by traditional technique. Moreover, the fundamental premises on which, and the conception of corrective emotional experience is based minimizing the significance of insight and recall. It is essentially, suggested that corrective emotional experience alone may bring about qualitative dynamic alterations in mental structure, which can lead to a satisfactory therapeutic goal. This implies a definite modification on the analytic hypothesis whose current problems are determined by their defences against the direct opposition to the instinctual impulses and the intentional object, to which had been set up during the decisive periods of early development. An analytic result therefore depends on the revival, repetition and mastery of earlier conflict in the current experience of the transference situation with insight an indispensable feature of an analytic goal.
Since certain important modifications are related to the concept of regression in the transference situation, it should be considered that this concept is in relation to the repetition compulsion, that transference, essentially is a revival of earlier emotional experience, must be regarded as a manifestation of the repetition compulsion is generally accepted. It is, however, necessarily to distinguish between repetition compulsion as an attempt to master traumatic experience and repetition compulsion as an attempt to return to a real or fantasized earlier state of rest or gratification. Lagache, in a recent paper, has connected by or as if by the affirming relatedness as associated to the corresponding divergence in the repetition compulsion to an inherent need to appear in the problems that had previously been left unsolved. From this point of view, the regressive aspects of the transference situation are to be regarded as a necessary preliminary to the mastery of unresolved conflict, as too, the regressive aspects of transference are mainly attributed to a wish to return to an earlier state of rest or narcissistic gratification, to the maintenance of the status quo in preference to any progressive action, to which Freud’s original conception of the death instinct. There is a good deal to suggest that both aspects of the repetition compulsion may bee seen in self-destructive forces tend to be stronger that progressive libidinal impulses, the potentialities of the analytic approach will inevitably appear to be limited. In those, in contrast, in whom that regard the reappearance in the transference situation of earlier conflicts as an indication of tendencies to master and progress will continue to feel that the classical analytic method remains the optimal approach to psychological illness wherever it is applicable.
Clarifications maintain the position as peculiarly occupying a particular point in space and time. Whereas in absence or termination must reflect on or upon the fearing analysis if the transference, as compelling of a generally acknowledged focal point, this itself may debase the appropriate factor that generates, in every degree. The exemplifying analytic technique that would react upon the discipline needed to utilize the new values, whereby, they can be ascribed as the commonality in holding the services to a suspicious self-direction and comprehensive understanding, in that of whatever is humanly affiliated to the best as can be, and yet, the advocacy to the analysis of the transference is generally acknowledged as the central feature of analytic technique? Freud regarded transference and resistance as facts in the observational conceptuality for which of representing the state of inventions. He writes, . . . that the theory of psychoanalysis in an attempt to account for two striking and unexpected facts of observation which emerge whenever an attempt is made. Evidently the symptoms of a neurotic source, may in his past life, inhabit the sources of experiential recall to the past or the introspective reflections. In the state of affairs, in that for being the latent characterizations announced as the factoring responsibility for the transference and of resistance . . . one which takes the other side of the problem, while accepting as such, to the latencies and the hidden values non-accepting for new interactions as brought through a hypothesis that will hardly escape the charge of misappropriation of properties by attempting endeavour to re-associate the essentially established personalization, that if the pursuit in calling them a psychoanalyst’. Rapaport (1967) argued, in his posthumously published paper on the methodology of psychoanalysis, that transference and resistance inevitably follow from the fact that the analytic situation is interpersonal.
Despite this general agreement on the centrality of transference and resistance in technique, in that, the analysis of transference is not pursued as systematically and comprehensively affirmed, however, it could be and should be. The relative privacy for which psychoanalytic work makes it impossible for one or of that of any-other, to skilfully improve upon the attemptive conceptual representation as comprehended of issues, its assumption to state this view as anything more that impressions, involving on that of what in the analysis of the transference and to states awareness in the number of reasons that an important aspect in the analysis of the transference of the transference, namely in the resistance, by the awareness of the transference is especially, and often adhering to the analytic procedures that interact among cultural inhibitors, but that will be distinguished as such, that its ranging manifold of distancing non-localities as founded of the analyst’s.
However, it must first be to distinguish between two types of interpretation of the transference. That one is an interpretation of resistance to the awareness of transference, the other, is an interpretation of resistance to the resolution of transference. The distinction has clearly been best spelled out in the form from which copies or reproductions can be produced, as to cause to make its awareness and yielding values as grounded in the cognisance to Greenson (1967) and Stone (1967). The first kind of resistance may be called decence transference, although this term emphases the terminological characterization by its term is mainly employed to refer to a phrase of analysis and carried within the general resistance to the transference of wishes, it can also be used for a more isolated instance of transference of defence. With some oversimplification, one might say that in resistance to the awareness of transference, the transference, the transference is what does the resisting.
Another connected description of stating this distinction between resistance and the awareness of transference and resistance to the resolution of transference is between implicit and indirect references to the transference and explicitly or directly referential to the transference. The interpretation of resistance to awareness of the transference is intended to make the implicit transference explicit. While the interpretation of resistance to the resolution of transference is intended to make the patient realize that the already explicit transference does indeed include a determinant from the past.
It is also important to distinguish between the general concept of an interpretation of resistance to the resolution of transference and a particular variety of such an interpretation, namely, a genetic transference interpretation - that is, an interpretation of how an attitude in the present is an inappropriate carry-over from the past. While there is a tendency among analysts to deal explicit references to the transference primarily among analyses to deal explicitly the references to the transference as primarily by a genetic transference interpretation, there are other ways of working toward a revolution of the transference. However, this argument does so implicate that not only is not enough emphasis being given to interpretation of the transference in the here and now, that is, to the interpretation of implicit manifestations of the transference, but also that interpretations intended to resolve the transference as manifested in explicit references to the transference should be primarily in the here and now, rather than genetic transference interpretations.
A patient’s statement that he feels the analyst is harsh, for example, is, at least to begin with, likely best dealt with not by interpreting that this is a displacement from the patient’s feeling that his father was harsh, but by as elucidation of some other aspect of this here and now attitude, such as what has gone on in the analytic situation that seems to the patient to justify his feeling or what was the anxiety that made it so difficult for him to express his feelings. How the patient experiences the actual situation is an example of the role of the actual situation in a manifestation of transference, which will be a major point of relevant significance.
Of course, both interpretations of the transference in the here and now and genetic transference interpretations are valid and constitute a sequence. We presume that a resistance to the transference ultimately rests on the displacement onto the analysts of attitudes from the past.
Because Freud’s case histories focus much more on the yield of analysis than on the details of the process, they are readily but perhaps incorrectly construed as emphasizing work outside the transference much more than work within the transference, and, even within the transference, emphasizing genetic transference interpretations much more than work with the transference in the here and now (Muslin and Gill, 1978). The example of Freud’s case reports may have played a role in what is to be considered as the common maldistribution of emphasis in these two respects - not enough on the transference and, within the transference, not enough on the here and now.
Transference interpretations in the here and now and genetic transference interpretations are, of course, exemplified in Freud’s writings and are in the repertoire of every analyst, but they are not distinguished sharply enough.
Both participants in the analytic situation are motivated to avoid these interactions. Flight away from the transference and to the past can be a relief to both the patient and the analyst.
These aligning measures have been divided into five categorical divisions and placed into the following parts: (1) The principle that the transference should be encouraged to expand as much as possible within the analytic situation because the analytic work is best done within the transference. (2) the interpretation of disguised allusion to the transference as a main technique for encouraging the expansion of the transference within the analytic situation, (3) the principle that all transference has a connection with something in the present actual analysis situation, (4) how the connection between transference and the actual analytic situation is used in interpreting resistance to the awareness of transference, and (5) the resolution of transference within the here and now and the role of genetic transference interpretation.
The importance of transference interpretations will surely be agreeing to by all analysts, the greater effectiveness of transference interpretations than interpretations outside the transference will be agreeing to by many, but what of the relative roles of interpretation of the transference and interpretation outside the transference?
Freud can be interpreted as either of saying that the analysis of the transference in auxiliary to the analysis of the neurosis or that the analysis of the transference is equivalent to the analysis of the neurosis. The first position is stated in his saying (1913) that the disturbance of the transference has to be overcome by the analysis of transference resistance in order to get on with the work of analysing the neurosis. It is also implied in his reiteration that the ultimate task of analysis is to remember the past, to fill in the gap in memory. The second position is stated in his saying that the victory must be won on the field of the transference (1912) and that the mastery of the transference neurosis ‘coincides with getting rid of the illness which was originally brought to the neurosis (1917). In this second view, he says that after the resistance is overcome, memories appear relatively without difficulty.
These two different positions also find expression in the two different ways in which Freud speaks of the transference. In `Dynamics of Transference` he refers to the transference, on the one hand, as `the most powerful resistance to the treatment`(1912) but, on the other hand, as doing us the inestimable service of making the patient’s . . . , immediate impulses and manifests, when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie (1912).
It can be agreed that his principal emphasis fails on the second position. He wrote once, in summary, ‘Thus our therapeutic work falls into two phases in the first, all the libido is forced from the symptoms into the transference and concentrated there, in the second, the struggle is waged around this new object and the libido is liberated from it`(1912).
The detailed demonstration that he advocated that the transference should be encouraged to expand as much as possible within the analytic situation lies in clarification that resistance is primarily expressed by repetition, and repetition takes place both within and outside the analytic situation, but that the analyst seeks to deal with it primarily within the analytic situation, that repetition can be not only in the motor sphere (acting) but also in the psychical sphere, and that the psychical sphere is not confined to remembering but includes the present, too.
Freud`s emphasis that the purpose of resistance is to prevent remembering can obscure his point that resistance shows itself primarily by repetition, whether inside or outside the analytic situation. `The greater the resistance, the more extensively, and will act out (repetition)replace remembering`. Similarly in `The Dynamics of Transference` Freud said that the main reason that the transference is so well suited to serve the resistance is that the unconscious implies does not want to be remembered . . . but endeavour to reproduce themselves . . . (1918), the transference is a resistance primarily insofar as it is a repetition.
The point can be restated in terms of the relation between transference and resistance. The resistance expresses itself in repetition, that is, in transference both inside and outside the analytic situation. To deal with the transference. Therefore, is equivalent to dealing with the resistance. Freud emphasized transference within the analytic situation so strongly that it has come to mean only repetition within the analytic situation, even though, conceptually speaking, repetition outside the analytic situation is transference too, and Freud once used the term that way. `We soon perceive that the transference is itself only a piece of repetition and that the repetition is a transference of the forgotten past not only onto the analyst but also onto all the other aspects of the current situation. We . . . find . . . the compulsion to repeat, which now replaces the impulsion to remember, not only in his personal attitude to his analyst but also in every other activity and relationship which may occupy his life at the time . . . (1914).
It is important to realize that the expansion of the repetition inside the analytic situation, whether or not in a reciprocal relationship to repetition outside the analytic situation, is the avenue to control the repetition: `The main instrument . . . for curbing the patients compulsion to repeat and for turning it into a motive for remembering lies in the handling of the transference. We render the compulsion harmless, and indeed useful, by giving it the right to assert itself in a definite field`(1914).
Kanzer has discussed this issue well in his paper on ‘The Motor Sphere of the Transference’ (1966). He writes of a ‘double-pronged stick-and-carrot’ technique by which the transference is fostered within the analytic situation and discouraged outside the analytic situation. The ‘stick’ is the principle of abstinence as exemplified in the admonition against making important decisions during treatment, and the ‘carrot’ is the opportunity afforded the transference to expand within the treatment, ‘in almost complete freedom’ as in a ‘playground’ (Freud, 1914). As Freud put it, ‘Provided only that the patient shows compliance enough to respect the necessary conditions of the analysis, we regularly succeed in giving all the symptoms of the illness a new transference meaning, and in replacing his ordinary neurosis by a ‘transference neurosis’ of which he can be cured by the therapeutic work’ (1914).
The reason it is desirable for the transference to be expressed within the treatment is that there, it `is at every point accessible to our intervention`(1914). In a later statement he made the same point this way. `We have followed this new edition - the transference-neurosis - of the old disorder from its start, we have observed its origin and growth, and we are especially well able to find our way about in it since, as its object, we are situated at it’s very centre, (1917), it is not that the transference is forced into the treatment, but that it is spontaneously but implicitly present and is encouraged to expand there and become explicit
Freud emphasized acting in the transference so strongly that one can overlook the repetition in the transference, but does not of necessity for its enactment or recognition that gives validity to acts of a subordinate conformation as ratified in support of explicit authoritative permission. Repetition need not go as far as motor behaviour, it can also be expressed in attitudes, feelings, and intentions, and, indeed, the repetition often does take such form rather than motor action. The importance of making this clear is that Freud can be mistakenly read to mean that repetition in the psychical sphere can only mean remembering the past, are when he writes that the analyst as prepared for a perpetual struggle with his patient to keep in the psychical sphere all the impulses which the patient would like to direct into the motor sphere, and he celebrates it as a triumph for the treatment if he can bring it about that something the patient wishes to discharge in action are disposed if through the work of remembering (1914).
It is true that the analyst’s efforts are to convert acting in the motor sphere into awareness in the psychical sphere, but transference may be in the psychical sphere to begin with, albeit disguised. The psychical sphere includes awareness in the transference as well as remembering.
One of the objections one hears, from both analysts and patient, to a heavy emphasis on interpretation of associations about the patients real life primarily in terms of the transference is that it means the analyst is disregarding the importance of what goes on in the patients real life. The criticism is not judiciable. To emphasize the transference meaning is not to deny or belittle other meanings, but to focus on the one of several meanings of the content that is the most important for the analytic process, for the reasons of positing the addition for one coming to any falsifiable conclusion.
Another way in which interpretations of resistance to the transference can be, or at lease appear to the patient to be, a belittling of the importance of the patients outside life is to make the interpretation as though the outside behaviour is primarily an acting out of the transference. The patient may undertake some actions in the outside world as an expression of and resistance to the transference, that is, acting out. But the interpretation of associations about actions in the outside world as having implications for the transference needs mean only that the choice of outside action to figure in the associations is co-determined by the need to express a transference indirectly. It is because of the resistance to awareness of the transference that the transference to be disguised. When the disguise is unmasked by interpretation, it becomes clear that, despite the inevitable differences between the outside situation and the transference situation, the content is the same for the analysis of the necrosis that coincides (Freud wrote that the mastering of the transference neurosis only coincides with getting rid of the illness which was originally brought to the treatment (1917)).
The analytic situation itself fosters the development of attitudes with primary determinants in the past, i.e., transference. The analyst’s reserve provides the patient with few and equivocal cues. The purpose of the analytic situation fosters the development of strong emotional responses, and the very fact that the patient has a neurosis means, as Freud said, that’ . . . it is a perfectly normal and intelligible thing that the libidinal cathexis [we would now add negative feelings] of someone who is partly unsatisfied, a cathexes which are held ready in anticipation, should be directly as well to the figure of the analyst (1912).
While the analytic setup itself fosters the expansion of the transference within the analytic situation, the interpretation of resistance to the awareness of transference will further this expansion.
There are important resistances on the part of both patient and analyst to awareness of the transference. On the patient’s part, this is because of the difficulty in recognizing erotic and hostile impulses toward the very person to whom they have to be disclosed. On the analyst’s part, this is because the patient is likely to attitude the very attitudes to him which are most likely to cause him discomfort. The attitudes the patient believes the analysts has toward him are often the ones the patient is least likely to voice, in a general sense because of a feeling that it is impertinent for him to concern himself with the analyst’s feelings, and in a more specific sense because the aptitudes as held by the analyst are often attitudes the patient feels the analyst will be comfortable about having ascribed to him. It is for this reason that the analyst must be especially alert to the attitudes the patient believes he has, not only to the attitudes the patient does have toward him. If the analyst is able to see himself as a participant in an interaction, as he will become much more attuned to this important area of transference, which might otherwise escape him.
The investigations of attitudes are ascribed to the analyst makes easier the subsequent investigation of the intrinsic factors in the patient that played a role in such ascription. For example, the exposure of the fact that the patient ascribes sexual interests in him to the analyst, and generally to the patient, alternatively the subsequent exploration of the patient’s sexual wish toward the analyst, and genetically the parent.
The resistance to the awareness of these attitudes is responsible for their appearing in various disguises in the patient’s manifested associations and for the analyst’s reluctance to unmask the disguise. The most commonly recognized disguise is by displacement, but identification is an equally important one. In displacement, the patient’s attitudes are narrated for being toward a third party. In identification, the patient attitudes to himself attitudes he believes the analyst has toward him.
To encourage the expansion of the transference within the analytic situation, the disguises in which the transference appears have to be interpreted in the case of displacement the interpretation will be of allusions to the transference in association not manifestly about the transference. This is a kind of interpretation every analyst often makes. In the case of identifications, the analyst interprets the attitudes that the patient ascribes to himself the identification with which an attitude and subsequently attributed to the analyst. Lipton (1977) has recently described this form of disguise allusion in the transference with illuminating illustration.
In his autobiography, Freud wrote, ‘The patient remains under the influence of the analytic situation as hopefully of a latter position or a period of decline, as though he is not directing responsibly for the mental activities onto a particular subject. Justly in assuming that nothing will occur, as not of some reference to the situation (1925). Since associations are obviously often not directed about the analytic situation, the interpretation of Freud’s remark rests on what he meant by the ‘analytic situation’.
It is believed that Freud’s meaning can be clarified by reference to a statement he made in, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’. He said that when the patient is told to say whatever comes into his mind, his associations become directed by the ‘purposive ideas inherent in the treatment’ and that there are two such inherent regressive themes, one relating to the illness and the other - concerning which, Freud said, the patient has ‘no suspicion’; - relating to other analyst’s (1900), if the patient has ‘’no suspicion’ of the theme relating to the analyst (1900). If the patient has ‘no suspicions’ - relating to the analyst (1900). If the patient has ‘no suspicions’ of the theme relating to the analyst, such that the theme appears only in disguise, the patient ‘s associations, it is contended that Freud’s remark not only specifies the themes inherent in the patient ‘s identifications’, but means that the associations are simultaneously directed by these two purposive ideas, not something by one and sometimes by the other.
One important reason that the early and continuing presence of the transference is not always recognized in that it is considered to be absent in the patient who is talking recognized is that it is considered to be absent in the patient who is talking freely and apparently without resistance. As (Muslin and Gill, 1976) pointed out in a paper on the early interpretation of transference resistance, to the transference is probably present from the beginning, even if the patient is talking apparently freely. The patient may well be talking about issues not manifestingly about the transference which are nevertheless, also allusions to the transference, but the analyst has to be alert to the pervasiveness of such allusory discernment about them.
The analyst should progress on the working assumption, that the patient’s associations have transference implications pervasively, that with which this assumption is not to be confused with denial or neglect of the current aspects of the analytic situation. It is theoretically always possible to give precedence to a transference interpretation if one can only discern it through its disguise by resistance. This is not to dispute the desirability of learning as much as one can about the patient, if only to be a position to make more correct interpretations of the transference. One therefore, does not interfere with an apparently free flow of associations, especially early, unless the transference threatens the analytic situation to the point where its interpretation is mandatary rather than optional.
With the recognition that evens apparently freely associating patient may also be showing resistance to awareness of the transference, this formulation should not interfere as long a useful information being gathered should relace Freud’s dictum that the transference should not be interpreted until it becomes a resistance (1913).
It can be argued that every transference has some connection to some aspect of the current analytic situation, in the sense that the past can exert an influence only insofar as it exists in the present. Of course, all the determinants of a transference are current in the sense that what I am distinguishing is the current reality of the analytic situation, that is, what actually goes on between patient and analyst in the situation from how the patient is currently constituted as a result of his past.
All analysts would dubiously agree that there are both current and transferential determinants of the analytic situation, and probably no analyst would argue that a transference of the analytic situation, and probably no analyst would argue that a transference idea can be expressed without contamination, as it was, that is, without any connection to anything current in the patient-analyst relationship. Nevertheless, the implications of this fact for technique are often neglected in practice, as my next point is only to argue for the connection.
Several authors, e.g., Kohut 1959 and Loewald 1960, have pointed out that Freud`s early application by the act or practice of using something or the state of being used, this, however, employ of the quality of being appropriate or valuable to some end as to accommodate the accountable or warrant the use of the term transference. In `The Interpretation of Dreams, in a connection not immediately recognizable as related to the present day use of the term, reveals the fallacy of considering that transference can be expressed free of any connection to the present. That early use was to refer to the fact that an unconscious idea cannot be expressed as such, but only as it becomes connected to a preconscious o r conscious content. In the phenomenon with which Freud was then concerned, the dream transference took place from an unconscious wish to a day residue. In `The Interpretation of Dreams, `Freud used the term transference both for the general rule that an unconscious content is expressible only as it becomes transferred to a preconscious or conscious content and for the specific application of this rule to a transference to the analyst. Just as the day residue is the point of attachment of the dream wish, so must there be an analytic-situation residue, though Freud did not use that term, as the point of attachment of the transference.
Analysts have always limited their behaviour, both in variety and intensity, to increase the extent to which the patient‘s behaviour is determined by his idiosyncratic interpretation of the analyst’s behaviour. In fact, analysts unfortunately sometimes limit the behaviour so much as to compare with such an expression or unpiled standard or absolute approximation, that the entire relationship with the patient matter of technique, with no nontechnical personal relation, as Liptop (1977) has pointed out.
But no matter how far the analyst attempts to carry this limitation of his behaviour, the very existence of the analytic situation provides the patient with innumerable cues which can enviably become his rationale for his transference responses. In other words, the current situation cannot be made to disappear - that is, the analytic situation is real. It is easy to forget this truism in one’s zeal to diminish the role of the current situation in determining the patient ‘s responses. One can try to keep past and present determinants relatively perceptible from one another, but one cannot obtain either ‘pure culture‘. Freud wrote: ‘I insist on this procedure [the couch], however, for its purpose and result are to prevent the transference from mingling with the patient’s associations imperceptibly, to isolate the transference and to allow it to come forward in due course sharply defined as a resistance’ (1913). Even ‘isolate’ is too strong a word in the light of the inevitable intertwining of the transference with the current situation.
If the analyst remains under the illusion that the current cues he provides to the patient can be reduced to the vanishing point, he may be led into a silent withdrawal, which is not too distant from the caricature of an analyst as someone who does refuse to have any personal relationship with the patient. What happens then is that silence has become a technique rather than merely an indication that the analyst is listening. The patient’s responses under such conditions can be mistaken fo uncontaminated transference when they are in fact transference adaptions to the actuality of the silence.
The recognition, from which it takes its point of departure, as it was, has a crucial implications for the technique of interpreting resistance to the awareness of transference, in that, if, the analyst becomes persuaded of the centrality of transference and the importance of encouraging the transference to expand within the analytic situation, he has to find the presenting and plausible interpretation of resistance to the awareness of transference he should make. Is that, his most reliable guide is the cues offered by what is actually going on in the analytic situation? : On the one hand, the events of the situation, such as change in time of session, or an interpretation made by the analyst, and, on the other hand, how the patient is experiencing the situation as reflected in explicit remarks about it, however, fleeting these may be. This is the primary yield for technique of the recognition that any transference must have a link to the actuality of the analytic situation. The cue points to the nature of the transference, just as the day residue for a dream may be a quick pointer of the latent dream thoughts. Attention to the current situation for a transference elaboration will keep the analyst from making mechanical transference interpretation, in which he interprets that there are allusions to the transference in association not manifestly about the transference, but without offering any plausible bias for the interpretation. Attention to the current stimulation offers some degree of protection against the analyst’s inevitability whose tendency to project his own views onto the patient, either because of countertransference or because of a preconceived theoretical bias about the content and hierarchical relationships in psychodynamics.
The analyst may be very surprised at what in his behaviour the patient finds important or unimportant, for the patient’s responses will be idiosyncratically determined by the transference, the patient’s responses may seem to be something the patient as well as the analysts consider trivial, because, as in displacement to a trivial aspect of the day residue of a dream, displacement can better serve resistance when it is to something trivial. Because it is connected to conflict-laden material, the stimulus to the transference may be difficult to find. It may be quickly disavowed, so that its presence in awareness is only transitory. With the discovery of the disavowed, the patient may also gain insight into how it repeats as disavowed earlier in his life. In his search for the present stimuli which the patient is responding transferentially, as the analyst must therefore remain alert to both fleeting and apparently trivial manifested reference to himself as well as in the events of the analytic situation.
If the analyst interprets the patient’s attitudes in a spirit of seeing their possible plausibility in the light of what information the patient does have, rather than in the spirit of either affirming or denying the patient’s views, the way is open for their further expression and elucidation. The analyst will be respecting the effort to be plausible and realistic, rather than manufacturing his transference attitudes out of whole bodied material.
Importantly, is to make a transference interpretation plausible to the patient in terms of as current stimulus that, if the analyst is persuaded that the manifest content has important implications for the transference but he is unable to see a current stimulus for the attitude, he should explicitly say so if he decides to make the transference interpretation anyway. The patient himself may then be able to say what the current stimulus is.
It is sometimes argued that the analyst’s attention to his own behaviour is a precipitant for the transference, will increase the patient’s resistance to recognizing the transference. That, on the contrary, that because of the inevitable interrelationship of the current and transferential determinants, it is only through interpretation that they can be disentangled.
It is also argued that one must wait until the transference has reached optimal intensity before it can be advantageously interpreted. It is true that too hasty and interpretation of the transference can serve as a defensive function for the analyst and deny him the information he needs to make a more appropriate transference interpretation. But it is true that delay in interpreting transference interpretation, but it is also true that delay in interpreting runs the risk of allowing an unmanageable transference to develop. It is also true that deliberate delay can be a manipulation in the service of abreaction rather than analysis, and, like silence, can lead to a response to the actual situation which is mistaken for uncontaminated transference. Obviously important, is assumed in the issues of timing are involved, whereas an important clue to when a transference interpretation is apt and which one to makes lies in whether the interpretation can be made plausibly in terms of the determinant, namely, as something in the current analytic situation. Such as, in the approaching transference in the spirit of seeing how it appears plausibly realistic to the patient, it paves the way toward its further elucidation and expression.
Freud’s emphasis on remembering as the goal of the analytic work implies that remembering is the principal avenue to the resolution of the transference. But the delineation of the successive steps in the development of the analytic technique (1920) makes clear that he saw this development as a change from an effort to reach memories directly to the utilization of the transference as the necessary intermediacy to reaching the memories.
In contrast to remembering as the way the transference is resolved, Freud also described resistance for beings primarily overcome in the transference, with remembering following relatively easily afterwards, ‘From the repetitive reactions which are exhibited in the transference we are led along the familiar paths to the awakening of the memories, which appear without difficulty, as it was, after the resistance has been overcome’ (1914), and ‘This revision of the process of repetition can be accomplished only in part in connection with the memory traces of the process which led to repression. The decisive part of the work’s achieved by creating in the patient’s relation to the analyst - in the ‘transference‘ new editions of the old conflicts . . . Thus, the transference becomes the battlefield on which all the mutually struggling forces should meet one another’ (1917). This is the primary indication for which Strachey (1934) classified in his seminal paper on the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis.
There are two main ways in which resolution of the transference can take place through work with the transference in the here and now. The first lies in the clarification of what are the clues in the current situation which are the patient‘s point of departure force a transference elaboration. The exposure of the current point of departure at once raises the question of whether it is adequate to the conclusion drawn from it. The relating of the transference to a current stimulus is, after all, parts of the patient‘s effort to make, the transference attitude plausibly determined by the present. The reverse and ambiguity of the analyst’s behaviour are what increases the ranges of apparently plausible conclusions the patient may draw. If an examination of the basis for the conclusion makes clear that the actual situation to which the patient responds is subject to other meanings than the one the patient has reached, he will more reality consider his pre-existing bias, that is to say, in that of transference.
Another critic of an earlier version of this paper suggested that, in speaking of the current relationship and the relation between the patient’s conclusion and the information on which they seem plausibly based, such in some absolute conception of what is real in the analytic situation, of which the analyst is the final arbiter. That is not the case, that what the patient must come to see is that the information he has is subject to other possible interpretations implies the very contrary to an absolute conception of reality. In fact, analyst and patient engage in a dialogue in a spirit of attempting to arrive at a consensus about reality, not about some factious absolute reality.
The second way in which resolution of the transference can take place within the work with the transference in the here and now is that in the very interpretation of the transference the patient had a new experience. He is being treated differently from how he expected to be. Analysts seem reluctant to emphasize his new experience, as though it endangers the role of insight and argue for interpersonal influence as the significant factor in change. Strachey’s emphasis on the new experience in the mutative transference interpretation has unfortunately been overshadowed by his views on introjection, which have been mistaken to advocate manipulating the transference. Strachey meant introjection of the more benign superego of the analyst only as a temporary strep on the road toward insight. Not only is the new experience not to be confused with the interpersonal influence of a transference gratification, but the new experience occurs together with insight into both the patient’s biassed expectation and the new experience. As Strachey points out, what is unique about the transference interpretation is that insight and the new experience take place in relation to the very person who was expected to behave differently, and it is this which gives the work in the transference, its immediacy and effectiveness. While Freud did stress the effective immediacy of the transference, he did not make the new experience explicit.
It is important to recognize that transference interpretation is not a matter of experience, in contrast to insight, but a joining of the two together, both are needed to bring about and maintain the desired changes in the patient. It is also important to recognize that no new techniques of intervention are required to provide the new experience. It is an inevitable accompaniment of interpretation of the transference in the here and now. It is often overlooked that, although Strachey said that only transference interpretations are outside the transference.
Rosenfeld (1972) has pointed out that clarification of material outside the transference is often necessary to know what is the appropriate transference interpretation, and that both genetic transference interpretations and extratransference interpretation taking to consider an inclination as marked by or indication of notable worth or simply the consequence based upon the role in working through. Strachey said relatively little about working through, but surely nothing against the necessary provision with which every thing needfully is explicitly recognized as the role for the recovery of the past in the resolving dissection of the purposiveness determined by the transference.
In taking positions, as to emphasis the role of the analysis of the transference in the here and now, both in interpreting resistance to the awareness of transference and in working toward its resolution by relating to the actuality of the situation. In that of opinion or purpose with the evidence that extratransference and genetic transference interpretation and, of course, working through is important too, that the matter is one of emphasis. Also, interpretation of resistance to awareness of the transference should figure in the majority of sessions, and that if this is done by relating the transference to the actual analytic situation, the very same interpretation is a beginning of work to the resolution of the transference. To justify this view more persuasively would require detailed case material.
The concern and considerations that the Kleinian annalists whom, many analysts feel, are in error in giving the analysis of the transference too great if not even as exclusive role in the analytic process. It is true that Kleinians emphasize the analysis of the transference more, in their writing at least, than does the general run of analysts. As, Anna Freud (1968) complained that the concept of transference has become overexpanded seems to be directed against the Kleinians. One of the reasons the Kleinians consider themselves the true followers of Freud in technique are precisely because of the emphasis they put on the analysis of the transference. Hanna Segal (1967), for example, writes, `Too say that all communications are seen as communications about the patents phantasy as well as current external life is equivalent to saying that all communications contain something relevant to the transference situation. In Kleinian technique, the interpretation of the transference is often more central than in the classical technique.
Affirmly held point of view or way of regarding that Freud and transference had accedingly connected by simulating observations that we can only offer, that Freud wrote briefly about transference, and did so, to sustain the way in which, is, as a whole, that his actions were justly taken in and around 1917. Another observation which can rarely be made about Freud’s works, and which everyone may not agree with, is that, with one or two exceptions, what he did write on transference did not reach the high level of analytical thought which has come to be regarded as standard for him. Some indication of what his contribution consists of is given by the editors of the Standard Edition, who list them in several places. One of the longer lists, in a footnote on page 431 of Volume 16, includes six references: ‘Studies of Hysteria’ with Breuer (1895), the Dora paper (1905), ‘The Dynamics of Transference’ (1912), ‘Observations on Transference-Love’ (1915), the chapter on transference in the Introductory Lectures (1917), and ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937). Although the editors, in no sense suggest that these six papers include everything Freud wrote on the subject. It does seem evident that, considering the essential importance of transference to analysis, he wrote, ‘The Dynamics of Transference’, ‘Transference-Love’, and the transference chapter in the Introductory Lectures, came across, as, perhaps, his least significant contribution.
Freud’s first direct mention of transference comes upon the pages ascribed within the ’Studies of Hysteria’ (1895), his first significant reference to it, however did not appear until five years later, when, in a letter to Fliess on April 16, 1900, he said (Freud, 1887-1902) he was ‘beginning to see that the apparent endlessness of the treatment is something of an inherent feature and is connected with the transference’. In a footnote to this letter the editors said that, ‘This is the first insight into the role of transference in psychotherapy.’
Despite these early references, it seems correct to say that yet another five years were to go by before the phenomenon of transference was actually introduced. Even so, the introduction was far from prominent, for it was tacked on like an afterthought as a four-page portion of a postscript to what was perhaps Freud’s most fascinating case history to date, the case of Dora (1905).
Using data from Dora’s three-month-long, unexpectedly terminated analysis, and especially from her dramatic transference reaction which had taken him quite unawares, Freud now gave to transference its first distinct psychological entity and for the first time indicated its essential role in the analytic process. His account, although in general more than adequate - in the elegant fact and unmistakably ‘finished’ - was brief, and almost to the point, and perhaps not an entirely worthy introduction so much more a truly great discovery. What was uniquely great was his recognizing the usefulness of transference. In his analysis of Dora he had noted not only that transference feelings existed and were powerful, but, much to his dismay, he had realized what a serious, perhaps, even insurmountable obstacles that objectively would be. Then, in what seems like a creative leap, Freud made the almost unbelievable discoveries that transference was in fact, the key to analysis, that by properly taking the patient’s transference and therapeutic force was added to the analytic method.
The impact on analysis of this startling discovery was actually much greater and much more significant than most people seem to appreciate. Although the role of transference as the sine quo non of analysis and is widely accepted, and was stated by Freud from the first, it has almost never been acclaimed for having brought about an entire change in the nature of analysis. The introduction of free association to analysis, a much lesser change, receives and still receives much more recognition.
One of the reasons for the relatively unheralded entry of transference into analysis may have been for circumstances of its discovery. Although Freud’s new ideas were recorded as if they arose as sudden inspiration during the Dora analysis, they may in fact have developed somewhat later. In the paper‘s precatory remarks, for instance, Freud said he had not discussed transference with Dora at all, and in the postscript, he said he had been unaware of her transference feelings. Also, pointing to a later discovery date is the extraordinary delay in the paper’s publication. According to the editor’s note, the paper had been completed and accepted for publication by late January 1901, but this date was then actually set back more than four and a half years until October 1905. The editors said, ‘We have no information as to how it happened that Freud, . . . deferred publication.’ It readily seems that for reasons to have been that only during those four and a half years, as a consequence to his own self-analysis, that he came to a better understanding of the relevantly significant as the applicable reason to posit of the transference. Only then may it have been possible for him to turn again to the Dora case, to apply to it of what he had learned in himself, to write this essay as part of the postscript, and at last to release the paper for publication.
Freud’s self-analysis has been considered from many angles, but not significantly, as can be of valuing measure, in at least from the standpoint of transference. Opponents of the idea that there is such a thing as definite self-analysis, some of whom say it is impossible, generally an object on grounds that without any analyst there can be no transference neurosis. Freud clearly demonstrated, as, perhaps, that the situation that may be necessary to fill this need: Self-analysis may require that, at least a halfway satisfactory transference object. In Freud`s case, the main transference object at this time seems to have been Fliess, who filled the role rather well. As with any analysis, the authenticity as known in the unfeigned design as if existing or having no illusions and facing reality squarely, by which the ‘real’ impact on Freud was slight, he was essentially a neutral figure, relatively anonymous and physically separates. All of this, and Fliess`s own reciprocal transference reactions, made it possible for Freud to endow Fliess with whatever qualities and whatever feelings were essential to the development of Freud`s transference, and, it should be added, his transference neurosis. In the end, of course, the transference was in part resolved. Freud`s eventual awakening of its self realization in its presence within him of such strange and powerful psychological forces must have come to the conclusion as a stupefied disilluionary dejection toward Fliess, however, his subsequent working out of some of these transference attachments must have been both an intellectual triumph and an immensely healing and releasing of actions, operations or motions involved in the accomplishment of an ending that makes from its process.
In the years following this revolutionary discovery, the central role of transference in analysis increased in remarkable acceptance, and it has easily held this central position ever since. What the substance of this central position distinctfully compose in having or be capable of having within the constructs to which is something of a mystery, for, it seems as nothing about analysis and is, of least to be, the well known than how individual analysis actually uses transference in their day-to-day work with patients. As a guess, as, perhaps of each analysts concept of transference derives variably but significantly from his own inner experience, transference probably means many and varying differentiations to things as to different analysts.
In the same differentiated individuals, as that Freud’s own pupils must have differed on this issue, not only from him but from each other. Although some of their differences may have been slight, others, my have contributed significantly to later analytic developments. A question could be raised, for instance, whether differences in handling the transference which at first were the property of one analyst gradually develop into formal clinical methods used by many, and whether these clinical methods, after having been conceptualized, serve as the beginning of variously divergent schools of analysis. Such occurrences, consistent with certain beliefs that analytic ideas do arise in this way, primarily out of transference experiences in the analytic situation, would lead to the question whether the history of the ideological differences in what was actually said and done in response to transference reactions that to any other factor. Whatever the case, many differences and divergencies did occur among the early analysts, and all of that is supposed to have had to do in some major way with differences in the handling of the transference.
Strangely, Freud himself seems to have taken little part in influencing this rapid and divergent period of growth. Usually accused of being too dominating in such matters, Freud seems to have done just the opposite during the development of this most critical aspect of analysis, the process itself, and, for reasons unknown, detached himself from it.
What was needed, one might be inclined to say, was not leadership in the form of domination, but leadership in trying to provide what was lacking, and still lacking, namely an analytical rationale for transference phenomena. The question must be asked, of course, whether in fact this would have been a good thing at that particular time in psychoanalytic history. Perhaps not. The exercise of closure, which Freud’s structuring might have amounted to. But although adding to understanding and stability at ceratin theoretical levels, could at another level, so such closures have often done, have placed many obstacles in the way of further analytical developments. Thus, his leaving the matter of transference wide open, even though it led to confusion and uncertainty, may have been just as well.
In many ways the closest Freud ever came to establishing a formal analytical rationale for transference was his first attempt, in the postscript to the case of hysteria (1905). These few pages are and among the most important of all Freud’s writings, outweighing by far the paper to which they are appended. Yet, in the case of Dora has always been taught as an entity rather than the ancillary to the essay on transference. In that essay Freud was clear: His ideas revealed tremendous insights and promised more to come, and that, the powers of the neurosis are occupied in creating a new edition of the same disease. Just think of the analytic implications of his saying that this new edition consists of a special class of mental structures, for the most part unconscious, having the peculiar characteristic of being able to replace earlier persons with that of the person of the analyst, and in the fashion applying all components of the original neurosis to the person of the analytical at the present time. Surely as profound a statement as any he ever made.
He then goes on to say that there is no way to avoid transference, that this ‘latest creation of the desire must be combatted like all the earlier ones’, and that, although this is by far the hardest part of analysis, only after the transference has been resolved can a patient arrive at a sense of conviction of the validity of the connection which have been constructed during analysis.
He concludes by saying, ‘In psychoanalysis . . . all the patients’ tendencies, including hostile ones, are aroused, they are then turned to account for reasons to explain or the internalization of justification, and by the same measure was to purposively give a sensible reason for the proposed change in the analysis by which of being made conscious. That, in this way, the transference is constantly being put-down, however, transference, which seems ordained to be the greatest obstacle to psychoanalysis, becomes its most powerfully . . .
These remarkable observations, in conveying a sense of deep conviction that could arise, one feels, only from Freud’s own hard-won inner experience, that nowhere is there a suggestion that transference is a mere technical matter. Far from it, as Freud announces that he has come upon as new and exciting kind of mental function, or, as it is to believe, that a new and exciting kind of ego function.
Very quickly, however, Freud’s conviction sees to have failed him. Nothing he wrote afterwards about transference was at this level, and most of his later references were a retreat from it, for instance, he never did develop the promising idea that the mind constantly creates new editions of the original neurosis and meaningfully incline the minded inclusion in them, an ever-changing series of persons. Instead, he tended to become less specific, even referring to transference at times in a broad terms as if it were no more than rapport between patient and analysts, or as if it was an interpersonal or psychosocial relationship, concepts which, of course, a great many analysts have since adopted, but which were not part of Freud’s original ideas.
Perhaps his most persistent deviation was an on-and-off tendency to regard transference merely as a technical matter, often writing of it as an asset to analysis when positive and a liability when negative.
Significantly, because it indicated that an active struggle was still going on within him, Freud occasionally expressed once again, even though briefly his earlier insights, particularly his ideas that transference is an essential although unexplored part of mental life. An example of this appears in his alternative obtainments such that is gainfully to appear of as quality of being pleasant or agreeable to a feature that makes for pleasantness or ease, among the amenities of the central geniality, otherwise, the prevailing indifference account for the transference in ‘An Autobiographical Study’ (1925). Transference, he says, ‘is a universal phenomenon of the human mind. And in fact dominated the whole of each person’s relations to his human environment. In these few words’ Freud again made the point, and in declarative fashion, that transference is a mental structure of the greatest magnitude, but he never really followed it up.
Rather extensive evidence of his departure from the original concept and his continuing struggle with that concept is seen most clearly, wherein, the ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ is much more than a courageous, brilliant, and pessimistic, appraisal of the difficulties and limitations of analysis, although transference is briefly mentioned in its content, yet a great deal about it comes through, some quite directly, some by easy inference. When looked at in this way, two themes stand out: Freud’s personal frustration with the enigmas of transference and his tacit placing of transference in the centre of success and failure in analysis, both as a therapy and as a developing science. What also comes through, is the perplexing realization of how far Freud had, by now, seemingly moved away from his original concepts. Or had he?
All the same, even if it is insufficient for exclusive reliance in relations to the complicated neurosis, for which it would be fallacious to assign to the recall and reconstruction of the past an exclusively explanatory value (in the intellectual sense), important though that functions be, and difficult as its full-blown emotional correlate may be to come by. There is no doubt that, even in complicated neurosis, equivalently complicated transference neurosis, the genuine complex and complicated transference neurosis, the genuinely experienced linking of the past and present can have, at times, a certain uniquely specific dynamic effect of its own, a type of telescoping or merging of common elements in experience, which must be connected with the meaninglessness of time in unconscious life, compared with its stern authority in the life of consciousness and adaptation to everyday reality. Contributing decisively to such experiences as to whatever degree it occurs, is of course, the vivid currency of the transference neurosis, and central in this, the reincarnations of old objects in an actual person, the analyst.
Thus, an allied problem in the general sphere of transference is the fascination and often enigmatic interplay of past and present. If one wishes to view this interplay in terms of a stereotyped formulation, the matter can remain relatively uncomplicated - as a formulation. Unfortunately. , This is too often the case. The phenomenon, however, retains some important obscurities, which cannot thoroughly dispel, but to which I would like to call attention. To concentrate on the dimension of time, it seems in reference to the complication and immediate aspects of technique, nonetheless, essential. For example, we can assume that the transference neurosis re-enacts the essential conflicts of the infantile neurosis in a current setting. If a reasonable degree of awareness of transference is established, the next problem is the genetic reduction of the neurosis to its elements in the past, through analysis of the transference resistance and allied intrapsychic resistances, ultimately genetic interpretations, recollections and reconstructions and working through. Such that the transference is related to its genetic origins, the analyst thereby emerges in his true, i.e., real, identity to the patient, the transference is putatively ‘resolved’. To the extent that one follows the traditional view that all resistances, including the transference itself, is ultimately directed against the restoration of early memories as such, this is a convincing formulation. Is that, only to say, that in his own right as having to a certain tightly logical quality? However, we know that it this is not so readily accomplished, apart from the special intrapsychic considerations described afterward by Freud in ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’. Although in a favourable case, much of the cognitive interpretative work can be accomplished, there remains the fact that cognition responsibility, in its bare sense, does not necessarily lead to the subsidence of powerful dynamism, to the withdrawal of ‘cathexes’ from importantly real objects. For, as mentioned, a short while ago, the analyst is a real and living object, apart from the representations with which the transference invests him, and which are interpretable as such, for which there is no, at any time a seldom, a confusing interrelations and commonly of the emergent responses, due to the same old seeking, and this is directed toward a new individual in his own right, both are important, furthermore, there are large and important ones of overlapping. Apart from such considerations, even the explicitly incestuous transference is currently experienced (as, at least in good part) by a full-grown adult (like the original oedipus), instead of a totally and actually helpless child. To be sure, the latter state is reflected in the emergent transference elements of instinctual striving, but it is subject to analysis, and the residual is something significant, if not totally different. It is these residual sexual wish, presumably directed toward the person of the analyst, as such, which must be displaced to others, if, as generally agreed, the revival of infantile fantasies and strivings in the biologically mature adolescent presents a new and special problem, one must assume distinctiveness of experience for the adult, although it is true that in the majority of instances, adequate solution is favoured by the adult state. There is, in any case, a residual relationship between persons who have worked together in a prolonged, arduous and intimate relationship, which, strictly speaking, are reversibly disconnected or divorced of services, in that the transference merely ushers out the retirement for which its rendering retreat of that state of mind or feeling by an inner avoidance of something usually felt as unpleasant or pronounced for it’s adverse but mutual colouration. Blending to some confusion between the two spheres of feeling. The general tendency is that both components are fully gratified to some degree. But, there is the ubiquitous power of the residual primordial transference, yet, argue to cling to an omnipotent partisan to resist the displacement of its ‘sublimated’ anaclitic aspects, even if the various representation of the wishes for bodily intimacy has been thoroughly analysed and successfully displaced. The outcome is largely the transference of the transference, as mentioned earlier, in a different context. For everyday reality can provide no actual answer to such cravings. In this connection, note, Freud’s genial envy of Pfister. If the man of faith finds this gratification in revealing religion, others in a wide range of secular beliefs and ‘leaders’ the modern rational and sceptical intellectual is less fortunate in this respect. Presumably free, he is prone to invest even intellectual disciplines or the proponents with inappropriate expectations and partisan passions, but, least of mention, that within these fields of analytical and theoretical thought, is not to provide exceptions to this tendency.
Though if one is to maintain and beneficially confine its bothering of reservations about the clarity of conceptualization, the explanatory discussion of Kohut and Seitz, is a very useful contribution to the direct complication or which by some understanding the awkwardness of oneself. Both Loewald and Kohut have deliberately associated a special but the different use of one of Freud’s three conceptions of transference, i.e., the transference from the unconscious to the preconscious.
Yet, to furthering comments on primordial transference, at least potentially, are largely psychological (mental) component, the concept of ‘transference of the transference’ would be applicable to this component. For it does appear that certain aspect of the search for the omnipotent and omniscient caretaking parents are implicitly practical as virtually capable for being turned to use or account for its functional practicability for something of a process or the procedure for being all but the essential purpose to come to or tend toward a common point, for which are the knowledgeable information or ideas, is nothing but causative effectuality. As suggested earlier, there are important qualitative and quantitative distinctions in the mode of persistence and such strivings, however, even to the extent that they are detached from the analyst and carried into some reasonably appropriate expression in everyday life, they retain at least a subtle quality which contravenes reality, one which derives from earliest infancy, and remains - to this extent - a transference. ‘Santa Claus’ lives on, where one might least expect to meet him, whether as a donor of miracle drug or of far more complex panaceas.
If one prescribes to this parasymbiotic transference drive, a true primordial origin, it is necessary to take cognizance of certain important concepts dealing with the earliest period of life. If we assume a powerful original organismic drive toward an original ‘object’, a striving to nullify separation from the beginning, how does this make something legally valid or operative usually by formal approval or sanctioned with concepts such as ‘primary narcissism’ or the ‘objectless phase’ or ‘the primary psycho physiological self’ (We note in passing that there are those who do not accept these as usually construed in the technique of Balint), for example, or Fairbairn or - conspicuously - Melanie Klein. These are states, variously defined or conceived, which apply to the earliest neonatal period, in which life, to state more simply, exists only as the potential in physiological processes. Since there is (we postulate) no clear awareness of self-withdrawal from the mother, there can be no ‘mentally’ represented or experienced drive to obliterate the separation (concerning oneself and object, conceiver of as separate, in a continuing sense). There are, of course, discharge phenomena, the precursors of purposive activity, and there are urgent physiological needs, directed toward fulfilment or relief, rather than toward an object as such. However, in relation to these physiological needs as archaistic precursors of object relationships, it must be noted that in all, except respiration and spontaneous sphincter relief (even in these instances, not without exception or reservation), the need fulfilment must be mediated by the primordial object (or her surrogate). There is also, of course, the uniquely important requirement for ‘holding’, in a literal expression, from the outset. The material partner in human symbiosis which supplies what the neonate cannot seek by ‘clinging’, as for Bowlty and Murphy, in the sense that must be experienced to the physiological ebb and flow of tension, even if restricted to the kinaesthetic, connected with a peripheral sensory registration, which is the protophase of the recognition of separation from the object or nonpresence of the object, as a painful instance of, her presence in apposition the converse? That the general context may be only in which the sense of unity is preponderant, or, more accurately, that there is no general awareness of ‘separation’ as such, means that the drive for union does not exist in a general psychological sense. It is, so to speak, satisfied. That object constancy, with its cognate ‘longing’, is quite a different experience from the urgencies of primitive need fulfilment is true, however, regardless of what may be added by maturational and developmental considerations, instinctual and perceptual, there is no reason to assume other than a core of developmental continuity from the earliest needs and their fulfilment to the later state, and some continuing degree of contingency based on them.
There is a very rough parallel in the way certain analytic patients, before a firm relationship with the analyst is established, signal certain primitive experiences and tendencies in special reactions to the end of the hour, to the nonvisibility of the analyst, to interruption of their association, to failure of the analyst to talk, and similar matters. We must note that in the basic formation of the ego is evident amongst the primitive reactions and beyond to separations, in the form of very early identifications as based on care taking functions. Certainly in the very development of autonomous ego of the mother’s investment in the, have a decisive role in the character of the their development. And in the case of object constancy, in its connotation of libidinal cathexis, where is no need whatsoever (emotional or otherwise) is needed for prolonged periods. The importance of the object is, to put it mildly, liable to deteriorate, or to differ complicating aggressive change. Probably the characteristic feature of later developing relations to the object (love and the wish for love), as separate if not always separated from demonstrable primitivity, in the need fulfilment, have a special relationship to those ‘ancillary’ aspects of neonatal nurture, whose lack has been shown to be an actual threat to life in some instances, not to speak of sound emotional development. So that from the first, regardless of the assumed state of libidinal (and aggressive) economy, or the assumed state of psychological nondifferentiation between self and potential object, there are critical percussive phenomena, objectively observed, and probably prototypic subjective experiences of separation, which are the forerunners of all subsequent experiences of the kind. One may generalize to the effect that, with maturation and development, secondary identifications, and the various other processes of ‘internalization’ in its broadest sense, the problem of separation and its mastery becomes correspondingly more complex, and changes with the successive phase of life, but never entirely disappears.
In the view of the psychoanalytic situation described earlier, the latent mobilization of experiences of separation stimulated by the situational structure awakens the driving primordial urge to undo or to master the painful separations which it represents, usually embodied in the various forms of clinical transference that which we are familiar. One legitimate gratification which tends to mitigate superfluous transference regression is the transmission of understanding that at times, are thought that by the ‘mature transference’, in effect, the ‘therapeutic alliance’ or a group of mature ego functions which enter into such an alliance. Now, there is one blurring and overlapping at the conceptual edges in both instances, but the concept as such is largely distinct from either one, as it is from the primitive transference, which we have been discussing. Whether the concept is thought by others to comprehend a demonstrable actuality, which is a further question. This question, of course, can only follow on conceptual clarity. This in saying, of a nonrational urge, not directly dependent on the perception of immediate clinical purposes, a true transference in the sense that it is displaced (in currently relevant form) from the parent of early childhood to the analyst. Its content is not anti-sensational, but largely non-sensual of sometimes transitional, as the child’s pleasure in the assemblages of ‘dirty words’ and encompasses a special and not minuscule sphere of the object relationship: The wish to understand, and to be understood, the wish to be given understanding, i.e., teaching, specifically by the parent (or later surrogate); the wish to be taught to use ingenuity in making or doing o r achieving an end through the actions in a nonpunitive way, corresponding to the growing perception of hazard and conflict and very likely the implicit wish to be provided with and taught channels of substitutional drive discharge. With this, there may well be a wish, corresponding to that element in Loewald’s description of therapeutic process, to be seen in terms of one’s developmental potentialities by the analyst. No doubt, the list could be extended into many subtleties, details, and variations. However, one should not omit to specify that, in its peak development, it would include the wish for increasingly accurate interpretations and the wish to facilitate such interpretations by providing adequate material ultimately, of course, by identification, to participate in, or even be the author of the interpretations. The childhood system of wishes which underlies the transference is a correlate of biological maturation, and the latent (i.e., teachable) autonomous ego function, appearing with it, however, there is a drive-like quality in the participation phenomena, which disqualifies any conception of the urge’s identical with the functions. No one who has ever watched a child importune a parent with questions, or experiment with new words, or solicit her interests in a new game, or demand a storytelling or reading, can doubt this. That this powerful support and integration in the ego identification with a loved parent is undoubtedly true, just as it is true of the identification with an analyst toward whom a positive relationship has been established. That ‘functional pleasure ‘ inscribes the part, where certain specific ego energies, perhaps very likely the ego’s own urge to extend its hegemony in the personality. However, it can be stressed in the derive element, even the special phase configurations and colourations, and with its importance of object relations, libidinal and aggressive, for a specific reason. For just as the primordial transference seeks to undo separation, in a sense to obviate object relationships as we know them, the ‘mature transference’, tends toward separation and individuation, and increasing contact with the environment, optimally with a large affirmative (increasing neutralized) relationship toward the original object toward whom (or her surrogates) a different dynamic of demands is now increasingly directed. The further considerations which has led to the emphasis that the drive-like element in these attitudes are integrated phenomena, as examples of ‘multiple functional’ rather than the discrete exorcise of function or functions, is the conviction that there is a continuing dynamic relation of relative interchangeability between the two series, at least based on the response to gratifications in a significant zone of complicated energetic overlap, possibly including the phenomenon of neutralization. That the empirical ‘interchangeability’ is limited, and that goes without saying, that in no way diminishes its decisive importance. The linguistic communications as in mention, that the excessive transference neurosis regression, which can seriously vitiate the affirmative psychoanalytic process, finds a prototype in the regressive behaviour and demands of certain children, who do not receive their share of teaching, ‘attention’, play, nonseductive, affectionate demonstration, as to use the quality of being appropriate or valuable to some end, even the act or practice of using something or the state of being used to which of responsible interests in development, and similar matters, from their parents. In the psychnalytic situation, both the gratifications offered by the analyst and the freedom of expression by the patient, are diversely limited and concentrated, practically entirely (in the every day demonstrable sense) in the sphere of linguistic expression, on the analyst’s side, further, in the transmission of understanding.
Whereas, the primordial transference exploits the primitive aspects of linguistic communication, by expressing the mature transference as to advocate the seeking mastery of the outer and inner environments, a mastery to which the mature elements in speech contribute importantly, for which these are stressed upon the clear-cut genetic prototype for the free associating its interpretative dialogue is the original learning and teaching of speech, the dialogue between child and mother. It is interesting to note that just as the profundities of interests between people who often include - in the service of the ego - transitory introjection and identifications, of the very word ‘communication’, representing the central ego function of speech, from which is a closely intimate relation to the etymologically certain, in actual usages, to the word chosen for that major of religious sacrament for that which is the physical ingestion of the body and blood of the Deity. Perhaps, this is just another suggestion that the oldest of individual problems does, after all, continue to seek its solution, in its own terms if only in a minimal sense, and in channels so remote as to be unrecognizable.
The mature transference is a dynamic and integral part of the therapeutic alliance, alone with the tender aspect of the erotic transference, even more attenuated (and more dependable) friendly feeling of adult type, and the ego identification with the analyst. Indispensable, of course, are the genuine adult need for help, the crystallizing rational and intuitive appraisal of the analyst, the adult sense of confidence in him, and innumerable other nuances of adult thought and feeling. With these, giving a driving momentum and power to the analytic process, but always, by its very nature, a potential source of resistance, and always requiring analysis, is the primordial transference and its various appearances in the specific therapeutic transference. That it is, if well managed, not only a reflection of the repetition compulsion in its menacing sense, but a living presentation from the id, seeking new solutions, and trying again, so to speak, to find a place in the patient’s conscious and effective life, has important affirmative potentialities. This has been specifically emphasized by Nunberg, Lagache and Loewald among others. Loewald has recently elaborated very effectively the idea of ‘ghosts’ seeking to become ‘ancestors’ based on an early figure of speech of Freud. The mature transference, in its own infantile right, provides some of the unique qualities of propulsive force, which comes from the world of feeling, rather than the world of thought. If one views it in a purely figurative sense, that fraction of the mature transference which derives from ‘conversion’ is somewhat like propulsive fraction as the wind in a boats sailing to windward currents into motion, the strong headwind, the ultimate source of both resistance and propulsion, is the primordial transference. This view, however, should not displace the original and independent, if cognate, a favourable tide or current would also be required. It is not that the mature transference is itself entirely exempt from analytic clarification and interpretation. For one thing, in common with other childhood spheres of experience, there may have been traumas in this sphere, punishments, serious defects or lacks of parental communication, Listening, attention or interest. In general, this is probably far more important than has hitherto appeared in our prevalent paradigmatic approach to adult analysis, even taking into account the considerable changes due to the growing interest in ego psychology. ‘Learning’ in the analysis can, of course, be a troublesome intellectualizing resistance. Furthermore, both the patient’s communications and his receptions and utilization of interpretations may exhibit only too clearly, as sometimes in the case of other ego mechanisms, their origin in and tenacious relation to instinctual or anaclitic dynamism; the longing implement out of silence for which the analyst is to override the uncritical acceptance (or rejection) of interpretations, in that the patient revealingly is to mention the unmindful assimilation, fluently, rich, endlessly detailed associations without spontaneous reflection or integration. In the direct demands for solution of moral and practical probability for an entirely intellectual scope, and a variety of others. It may and always be easy to discriminate between the utilization of speech by an essentially instinctual demand, and an intellectual or linguistic trait or having to be determined by specific factors in their own developmental sphere, however, the underlying and essentially genuine dynamism which have to continue to be placed for a notable time interval or remain to an arbitrary or conventional character most favoured to the purposes of processes of analysis, as it was to the original processes of maturational development, communication, and benign separation. Lagache, on the desirability of separating the current unqualified usage, ‘positive’ and ’negative’ transference, as based on the patient‘s immediate state of feeling, from a classification based on the essential effect on analytic processes. Yet, the later of mature transference is, in general, a ‘positive transference’.
Concerning considerations in the transference neurosis, and the problem of transference interpretation, may be offered at this point. The whole situational structure of analysis (in contrast with other personal relationships), its dialogue of free association and interpretation, and its deprivations as to most ordinary cognitive and emotional interpersonal drives that tend toward the separation of discrete transferences from their synthesis with one another and with defences in character or symptoms, and with deepening regression, toward a contuative enactment of the essential of the infantile neurosis, in the transference neurosis. In other relationships, the ‘give and take’ aspects - gratifying aggressive, punitive or otherwise actively responsive, and the open mobility of searching for alternative or greater satisfaction - exert a profound dynamic and economic influence, so that only extraordinary situations, or transference of pathological character, or both, occasion to comparable regression.
It is a curious fact, whereas the dynamic meaning to the importance of the transference neurosis have been well established since Freud gave this the phenomenon a central position in his clinical thinking, the clinical reference, when the term is used, remains variable and somewhat ambiguous. For example, Greenson, in his excellent recent paper, speaks of it as appearing, ‘when the analyst and the analysis become the central concern in the patient’s life’. However, previous remarks in this connection, for which it is worthwhile to specify certain aspects of Greenson’s definition, for the term ‘central’ is somewhat ambiguous, as to its specific reference. Certainly, the term could apply to the symbolic position of the analyst in relation to the patient’s experiencing ego and the symbolically decisive position which he correspondingly assumes in the relation to the other important figures in the patient’s current life. However, while the analysis is in any case, and for multiple reasons, exceedingly important the seriously involved patient, there is a free observing portion of is ego, also involved, not in the same sense as that involved in the transference regression and revived in infantile conflicts. And here is here being, of course, always the integrated adult personalty, however diluted in may seem at times, of its rarity, although certainly does occur, that the analysis actually exceeds the quality or state of being of notable worth or influence that the other major concerns, attachments, and responsibilities of the patient’s life, nor is it desirable that his should occur, on the other hand, if construed with proper attention to the economic considerations as mentioned, the concept is important, both theoretically and clinically. In the theoretical direction to the assumption that there is a continuing system of object relationships and conflict situations, most important in the unconscious representations, but participating to some degree in all others, deriving in a successive series of transference from the experiences of separation from the original object, the mother. In this sense, the analyst’s applicability to a uniquely important portion of the patient‘s personality, the portion that ‘never grew up’, to maintain a central figure. In the clinical sense, to call or direct attention especially to a supposed cause, source, or to refer to the importance of the transference neurosis as outlining for the essential and central analytic task, providing by its very currency and demonstrability a relatively secure cognitive base for procedural duties. By its inclusion of the patient’s essential psychopathological processes and tendencies, in their original functional connection, it offers, in its resolution or marked reduction, the most formidable lever for analytic cure. Nonetheless, transference neurosis must be seen in its interweaving with the patient’s extra-analytic system of personal contacts. The relationship to the analyst may influence the course of relationships to others, in the same sense that the clinical neurosis did, except that the former is alloplastic, relatively exposed, and subject to constant interpretation. It is also an important fact that, except in those rare instances where the original dyadic relationship appears to turn, the analyst, even in the strict transference sphere, cannot be assigned all the transference role simultaneously. Other actors are required. He may at times oscillate with confusing rapidity between the status of mother and father, but he is usually predominantly in one of the roles for long periods, someone else representing the other. Furthermore, apart from ‘acting out’, complicated and mutually inconsistent attitudes of the anterior apprehensions for realizing often about something not generally realized in the verbalization, may require the seeking of other transference objects, i.e., The husband or wife, friend, another analyst and so forth. Children, even the patient’s own children, may be invested with strivings of the patient, displaced from the analysis, even experience the impulses which they would wish to call forth in the analyst. The range is extensive, varied, and complicated, requiring constant alertness. Transference interpretation therefore often has a necessarily paradoxical inclusiveness, which is an important reality of technique. There is another aspect, and that is the dynamic and economic impact of the intimate and actual dramatist personate of the transference neurosis in the progress of the analysis as such, and on the patient ‘s motivation, as well as his real lifer avenues for recovery. For the persons in his milieu may fulfill their ‘positive’ or ‘negative ‘ roles in transference drama, which may facilitate or impede interpretative effectiveness, they provide the substantial and dependable real life gratification which ultimately facilitate the analysis of the residual analytic transference, or their capacities or attitudes may occasion overload of the anaclitic and instinctual needs in the transference which renders the same process far more difficultly. In the most unhappy instances, there can be a serious undercounting of the motivation for basic change.
There is also the fundamental question of the role of the transference interpretation. At the Marienbad Symposium most of Strachey’s colleagues appeared to accept the essential import of his contribution and thus unique significance of the transference interpretations, despite the various reservations as to detail and emphasis on other important aspects of the therapeutic process. Nevertheless, there are still many who, if not in doubt regarding the great value of transference interpretations are inclined to doubt their uniqueness, and to stress the importance of economic considerations in determining the choice as to whether transference or extratransference interpretations may be indicated. Now, apart from the realistic considerations mentioned in the preceding passage (in a sense the necessarily ‘distributed’ character of a variable fraction of transference interpretation). There is in fact that the extra-analytic life of the patent often provides indispensable data fo the understanding of detailed complexities of his psychic functioning, because of the sheer variety of its references, some of which cannot be reproduced in the relationship to the analyst. For example, there is no repartee (in the ordinary sense ) in the analysis. The way the patient handles the dialogue with an angry employee may be importantly revealing. The same may be true of the quality of his reaction to a real danger of dismissal. There is not only the realities, but the ‘formal’ aspects of this responses. These expressions of personality remain important, even though his ‘acting out‘ of the transference (assuming this was this was the case) may have been more important, and, of course, requiring transference interpretation. Furthermore, they remain useful, if discriminatingly and conservatively treated, even if they are inevitably always subject that epistemological reservations, which haunts so much of analytic data. Of course, the ‘positive’ transference has a role in the utilization of such interpretations that what enables the patent to listen to them and them seriously.
In an operational sense, it would seem that extratransference interpretations cannot set aside, or underestimated in importance, but the unique effectiveness of transference interpretations is not thereby disestablished. No other interpretation is free, within reason, of the doubt introduced by not really knowing the ‘other person’s’ participation in love, or quarrel or criticism or whatever the issue. And no other situation provides the patient the combined sense of cognitive acquisition, with the experience of complete personal tolerance and acceptance, that is implicit in an interpretation by an individual who is an object of the emotion, drive, or even defences, which are active at the time. There is no doubt that such interpretations must not only (in common with all others) include personal tact, but must be offered with special care as to their intellectual reasonability, in relation to the immediate context, lest they defeat their essential purpose. It is not too often likely that a patient who has just been jilted in a long-standing love affair, and suffering exceedingly, will find an immediate interpretation that his suffering is due to the fact that the analyst does not reciprocate his love, even though a dynamism in this general sphere may be ultimately demonstrable, and acceptable to the patient. On the other hand, once the transference neurosis is established, with accompanying subtle (sometime gross) colouration of the patient’s life, th n more far-reaching anticipatory, transference interpretations are indicated, for, if all of the patient’s libidinal and aggression is not, in fact, invested in the analyst, he has at least an unconscious role in all important emotional transactions, and, if the assumption is correct that the regressive drive, mobilized by the analytic situation, is in the direction of restoration of a single all-encompassing relationship, specified pragmatically in the individual case by the actually attained level of development, then there is a dynamic factor at work, importantly meriting interpretation as such, to the extent that available material supports it. This would be the immediate clinical application on the material regarding the ‘cognitive lag’ or ‘cognitive fall-back’.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, resides in a mental illness that some people develop after experiencing traumatic or life-threatening events. Such events include warfare, rape and other sexual assaults, violent physical attacks, torture, child abuse, natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, and automobile or aeroplane crashes. People who attest of the traumatic events may also develop the disorder.
Post-traumatic stress disorder in war veterans is sometimes called shell shock or combat fatigue. In victims of sexual or physical abuse, the disorder has been called rape trauma or battered woman syndrome. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) adopted the current name of the disorder in 1980.
In the late 1960's and early 1970's, mass demonstrations erupted throughout the United States protesting US involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975). Thousands of veterans joined together in a national organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, that supported and influenced the antiwar movement. In this transcript from an April 22, 1971, hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, committee chairman Senator J. William Fulbright indicated his sympathy for the antiwar movement. Fulbright’s comments were followed by the testimony of Vietnam veteran John Kerry, who called for an end to the war. Kerry also detailed what he believed to be the war’s negative effect in both Vietnam and the United States. Kerry became a Democratic senator from Massachusetts in 1985.
People with this disorder relive the traumatic event again and again through nightmares and disturbing memories during the day. They sometimes have flashbacks, in which they suddenly lose touch with reality and relive images, sounds, and other sensations from the trauma. Because of their extreme anxiety and disruptive opposition to events, they try to avoid anything that reminds them of it. They may seem emotionally numb, detached, irritable, and easily startled. They may feel guilty about surviving a traumatic event that killed other people. Other symptoms include trouble concentrating, depression, and sleep difficulties. Symptoms of the disorder usually begin shortly after the traumatic event, although some people may not show symptoms for several years. If left untreated, the disorder can last for years.
Post-traumatic stress disorder can severely disrupt one’s life. Besides the emotional pain of reliving the trauma, the symptoms of the disorder may cause a person to think that he or she is ‘going crazy.’ In addition, people with this disorder may have unpredictable, angry outbursts at family members. At other times, they may seem to have no affection for their loved ones. Some people try to mask their symptoms by abusing alcohol or drugs. Others work very long hours to prevent any ‘down’ periods when they might relive the trauma. Such actions may delay the onset of the disorder until these individuals retire or become sober.
Studies have set or to bring into a new found control from 1 to 14 percent of people that suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder at some point during their lives. The findings vary widely due to differences in the populations studied and the research methods used. Among people who have survived traumatic events, the prevalence appears to be much higher. The disorder may be particularly prevalent among people who have served in combat. For example, one study of veterans of the Vietnam War (1959-1975) found that veterans exposed to a high level of combat were nine times more likely to have post-traumatic stress disorder than military personnel who did not serve in the war zone of Southeast Asia.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is an extreme reaction to extreme stress. In moments of crisis, people respond in ways that allow them to endure and survive the trauma. Afterward those responses, such as emotional numbing, may persist even though they are no longer necessary.
Not everyone who experiences a traumatic event develops post-traumatic stress disorder. Several factors influence whether people develop the disorder. Those who experience severe and prolonged trauma are more likely to develop the disorder than people who experience less severe trauma. Additionally, those who directly witness or experience death, injury, or attack are more likely to develop symptoms.
People may also have been existing biological and psychological vulnerabilities that make them more likely to develop the disorder. Those with histories of anxiety disorders in their families may have inherited a genetic predisposition to react more severely to stress and trauma than other people. In addition, people’s life experiences, especially in childhood, can affect their psychological vulnerability to the disorder. For example, people whose early childhood experiences made them feel that events are unpredictable and uncontrollable have a greater likelihood than others of developing the disorder. Individuals with a strong, supportive social network of friends and family members seem somewhat protected from developing post-traumatic stress disorder.
Treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder may involve psychotherapy, psychoactive drugs, or both. Psychotherapists help individuals confront the traumatic experience, work through their strong negative emotions, and overcome their symptoms. Many people with post-traumatic stress disorder benefit from group therapy with other individuals suffering from the disorder. Physicians may prescribe antidepressants or anxiety-reducing drugs to treat the mood disturbances that sometimes accompany the disorder.
At the arriving considerations that are marked and noted, through which the essence of functional dynamics as based of the transference in the psychoanalytic process or the basic underlying the most basic of beliefs that in politics there is neither good nor evil, however, in that something that forms part of the minimal body, character or structure of that thing predetermines the properties to the good life. Nonetheless, most psychoanalysts maintain that schizophrenic patients cannot be treated psychoanalytically because they are too narcissistic to develop with the psychotherapist as interpersonal relationship that is sufficiently reliable and consistent for psychoanalytic work. Freud, Fenichel and others have recognized that a new technique of approaching patients psychoanalytically must be found if analysts are to work with psychotics. Among those who have worked successfully in recent years with schizophrenics, Sullivan, Hill, and Karl Menninger and his staff have made various modifications of their analytic approach. The techniques that are in use with psychotics is different from our approach to psychoneurotics. This is not a result of the schizophrenic’s inability to build up a consistent personal relationship with the therapist but due to his extremely intense and sensitive transference reactions.
Let us see first what the essence of the schizophrenic’s transference reactions are and how we try to meet these reactions.
We think of a schizophrenic as a person who has had serious traumatic experiences in early infancy at a time when his ego and its ability to examine reality were not yet developed. These early traumatic experiences seem to furnish the psychological basis for the pathogenic influence of the flustrations of later years. At this early time the infant lives grandiosely in a narcissistic world of his own. His needs and desires seem to be taken care of by something vague and indefinite which he does not yet differentiate. As Ferenczi noted, they are expressed by gestures and movements since speech is as yet undeveloped. Frequently the child’s desires are fulfilled without any expression of them, a result that seems to him a product of his magical thinking.
Are a person’s characteristics primarily shaped by early influences, remaining relatively stable thereafter throughout life? Or does change spontaneously occur continuously throughout life? Many people believe that early experiences are formative, providing a strong or weak foundation for later psychological growth. This view is expressed in the popular saying ‘As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.’ From this perspective, it is crucial to ensure that young children have a good start in life. But many developmental scientists believe that later experiences can modify or even reverse early influences; studies show that even when early experiences are traumatic or abusive, considerable recovery can occur. From this vantage point, early experiences influence, but rarely determine, later characteristics.
Traumatic experiences in this early period of life will damage a personality more seriously than those occurring in later childhood such as are found in the history of psychoneurotics. The infant’s mind is more vulnerable the younger and less used it has been, further, the trauma has quickened the infant ‘s egocentricity. In addition early traumatic experiences shortens the only period in life in which an individual ordinarily enjoys the most security, thus endangering the ability to store up as it were a reasonable supplies of assurance and self-reliance for the individual’s later struggles through life. Thus, as such, a child sensitized considerably more toward the frustrations of later like than by later traumatic experiences. hence many experiences in later life which would mean little to a ‘healthy’ person and not much to a psychoneurotic, mean a great deal of pain and suffering to the schizophrenic. His resistance against frustration is easily exhausted.
Once he reaches his limit of endurance, he escapes the unbearable reality of his present life by attempting to reestablish the autistic, delusional world of the infant, but this is impossible because the content of his delusions and hallucinations are naturally coloured by the experiences of his whole lifetime.
How do these developments influence the patient’s attitude toward the analyst and the analyst’s approach to him?
Due to the very damage and the succeeding chain of frustrations which the schizophrenic undergoes before finally giving in to illness, he feels extremely suspicious and distrustful of everyone, particularly of the psychotherapist ho approaches him with the intent of intruding into his isolated world and personal life. To him the physician’s approach means the threat of being compelled to return to the frustrations of real life and to reveal his inadequacy to meet them or, - still worse – a repetition of the aggressive interference with his initial symptoms and peculiarities which he has encountered in his previous environment.
The difficulty that the patient’s dilemma through his frustrations is the product through which is called ‘delusion’: Delusion itself is a false belief which is firmly held by a person even though other people recognize the belief as obviously untrue. For example, a person who truly believes he is Napoleon Bonaparte is delusional. Religious beliefs or popular conceptions, such as the belief that people have been abducted by aliens, are not delusions because they are widely held beliefs. Delusions are a type of psychotic symptom that indicate a person has lost contact with reality.
There are many different types of delusions. A person with a paranoid delusion believes that others - such as the FBI, or the CIA, even the Mafia as trying to harm or plot against him. A person with a delusion of reference believes that events or people refer specifically to him or her when they do not. For example, a woman with schizophrenia may believe that a television news broadcaster is talking personally to her rather than to the entire viewing audience. A grandiose delusion is a belief that one is extremely famous or that one has special powers, such as the ability to magically heal people.
A delusion of control is a belief that others are able to control one’s thoughts, feelings, or actions. For example, a man with this type of delusion may believe that someone has implanted a microchip in his brain that enables other people to control his thoughts. A somatic delusion is a belief that something is wrong with one’s body - for example, that one’s brain is rotting away - even though no medical evidence supports this belief. A person with an erotic delusion believes that someone is in love with him or her despite a lack of evidence for this belief. In a delusion of jealousy, a person believes that his or her spouse or lover is unfaithful despite evidence to the contrary.
Delusions commonly occur in certain severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder (also called manic-depressive illness), some cases of major depression, Dissociative disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and paranoid personality disorder. In addition, delusions may result from abuse of certain drugs, including alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, and hallucinogens such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), phencyclidine (PCP), and mescaline. Medical conditions affecting the brain, such as syphilis and brain tumours, may also cause delusions.
Delusional disorder is a relatively uncommon mental illness characterized by delusions. People with this disorder have one or more delusions that persist for at least one month. In addition, they do not suffer from other symptoms of schizophrenia, such as disorganized speech and bizarre behaviour. Usually their delusions are less bizarre than those that occur in schizophrenia and seem merely odd or unsupported by facts. Examples of nonbizarre delusions include beliefs that one is being followed, loved by someone famous, or deceived by one’s spouse. Because delusional disorder is relatively rare, little research has systematically examined its treatment. However, doctors most often use Antipsychotic drugs (also called neuroleptics) to treat this disorder. These drugs help reduce or eliminate delusions, hallucinations, and other psychotic symptoms.
In spite of his narcissistic retreat, every schizophrenic has some underlying notion of the unreality and loneliness of his substitute delusionary world. He longs for human contact and understanding, yet is afraid to admit of himself, or his therapist for fear of further frustration.
That is why the patient may take weeks and months to test the analyst before being willing to accept him, however, once he has accepted him. His dependence on the analyst is greater and he is more sensitive about it than is the psychoneurotic because of the schizophrenic’s deeply rooted insecurity, the narcissistic seemingly self-righteous attitude is but a defence.
Whenever the analyst fails the patient from reasons to be discussed later - one cannot at times avoid failing one’s schizophrenic patients - it will be severe disappointment and a repetition of the chain of frustrations the schizophrenic has previously endured.
The instinctually primitive part of the schizophrenic’s mind that does not discriminate between himself and the environment, it may mean the withdrawal of the impersonal supporting forces of his infancy. Severe anxiety will follow this vital deprivation.
In the light of his personal relationship with the analyst it means that the therapist seduced the patient to use him as a bridge over which he might possibly be led from the utter loneliness of his own world to reality and human warmth, only to have him discover that this bridge is not reliable. if so, he will respond helplessly with an outburst of hostility or with renewed withdrawal as may be seen most impressively in catatonic stupor.
The symptoms of mental illness can be very distressing. People who develop schizophrenia may hear voices inside their head that say nasty things about them or command them to act in strange or unpredictable ways. Or they may be paralysed by paranoia—the deep conviction that everyone, including their closest family members, wants to injure or destroy them. People with major depression may feel that nothing brings pleasure and that life is so dreary and unhappy that it is better to be dead. People with panic disorder may experience heart palpitations, rapid breathing, and anxiety so extreme that they may not be able to leave home. People whom experience episodes of mania may engage in reckless sexual behaviour or may spend money indiscriminately, acts that later cause them to feel guilt, shame, and desperation.
Other mental illnesses, while not always debilitating, create certain problems in living. People with personality disorders may experience loneliness and isolation because their personality style interferes with social relations. People with an eating disorder may become so preoccupied with their weight and appearance that they force themselves to vomit or refuse to eat. Individuals who develop post-traumatic stress disorder may become angry easily, experience disturbing memories, and have trouble concentrating.
Experiences of mental illness often interact differently but depends on one’s culture or social group, sometimes greatly so. For example, in most of the non-Western world, people with depression complain principally of physical ailments, such as lack of energy, poor sleep, loss of appetite, and various kinds of physical pain. Indeed, even in North America these complaints are commonplace. But in the United States and other Western societies, depressed people and mental health professionals who treat them tend to emphasize psychological problems, such as feelings of sadness, worthlessness, and despair. The experience of schizophrenia also differs by culture. In India, one-third of the new cases of schizophrenia involve catatonia, a behavioural condition in which a person maintains a bizarre statue like pose for hours or days. This condition is rare in Europe and North America.
With appropriate treatment, most people can recover from mental illness and return to normal life. Even those with persistent, long-term mental illnesses can usually learn to manage their symptoms and live productive lives.
By a variety of symptoms, including loss of contact with reality, bizarre behaviour, disorganized thinking and speech, decreased emotional expressiveness, and social withdrawal. Usually only some of these symptoms occur in any one person. The term schizophrenia comes from Greek words meaning ‘split mind.’ However, contrary to common belief, schizophrenia does not refer to a person with a split personality or multiple personality. For a description of a mental illness in which a person has multiple personalities. To observers, schizophrenia may seem or appear for being as some sorted kind of madness or a manufacturing insanity.
Perhaps more than any other mental illness, schizophrenia has a debilitating effect on the lives of the people who suffer from it. A person with schizophrenia may have difficulty telling the difference between real and unreal experiences, logical and illogical thoughts, or appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. Schizophrenia seriously impairs a person’s ability to work, go to school, enjoy relationships with others, or take care of oneself. In addition, people with schizophrenia frequently require hospitalization because they pose a danger to themselves. About 10 percent of people with schizophrenia commit suicide, and many others attempt suicide. Once people develop schizophrenia, they usually suffer from the illness for the rest of their lives. Although there is no cure, treatment can help many people with schizophrenia lead productive lives.
Schizophrenia also carries an enormous cost to society. People with schizophrenia occupy about one-third of all beds in psychiatric hospitals in the United States. In addition, people with schizophrenia account for at least 10 percent of the homeless population in the United States. The National Institute of Mental Health has estimated that schizophrenia costs the United States tens of billions of dollars each year in direct treatment, social services, and lost productivity.
Approximately 1 percent of people develop schizophrenia at some time during their lives. Experts estimate that about 1.8 million people in the United States have schizophrenia. The prevalence of schizophrenia is the same regardless of sex, race, and culture. Although women are just as likely as men to develop schizophrenia, women tend to experience the illness less severely, with fewer hospitalizations and better social functioning in the community.
Schizophrenia usually develops in late adolescence or early adulthood, between the ages of 15 and 30. Much less commonly, schizophrenia develops later in life. The illness may begin abruptly, but it usually develops slowly over months or years. Mental health professionals diagnose schizophrenia based on an interview with the patient in which they determine whether the person has experienced specific symptoms of the illness.
Symptoms and functioning in people with schizophrenia tend to vary over time, sometimes worsening and other times improving. For many patients the symptoms gradually become less severe as they grow older. About 25 percent of people with schizophrenia become symptom-free later in their lives.
A variety of symptoms characterize schizophrenia. The most prominent include symptoms of psychosis—such as delusions and hallucinations - as well as bizarre behaviour, strange movements, and disorganized thinking and speech. Many people with schizophrenia do not recognize that their mental functioning is disturbed.
Some people with schizophrenia experience delusions of persecution - false beliefs that other people are plotting against them. This interview between a patient with schizophrenia and his therapist illustrates the paranoia that can affect people with this illness.
Delusions are false beliefs that appear obviously untrue to other people. For example, a person with schizophrenia may believe that he is the king of England when he is not. People with schizophrenia may have delusions that others, such as the police or the FBI, are plotting against them or spying on them. They may believe that aliens are controlling their thoughts or that their own thoughts are being broadcast to the world so that other people can hear them.
Research suggests that the genes one inherits strongly influence one’s risk of developing schizophrenia. Studies of families have shown that the more close one is related to someone with schizophrenia, the greater the risk one has of developing the illness. For example, the children of one parent with schizophrenia have about a 13 percent chance of developing the illness, and children of two parents with schizophrenia have about a 46 percent chance of eventually developing schizophrenia. This increased risk occurs even when such children are adopted and raised by mentally healthy parents. In comparison, children in the general population have only about a 1 percent chance of developing schizophrenia.
Some evidence suggests that schizophrenia may result from an imbalance of chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters. These chemicals enable neurons (brain cells) to communicate with each other. Some scientists suggest that schizophrenia results from excess activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine in certain parts of the brain or from an abnormal sensitivity to dopamine. Support for this hypothesis comes from Antipsychotic drugs, which reduce psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia by blocking brain receptors for dopamine. In addition, amphetamines, which increase dopamine activity, intensify psychotic symptoms in people with schizophrenia. Despite these findings, many experts believe that excess dopamine activity alone cannot account for schizophrenia. Other neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and norepinephrine, may play important roles as well.
Although scientists favour a biological cause of schizophrenia, stress in the environment may affect the onset and course of the illness. Stressful life circumstances - such as maturing in age and character as for living in poverty, the death of a loved one, an important change in jobs or relationships, or chronic tension and hostility at home—can increase the chances of schizophrenia in a person biologically predisposed to the disease. In addition, stressful events can trigger a relapse of symptoms in a person who already has the illness. Individuals who have effective skills for managing stress may be less susceptible to its negative effects. Psychological and social rehabilitation can help patients develop more effective skills for dealing with stress.
Although there is no cure for schizophrenia, effective treatment exists that can improve the long-term course of the illness. With many years of treatment and rehabilitation, significant numbers of people with schizophrenia experience partial or full remission of their symptoms.
Treatment of schizophrenia usually involves a combination of medication, rehabilitation, and treatment of other problems the person may have. Antipsychotic drugs (also called neuroleptics) are the most frequently used medications for treatment of schizophrenia. Psychological and social rehabilitation programs may help people with schizophrenia function in the community and reduce stress related to their symptoms. Treatment of secondary problems, such as substance abuse and infectious diseases, is also an important part of an overall treatment program.
Antipsychotic medications, developed in the mid-1950s, can dramatically improve the quality of life for people with schizophrenia. The drugs reduce or eliminate psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions. The medications can also help prevent these symptoms from returning. Common Antipsychotic drugs include risperidone (Risperdal), olanzapine (Zyprexa), clozapine (Clozaril), quetiapine (Seroquel), haloperidol (Haldol), thioridazine (Mellaril), chlorpromazine (Thorazine), fluphenazine (Prolixin), and trifluoperazine (Stelazine). People with schizophrenia usually must take medication for the rest of their lives to control psychotic symptoms. Antipsychotic medications appear to be less effective at treating other symptoms of schizophrenia, such as social withdrawal and apathy.
Because many patients with schizophrenia continue to experience difficulties despite taking medication, psychological and social rehabilitation is often necessary. A variety of methods can be effective. Social skills training helps people with schizophrenia learn specific behaviours for functioning in society, such as making friends, purchasing items at a store, or initiating conversations. Behavioural training methods can also help them learn self-care skills such as personal hygiene, money management, and proper nutrition. In addition, cognitive-behavioural therapy, a type of psychotherapy, can help reduce persistent symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and social withdrawal.
Because many patients have difficulty obtaining or keeping jobs, supported employment programs that help patients find and maintain jobs are a helpful part of rehabilitation. In these programs, the patient works alongside people without disabilities and earns competitive wages. An employment specialist (or vocational specialist) helps the person maintain their job by, for example, training the person in specific skills, helping the employer accommodate the person, arranging transportation, and monitoring performance. These programs are most effective when the supported employment is closely integrated with other aspects of treatment, such as medication and monitoring of symptoms.
Some people with schizophrenia are vulnerable to frequent crises because they do not regularly go to mental health centres to receive the treatment they need. These individuals often relapse and face rehospitalization. To ensure that such patients take their medication and receive appropriate psychological and social rehabilitation, assertive community treatment (ACT) programs have been developed that deliver treatment to patients in natural settings, such as in their homes, in restaurants, or on the street.
People with schizophrenia often have other medical problems, so an effective treatment program must attend to these as well. One of the most generally shared in or participated in things conforming to a type without noteworthy excellence or faults just as common a rule, by ordinary, frequent and ordinarily as an idea or expression deficient in originality or freshness, yet, only of its exchanging the commonplace of the common associated problems is vehemently and usually coarsely expressed condemnation or disapproved, as the interpretative category of an unequalled vocabulary is itself a genuine abuse. Successful treatment of substance abuse inpatients with schizophrenia requires careful coordination with their mental health care, so that the same clinicians are treating both disorders at the same time.
The high rate of substance abuse in patients with schizophrenia contributes to a high prevalence of infectious diseases, including hepatitis B and C and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Assessment, education, and treatment or management of these illnesses is critical for the long-term health of patients.
Other problems frequently associated with schizophrenia include housing instability and homelessness, legal problems, violence, trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and suicide attempts. Close monitoring and psychotherapeutic interventions are often helpful in addressing these problems.
Several other psychiatric disorders are closely related to schizophrenia. In schizoaffective disorder, a person shows symptoms of schizophrenia combined with either mania or severe depression. Schizophreniform disorder refers to an illness in which a person experiences schizophrenic symptoms for more than one month but fewer than six months. In schizotypal personality disorder, a person engages in odd thinking, speech, and behaviour, but usually does not lose contact with reality. Sometimes mental health professionals refer to these disorders together as schizophrenia-spectrum disorders.
Severe mental illness almost always alters a person’s life dramatically. People with severe mental illnesses experience disturbing symptoms that can cause of such difficulties and holding to a job, or go to school, relate to others, or cope with ordinary life demands. Some individuals require hospitalization because they become unable to care for themselves or because they are at risk of committing suicide.
The symptoms of mental illness can be very distressing. People who develop schizophrenia may hear voices inside their head that say nasty things about them or command them to act in strange or unpredictable ways. Or they may be paralysed by paranoia - the deep conviction that everyone, including their closest family members, wants to injure or destroy them. People with major depression may feel that nothing brings pleasure and that life is so dreary and unhappy that it is better to be dead. People with panic disorder may experience heart palpitations, rapid breathing, and anxiety so extreme that they may not be able to leave home. People whom experience episodes of mania may engage in reckless sexual behaviour or may spend money indiscriminately, acts that later cause them to feel guilt, shame, and desperation.
Other mental illnesses, while not always debilitating, create certain problems in living. People with personality disorders may experience loneliness and isolation because their personality style interferes with social relations. People with an eating disorder may become so preoccupied with their weight and appearance that they force themselves to vomit or refuse to eat. Individuals who develop post-traumatic stress disorder may become angry easily, experience disturbing memories, and have trouble concentrating.
Experiences of mental illness often take issue upon its stability for depending on one’s culture or social group, sometimes greatly so. For example, in most of the non-Western world, people with depression complain principally of physical ailments, such as lack of energy, poor sleep, loss of appetite, and various kinds of physical pain. Indeed, even in North America these complaints are commonplace. But in the United States and other Western societies, depressed people and mental health professionals who treat them tend to emphasize psychological problems, such as feelings of sadness, worthlessness, and despair. The experience of schizophrenia also differs by culture. In India, one-third of the new cases of schizophrenia involve catatonia, a behavioural condition in which a person maintains a bizarre statue like pose for hours or days. This condition is rare in Europe and North America.
Of furthering issues regarding depersonalization disorder, meaning, in effect, that it is a categorised illness based within its intendment for being an illness, of mind, in which people experience an unwelcome sense of detachment from their own bodies. They may feel as though they are floating above the ground, outside observers of their own mental or physical processes. Other symptoms may include a feeling that they or other people are mechanical or unreal, a feeling of being in a dream, a feeling that their hands or feet are larger or smaller than usual, and a deadening of emotional responses. These symptoms are chronic and severe enough to impede normal functioning in a social, school, or work environment.
Depersonalization disorder is a relatively rare syndrome thought to result from severe psychological stress. It may occur as part of other mental illnesses, especially anxiety disorders. For example, some people with panic disorder feel nervous, have a sense of doom about their future and health, and have a troubling sense of detachment form the lose in the attemptive use in making or doing or achieving a useful regularity as might be expected of the control over their bodies. Depersonalization disorder may also be a component of more severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia. Treatment may include training in relaxation techniques that enhance body perception and control, hypnosis to modify symptoms, and psychotherapy to explore possible stress-related components of the disorder.
Psychiatrists classify depersonalization disorder as one of the Dissociative disorders. Such disorders involve a disruption of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception.
All the while, the schizophrenic responds to altercations in the analyst’s defections and understanding by corresponding stormy and dramatic changes from love to hatred, from willingness to leave his delusional world to resistance and renewed withdrawal.
As understandable as these changes are, nevertheless may come as a surprise to the analyst who frequently has not observed their source, this is quite in contrast to his experience with psychoneurosis whose emotional reactions during an interview he can usually predict. These unpredictable changes seem to be the reason for the conception of the unreliability of the schizophrenic’s transference reaction, yet they follow the same dynamic rules as the psychoneurotic’s oscillations between positive and negative transference and resistance, however, if the schizophrenic’s reactions are stormy and seemingly more unpredictable than those of the psychoneurotic, that instances suggested to be due to the inevitable errors in the analyst’s approach to the schizophrenic, of which he himself may be unaware, rather than to the unreliability of the patient‘s emotional response?
Why is it inevitable that the psychoanalyst disappoint his schizophrenic patient time and again?
The schizophrenic withdraws from painful reality and retires to what resembles the early speechless phase of development where consciousness is not yet crystalized. As the expression of his feelings is not hindered by the convention that he has eliminated, as his thinking, feelings, behaviour and speech - when present - obey the working rules of the archaic unconscious. His thinking is magical and does not follow logical rules. It does not admit to every last ‘no’, and likewise the no to ‘yes’: There is no recognition of space and time, I, you, and they, are interchangeable expression through which of symbols and often by movement and gestures rather than by words.
As the schizophrenic is suspicious, he will distrust the words of his analyst. He will interpret them and incidental gestures and attitudes of the analyst according to his own delusional experience. The analyst may not even be aware of these involuntary manifestations of his attitudes, yet they mean much to the hypersensitive schizophrenic who uses them as a means of orienting himself to the therapist‘s personality and intentions toward him.
In other words, the schizophrenic patient and the therapist are people living in different worlds and no different levels of personal development with different means of expressing and of orienting themselves. We know little about the language of the unconscious that belongs to the schizophrenic, and our access to it is blocked by the very process of our own adjustment to a world the schizophrenic has relinquished, so, we should not be surprised that errors and misunderstandings occur when we under take to communicate and strive for a rapport with him.
Another source of the schizophrenic’s disappointment arises form which the analyser accepts and does not interfere with the behaviour of the schizophrenic, his attitude may lead the patient to expect that the analyst will assist in carrying out all the patient’s wishes, even though they may not seem to be in his interest to the analyser‘s and the hospital’s in their relationship to society. This attitude of acceptance so different from the patient’s previous experiences readily fosters the anticipation that the analyst will try to carry out the patient’s suggestion and take his part, even against conventional society with which it should occasionally arise. Frequently it will be wise for the analyst to agree with the patient‘s wish to remain unbattled and untidy until he is ready to talk about the reasons for his behaviour or to change spontaneously. At other times, he will unfortunately be unable to take the patient’s part without being able to make the patient understand and accept the reasons for the analyst’s position.
If the analyst is not able to accept the possibility of misunderstanding the reaction of the schizophrenic patient and in turn of being misunderstood by him, it may shake his security with his patient.
That is to say, that, among other things, the schizophrenic, once he accepts the analyst’s insecurity. being helpless and open to himself - in spite of his pretended grandiose isolation - he will feel utterly defeated by the insecurity of his would-be helper. Such disappointment may furnish reasons for outbursts of hatred and are comparable to the negative transference reactions of psychoneurosis, yet more intense than these, since they are not limited by the restrictions of the actual world - that is, it exists in or based on fact, its only problem is a sure-enough externalization for which things are existing in the act of being external in something that has existence, ss if it were an actualization as received in the obtainable enactment for being externalized, such that its problem of in some actual life that proves obtainable achieved, in that of doing something that has an existence for having absolute actuality.
These outbursts are accompanied by anxiety, feelings of guilt, and fear of retaliations which in turn lead to increased hostility. Yet this established a vicious circle: We disappoint the patient, he is afraid that we hate him for his hatred and therefore continues to hate us. If in addition he senses that the analyst is afraid of his aggressiveness, it confirms his fear that he is actually considered as some dangerous and unacceptable, and this augments his hatred.
This establishes that the schizophrenics capable of developing strong relationships of love and hatred toward the analyst. After all, one could not be so hostile if it were not for the background of a very close relationship. In addition, the schizophrenic develops transference reactions on the narrower sense which he can differentiate from the actual interpersonal relationship. For which the schizophrenic’s emotional reactions toward the analyst have to be met with extreme care and caution. The love which the sensitive schizophrenic feels as he first emerges, and his cautions acceptance of the analyst’s warmth of interest are really most delicate and tender things. If the analyst deals with the transference reactions of a psychoneurotic is bad enough, though as a reparable rule, but if he fails with a schizophrenic in meeting positive feelings by pointing it out for instance before the patient indicates that he is ready to discuss it, he may easily freeze to death what has just begun to grow and so destroy any further possibility of therapy.
Some analysts may feel that the atmosphere of complete acceptance and of strict avoidance of any arbitrary denials which we recommend as a basic rule for the treatment of schizophrenics may not avoid our wish to guide of reacceptance of reality, nevertheless, Freud says that every science and therapy which accepts his teachings about unconscious, about transference and resistance and about infantile sexuality, may be called psychoanalysis. According in this definition we believe we are practising psychoanalysis with our schizophrenic patients.
Whether we call it analysis or not, it is clear that successful treatment does not depend on technical rules of any special psychiatric school but rather on the basic attitude of individual therapist toward psychologic persons. If he meets them as strangle creatures of another world whose productions are not comprehensible to ‘normal’ beings, he cannot treat them, if he realizes, however, that the difference between himself and the psychologic is only of degree, and not of kind, he will know better how to meet him. He will not be able to identify himself sufficiently with the patient to understand and accept his emotional reactions without becoming involved in them.
The process of constant and perpetual change is examined and closely matched within the study of philosophical speculations and pointed of a world view which asserts that basic reality is constantly in a process of flux and change. Indeed, reality is identified with pure process. Concepts such as creativity, freedom, novelty, emergence, and growth are fundamental explanatory categories for process philosophy. This metaphysical perspective is to be contrasted with a philosophy of substance, the view that a fixed and permanent reality underlies the changing or fluctuating world of ordinary experience. Whereas substance philosophy emphasizes static being, process philosophy emphasizes dynamically becoming.
Although process philosophy is as old as the 6th-century Bc Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, renewed interest in it was stimulated in the 19th century by the theory of evolution. Key figures in the development of modern process philosophy were the British philosophers Herbert Spencer, Samuel Alexander, and Alfred North Whitehead, the American philosophers Charles S. Peirce and William James, and the French philosophers Henri Bergson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Whitehead's Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929) is generally considered the most important systematic expression of process philosophy.
Contemporary theology has been strongly influenced by process philosophy. The American theologian Charles Hartshorne, for instance, rather than interpreting God as an unchanging absolute, emphasizes God's sensitive and caring relationship with the world. A personal God enters into relationships in such a way that he is affected by the relationships, and to be affected by relationships is to change. So too is in the process of growth and development. Important contributions to process theology have also been made by such theologians as William Temple, Daniel Day Williams, Schubert Ogden, and John Cobb, Jr.
‘Reality’ is a difficult word to use to every one’s satisfaction or even to one’s own satisfaction. In this instance the word reality is used arbitrarily to designate the direct, here-and-now impact of the analyst upon the patient. Reality. In this sense, contrasts with the impact the analyst has through his representation in the patient’s fantasy life, neurosis, and transference, since both kinds of impact seem always to coexist and since the former - the analyst’s real impact - may be the worst enemy of the transference, the matter of their differentiation is possibly the most challenging aspect of analysis.
The analytic situation, which is set up to shut out ordinary reality intrusions, that cannot nor should not exclude all, but to say, that in the beginning months, for instance, reality inevitably has the upper hand. The analyst, the office, the procedure, are all overwhelmingly real. Everything is strange, frightening and exciting, gratifying and frustrating. Unlike the patient can test it and orient himself to it, the impact of this reality is usually so great that even an ordinary useful transference relationship cannot be expected to develop.
Perhaps the most confusing aspect of this beginning period is the frequent appearance in it of what can be regarded as a false transference relationship. With great intensity and clarity, the patient may reveal, through transference-like references about the analyst, some of the deepest secrets only of his neurosis but of its genesis. The pseudotransference, too good to be true, is almost sure to be nothing more than the patient’s attempt to deal with the person of the analyst, the entire spectrum of his various patterns of behaviour. If, it is easy to do, the analyst overlooks the likelihood that the patient’s relationship with at this time is really about that almost everything said about it is related, analysis may get off to a very bad start. And if, as is even earlier to do, the analyst’s interests the genetic meaning of the openly exposed material, a good transference relationship may be seriously delayed and a workable transference necrosis may never appear. even after initial reality has had time to fade, reality may continue to intrude in ways that are very hard to detect and that are very troublesome.
One of the most serious problems of analysis is the very substantial help which the patient receives directly from the analyst and the analytic situation. For many a patient, the analyst in the analytic situation is in fact the most stable, reasonable, wise and understanding person he has ever met, and the setting in which they meet may actually be the most honest, open, direct and regular relationship he has ever experienced. Added to this is the considerable helpfulness to him of being able to clarify his life storey. confess his guilt, express his ambitions, and explore his confusions. Further real help comes from the learning-about-life accruing from the analyst’s skilled questions, observations and interpretations. Taken together, the total real value to the patient of the analytic situation can easily be immense. The trouble with this kind of help is that it goes on and on, it may have such a real, direct and continuing impact upon the patient that he can never get deeply enough involved in transference situation to allow him to resolve or even to become acquainted with his most crippling internal difficulties. The trouble is far too good, the trouble also is that we as analysts apparently cannot resist the seductiveness of being directly helpful, and this, when combined with the compelling assumption that helpfulness is bound to be good, permits us top credit patient improvements to ‘analysis’ when more properly it should often be recognized for being the amounting result for the patient’s using the analytic situation, as the model, for being the preceptors and supporter in the dealing practically within the immediate distractions as holding to some problem.
Perhaps, we can now refer to something in a clear unmistakable manner, and it would be to mention, for being, that one more difficult-to-handle intrusion of reality into the analysis, that by saying, that this is the definitive and final interruption of the transference neurosis by the reality of termination; in the sense, the situation is reversed and the intrusion is analytically desirable, since ideally the impact of reality of impending and certain termination is used to facilitate the resolution of the transference. As with the resolution of earlier episodes of transference neurosis, this final one is brought about principally by the analyst’s interpretations and reconstructions. As these take effect, the transference neurosis and, hopefully, along with it the original neurosis is resolved. This final resolution, however, which is much more comprehensive, is usually very different and may not come about at all without the help of the reality of termination. Accordingly, any attenuation of the ending, such as tapering off or causal or tentative stopping, should be expected to stand in the way of an effective resolution of the transference. Yet, it seems that this is what most commonly happens to an ending, and because of this a great many patients may lose the potentially great benefit of a thorough resolution and are forever after left suspended in the net of unresolved transference.
Yet, slurring over a rigorous termination seems understandable, as difficult as transference neurosis may be in the analyst at other times, this ending period, if rigorously carried out, simply has to be the period of his greatest emotional strain. There can surely be no more likely time for an analyst to surrender his analytic position and, responding to his own transference, become personally involved with his patient than during the process of separating from a long and self-restrained relationship. Accordingly, it may be better to slur over the ending lightly than to mishandle it in an attempt to be rigorous.
In considering more broadly the function of the transference in the psychoanalytic process, one is confronted by the apparent naïve, but, nonetheless important questions of the role of the actual (current) object as compared with that of the object representation of the original personage in the past. We recall Freud’s paradoxical, somewhat gloomy, but portentous concluding passage in ‘The Dynamics of Transference.’ This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won - the victory whose expression is on that field that the victory must be won - the victor y whose expression is the permanent cure of the neuroses. It cannot be disputed that controlling the phenomena of transference presents the psychoanalysis with the greatest difficultly, but it should not be forgotten that they do us the inestimable service of making the patient ‘s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses of showing their immediate and manifested impossibilities, for when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigies.
Both object and representation are made necessary by the basic phenomenon of original separation. The existence of an image of the object, which persist in the absence of the object, is one of the important beginnings of psychic life in general, certainly an indispensable prerequisite for object relationship. As generally construed. Whether this is viewed as (or a times demonstrably is) something unstable for allotting introjection, s always subject to alternative projection, or an intrapsychic object representation clearly distinguished from the self-representation, or firm identification in the superego, or in the ego itself, these phenomena are in various ways components of the system of mastery of the fact of separation, or separateness, from the original absolutely necessarily anaclitic (in the earliest period) symbiotic ‘object’. In the light of clinical observation, it would appear to be that the relative stability (parental) object representation. At which time of varying degree, are to a greater extent for the archaic phenomena. Even in nonpsychotic patients, overwhelmed by them, sometimes resembles the restoration from oedipal identification, which provides the preponderant basis for most demonstrable analytic transferences. That within the necrotic patients, the transference is effectively established when this representation invests the analyst to a degree - depending on intensity of drive and most of ego participation - which ranges in all the, wishing and strivings to remake and analyst to biasses judgements and misinterpretation of data, finally are the actual perceptual distortions.
However, the old object representations as such may be invested, however rigidly established the libidinal or aggressive cathexis of the image may be, this as such can become the actual and exclusive focus of instinctual discharge, or of complicated and intense instinct-defence solutions, only and general energy-sparing quality of strictly intrapsychic processes. For the vast majority of persons, visible to any degree, including those with severe neurosis, character distortions, addictions and certain psychoses, the striving is toward the living and actual object, even at the cost of intense suffering. In a sense, this returns us to the state in which the psychological ‘object-to-be’. Has a critical importance never again to be duplicated, except in certain acute life emergencies, even if the object is not firmly perceived as such, in the sense of later object relations? And it does seem that trance impressions from the earliest contacts in the service of life preservation, and the associated instinctual gratifications, and innumerable secondarily associated sensory impressions. Are activated by the specific inborn urges of sexual maturation? These propel the individual to renew many of the earliest modes of actual bodily contact, in connection with seeking for specific instinctual gratification. Or, to look away from clear-cut instinctual matters to the more remote elaborations of human contact: Few regard loneliness as other than a source of suffering, even self-imposed, as an apparent matter of choice, and the forcible imposition of ‘solitary confinement ‘ is surely one of the most cruel of punishments.
Of these few generalizations have some important implications, no reaction to another individual is all transference, just as surely as no relationship is entirely free of it. There is not only the general maturational-developmental drive toward the outer world, but the seeking for a variety of need and pleasure satisfactions, learned or simulated in relation to the primordial object, but necessarily and inevitably transferred from this object the generically related things and persons in the expanding environment. these may be used or enjoyed without penalty, if the distinction between the original and the new is profoundly and genuinely established (with due respect for the quantitative ‘relativism’ of such concepts). The range of such inevitable displacement (transfers) in endless in all spheres - sexual, aggressive, aesthetic, utilitarian, intellectual. More immediately relevant, in the lives of those whose development has been relatively healthy, are those individuals whose vocations provide similarities or parallels, however, rarefied, to the caretaking functions of the original parents: Teachers, physicians, clergymen, political rulers, occasionally others. Again it must be noted, that such persons perform real functions, that the adult individual’s interest in them, his specific need for them, often greatly outweighs similar reactions to parents, who retain their unique place for a complex and variable combination of other reasons. For such surrogate parents perform for the adult what his parents largely performed for him in realist years, and the psychological comparison is with an old object representation, or with an early identification, to which such latter-day parent surrogates may add important layers of elaborations. It is on the basis of such functional resemblances that persons in these roles have a unique transference valence. The analyst is first perceived as a real object, who awakens hope of help in the patients experience at all level of integration, from that of actual and immediate perception, evaluation, and response, to the activation of original parental object representations and their cathexes. That the analyst becomes invested with such representations, in forms ranging from wishes or demands to functional or even perceptual misidentifications, comprises the broad range of phenomena which we know as the therapeutic transference. Thus, the complicate structural phenomena of conflict are activated in relation to a real object, and such activation is uniquely dependent on the participation of this object, in a situation whose realities revive, with the affirmative associations, the memories of old and painful frustrations. In this situation, the continuing and prolonged contact, under strictly controlled conditions, is an important real factor, which has been elaborated previously. Without these actualities, dream life, - or instance of greater energid imbalance between impulses and defence - neurosis, will be the spontaneous solution, while everyday ‘give-and-take’ object relations are, at least on the surface, maintained as such. Occasionally, neurotic behaviour, where transferences dominate the everyday relationships, will supervene.
Interpretation, recollection or reconstruction, and, of course, working through, are essential for the establishment of effective insight, but they cannot operate mutatively if applied only to memories in the structural sense, whether of higher cathected events or persons. For it is the thrust of wish or impulse, or the elaboration of germane dynamic fantasies, and the corresponding defensive structures and their inadequacies, associated with such memories, which give to neurosis. It is a parallel thrust which creates the transference neurosis. where memories are clear and vivid, through recall, or accepted as much through reconstruction and associated with variable, optional, and adaptive, rather than rigidly structuralized’ response patterns, the analytic work has been done.
This view does place somewhat of a weighty emphasis on the horizontal coordinate of procedural operations, the conscious and unconscious relation to the analyst as a living and actual object, which is of investing upon the becoming imagery, traits, and functions of critical objects of the past. The relationship is to be understood in its dynamic, economic, and adaptive meaning, in its current structuralized tenacity, the real and unreal carefully separated from one another. The process of subjective memory or of reconstruction, the indispensable genetic dimension, is, in this sense, involved toward the decisive and specific autobiographic understanding of the living version of old conflict, than with the assumption that the interpretative reduction of the transference neurosis to gross mnemic elements is, in itself and automatically, mutative. At least, this view of the problem would seem appropriate to most chronic neurosis embedded in germane character structures of some plexuity. That neurosis symptoms connected with isolated traumatic events, covered by amnesia, may, at times, disappear on restoration of memories with adequate effective discharge, regardless of technical method, is, of course, indisputably true, even though the details of process, including the role of transference, are probably not yet adequately understood. Psychoanalysis was born in the observation of this type of process. In a thoughtful manner, the role of transference, in the early writings of both Freud and Ferenczi, seemed weighted somewhat in the direction of its resistance function, i.e., as directed against recall, although its affirmative functions were soon adequately appreciated, and placed in the dialectical position, which has obtained to the present day.
Other while, the primal processes of projection ad introjection, being inextricably linked with the infant’s emotions and anxieties, initiate object-relations, by projecting, i.e., deflecting libido and aggression onto the mother’s breast, the basis for object-relations is established, by introjecting the object, first of all the breast, relations to internal objects come into being. The term ‘object-relations’ is based on the contention that the infant has from the beginning post-natal life a relation to the mother, although focussing primarily of her breast, which is imbued with the fundamental element’s of an object-relation, i.e., love, hatred, phantasies, anxieties, and defences? The introjection of the breast is the beginning of superego formation which extends over years. We have grounds for assuming that from the first feeding experience onwards the infant’s introjection, the breast in its various aspects. The core of the superego is thus the mother’s breast, both good and bad. Given to the simultaneous operation of introjection and projection, relations to external and internal objects interact. The father too, who soon plays a role in the child’s life, early on becomes part of the infant’s internal world it is characteristic of the infant‘s emotional life that there are rapid fluctuations between love and hate, between external and internal situations between perception of reality and the fantasises relating to it, and accordingly, an interplay between prosecutory anxiety and idealization - both referring to the internal and external object’s, the idealized object bring a corollary of the prosecutory, extremely bad one.
The ego’s growing capacity for integration and synthesis leads more and more, evening during these first few months, to states in which love and hatred, and correspondingly the good and bad aspects of objects, for being synthesized. This gives rise to the second form of anxiety - depressive anxiety - for the infant’s aggressive impulses and desires toward the bad breast (mother) are now felt to be a danger to the good breast (mother) as well. In the second quarter of the first year these emotions are reinforced, because at this stage the infant increasingly perceives and introjects the mother as a person. Depressive anxiety is intensified, for the infant feels he has destroyed or is destroying a whole object by his greed and uncontrollable aggression. Moreover, owing to the growing synthesis of his emotions, he now feels that these destructive impulses are directed against as a ‘loved person’. Similar processes operate in relation to the father and other member s of the family. These anxieties and corresponding defences constitute the ‘Depressive position’, which comes to a head about the middle of the first year and whose essence is the anxiety and guilt relating to the destruction and loss of the loved internal and external objects.
It is at this stage, and bound up with the depressive position, that the oedipus complex sets in. Anxiety and guilt adds a powerful impetus toward the beginning of the oedipus complex. For anxiety and guilt increase the need to externalize (project) bad figures and to internalize (introject) good ones. There to attaching desires, love, feeling of guilt, and reparative tendencies to internal figures in the external world, however, not only is the search for new objects which dominates the infant’s needs, but also, the drive toward new life proposes: Away from the breast toward the penis, i.e., from oral desires toward genital ones. Many factors contribute to these developments, the forward drive of the libido, the growing integration of the ego, physical and mental skills and progressive adaption to the external world. These trends are bound up with the processing of symbol formation, which enables the infant to transfer not only emotions and phantasies, anxiety and guilt, from one object to another.
The processes are linked with another fundamental phenomenon governing its mental life, such that pressures exerted by the earliest anxiety situation is of the factors through which bring about the repetition compulsion, however, one conclusion about the earliest states of infancy are a continuation of Freud’s discoveries; on certain points, nonetheless, the divergencies having to arise of which is very relevant, perhaps, its main contention that object-relations are operative from the beginning of post-natal life.
Nevertheless, the view that autoerotism and narcissism are the young infant contemporaries with the first relation to objects - external and internalized, that hypothetically, autoerotism and narcissism include the love for and relation with the internalized good object which in phantasy forms part of the loved body and self. It is to this internalized object that in autocratic gratification and narcissistic stages a withdrawal takes place. Concurrently, from birth onwards, a relation to objects, primarily the mother (her breasts) is present. This hypothesis contradicts Freud’s concept of autoerotic and narcissistic stages which preclude an object-relation. However, the difference between Freud’s statement on this issue are equivocal. In various context he explicitly and implicitly expresses opinion which suggested a relation to an object, the mother’s breast, preceding autoerotic and narcissism.
In the first instance the oral component instinct finds satisfaction by attaching itself to the sating of the desire for nourishment, and its object in the mother’s breast. It then detaches itself, becomes independent and at the same time of autoerotic objectivity is found to an object in the child’s own body.
Freud’ use of the term object is somewhat different from the context that is used of this term, but Freud is referring the object of an instinctual aim. What it is to mean, that, while, in addition, it is meant as an object-relation involving the infant’s emotions, phantasies, anxieties and defences. Nevertheless, in sentence referred to, Freud clearly speaks of a libinal attachment to an object, the mother’s breast, which precedes autoerotism and narcissism.
In this context, it is reminded that of Freud’s findings about early identification. In ‘The Ego and the Id,’ speaking of abandoned object cathexes. He said, ‘ . . . The effects of the first identification in earliest childhood will be profound and lasting. This leads us back to the origin of the ego-ideal, . . . Freud then defines the first and most important identifications which lie hidden behind the ego-ideal as the identification with the father, or with the parent’s, and places them, as he expresses it, in the ‘prehistory’ of every person’. These formulations come close to the deceptions as described of their resulting of introjected objects, for by definition identifications are the result as such, but that the statement and the passage quoted from the Encyclopaedia article, it can be deduced that Freud, although he did not pursue this line of though t, however, he did assume that in the earliest infancy that both an object and introjective processes play a part.
That is to say, as regards autoerotism and narcissism we meet with an inconsistency in Freud’s views. Such inconsistencies which exist on a number of points of theory clearly show, which on these particular of issue s Freud had not yet arrived at a final decision. In respect to the theory of anxiety he stated this explicitly in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. His realization that much about the early stages of development was still unknown or obscure to him is also exemplified by his speaking of the first years of a girl’s life as, ‘ . . . lost in a past so dim and shadowy . . .’
As regards to the question of autoerotism and narcissism, Anna Freud - although her views about this aspect of Freud’s work remains unknown, but she seems only to have taken into account Freud’s conclusions that an autoerotic and a narcissistic stage precede object-relations, and not to be allowed for other possibilities, of which are implied in some of Freud’s statements such as the ones inferred above. This is one of the reasons why the divergence between Anna Freud’s conception and the immediacy of early infancy is far greater than that between Freud’s views, taken as a whole, and those of stating it as the essential to clarify the content and nature of the differences between the two schools of psychoanalytic thought, represented by Anna Freud and those that imply of such clarification is required in the interests of psychoanalytic training and also because it could help to open up fruitful discussions between psychoanalysts and thereby contribute to a greater generality of a better understanding of the fundamental problems of early infancy.
The hypothesis that a time interval extending over several months precedes object-relations implies that - except for the libido attached to the infant’s own body - impulses, phantasies, anxieties, and defences either are not present in him, or are not related to an object, that is to say, they would operate in vacua. The analysis of very young children, as to implicate, would show that there is no instinctual urge, no anxiety situation, no mental process which does not involve objects, external or internal, in other words, object-relations are at the centre of emotional life. Furthermore, love and hatred, phantasies, anxiety and defences are also operative from the beginning and are ‘ad initio’ indivisibly linked with object-relations.
The oedipus complex, in a pragmatic analytic sense, retains its position as the ‘nuclear complex’ of the neurosis. It is a climactic organization experience of early childhood, apart from its own vicissitudes, It can under favourable circumstances provide certain solutions for pregenital conflicts, or in itself suffer from them. in any case, include them in its structure. Only when the precursor experiences have been of a great severity, for which it is to claim to a shadowy organic determinacy, as the new ‘frame of reference’, which hardly having the independent and decisive significance of its own. In any case, its attendant phallic conflicts must be resolved in their own right, in the analytic transference. From the analyst, (or his current surrogate in the outer world) thus from the psychic representation of the parent, the literal (i.e., bodily) sexual wishes must be withdrawn, and genuinely displaced to appropriate objects in the outer world. The fraction of such drive elements which can be transmuted to friendly, tender feeling toward the original object. Or too other acceptable (neutralized) variants, will of course, influence the economic problem involved. This genuine displacement is opposed to the sense of ‘acting out’, while other objects are perceptually different substitutes for the primary object (thus for the analyst). This may be thought to follow automatically on the basic process of coming to terms with (accepting) the childhood incestuous wish and its parricidal connotation. Such assumption does not do justice to the dynamic problem implicit in tenaciously persistent wishes. To the extent that these wishes are to be genuinely disavowed or modified, rather than displaced, a further important step is necessary: The thorough analysis of the functional meaning of the persisting wishes and the special etiologic factors entering into their tenacity, as reflected in the transference neurosis. Thus, in principle, the literal accuracy of the concept phrased by Wilhelm Reich, ‘transference of the transference,’ as the final requirement for dissolution of the erotic analytic transference, even though the clinical discussion, which is its context, is useful. This expression would imply that the object representation which largely determine the distinctive erotic interest in the analyst can remain essentially the same, so long as the actual object changes. While a semantic issue may be involved in some degree, it is one which impinges importantly on conceptual clarity. However, such definite conceptualization of one basic element in the phenomenon or transference may be, and should be, subject to the reservations appropriately attaching themselves to any very clear-cut ideas about obscure areas, with the clinical concept of transference, its clinical derivation and its generally accepted place in the psychnalytic process.
The evolution of the reality-relatedness between patient and therapist, over the course of the psychotherapy, is something which has received little more than passing mention in the literature, Hoedemaker (1955), in a paper concerning the therapeutic process in the treatment of schizophrenia, stresses the importance of the schizophrenic patient’s forming healthy identifications with the therapist, and Loewald (1960), in his paper concerning the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis in general, repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the real relationship between patient and analyst, but only in the following passage eludes the evolution, the growth, of this relationship over the course of treatment:
. . . Where repression is lifted and unconscious and preconscious are again in communication, infantile object and contemporary object may be united into one - a truly new object as both unconscious and preconscious are changed by their mutual communication, the object which helps to bring this about in therapy, the analyst, mediates this union. . . .
It has been distinctly impressive that the patient’s remembrance of new areas of his past - his manifestation of newly de-repressed transference reactions to the therapist - occurs only hand-in-hand with the reaching of comparable areas of feeling in the evolving reality-relatedness between patient and therapist. For example, he does not come to experiencing fond memories of his mother until the reality-relatedness between himself and the therapist has reached the point where the feelings between them have become, in reality, predominantly positive. Loewald’s words, imply that an increment of transference resolution slightly antedates. , and makes possibly the forming of each successive increment the evolving reality-relationship between patent and analyst. It has been, by contrast, that the evolution of the reality-relatedness proceed alway a bi t ahead of, and makes possibly, the progressive evolution and resolution of the transference, although to be sure the latter, in so far as it frees psychological energy and makes it available for reality-relatedness, helps greatly to consolidate the ground just taken over by the advancing reality-relatedness. Loewald (1960) thinks of it that
. . . The patient can dare to take the plunge into the regressive crises of the transference neurosis which brings him face to face again with his childhood anxieties and conflicts, if he can hold on to the potentialities of a new object-relationship, represented by the analyst.
It seems that this new object-relationship is more that a potentiality, to be realized with comparative suddenness, toward the end of this treatment with the resolution of the transference. Rather it is, it has seemed as constantly being there, being built up bit by bit, just ahead of the likewise evolving transference relationship. Predeterminates as in Freud’s (1922) having pointed out that projection (expressed in the Latin is called ‘projectio’) which is, after all, so major an aspect of transference - is directed not ‘into the sky, so to speak, were there is nothing of the sort already’, but rather onto a person who provides some reality-basic for the projection.
In the final months of the therapy, the therapist clearly sees that extent to which the patient’s transference to him as representing a succession of figures from the latter’s earlier years have all been in the service the patient’s unconscious successively decreasing extent, fro experiencing the full and complex reality of the immediate relatedness with the therapist in the present. The patent at last comes to realize that the relationship with a single other human being - in this instance, the therapist - is so rich as to comprise all these earlier relationships - so rich as to evoke all the myriad feelings which has been parcelled out and crystallized, wherefore, in the transference which have now been resolved. This is a province most beautifully described by the Swiss novelist, Herman Hesse (1951) winner of the Nobel Prize in 1946,in his little novel. Siddhartha. The protagonist in a lifelong quest for the ultimate answer to the enigma of man’s role on earth, finally discovers in the face of his beloved friend all the myriad persons, things, and events which he has known, but incoherently before, during the vicissitudes of his many years of searching.
It is thus that the patient, schizophrenic or otherwise, becomes at one with himself, in the closing phase of psychotherapy. But although the realization may come to him as a sudden one, it is founded on a reality-relatedness which has been building up all along. Loewald (1960) in his magnificent paper to which transference resolution plays in the development of this reality-relatedness. As, perhaps, that the evolution of the ‘countertransference’ - not counter-transference in the classical sense of the therapist’s transference to the patient, but rather in the sense of the therapist’s emotional reaction to the patient’s transference - forms an equally essential contribution to this reality-relatedness.
It is, nonetheless, but often, that the therapist who sees a new potentiality in the patient, a previously unnoted side of him which heralds a phase of increasing differentiations. And frequently the therapist is the only one who sees it. Even the patient does not see it as ye t, except in the projected form, so that he perceives this as an attribute of the therapist. This situation can make the therapist feel very much inalienable as alone and intensely threatened.
Upon which the transference relationship with the therapist, we find that the patient naturally brings this relationship, just as he brings into the relatedness in which the difficulties concerning differentiation and integration which were engendered by the pathological upbringing upon the advances in differentiation and integration necessarily occur first outside the patient - namely, in the therapist’s increasingly well differentiated and well-integrated view of, and consequently, responses to, him - before these can become well established within him.
Because the schizophrenic patient did not experience, in his infancy, the symbolic relatedness with his mother such as each human being needs for the formation of a healthy core in his personality structure, in the emotion of the transference relationship to his therapist he must eventually succeed in establishing such a mode of relatedness.
This means that he must eventually regress, in the transference, to such a level in order to get a fresh start toward a healthier personality differentiation and integration than he had achieved before entering therapy. This is not to say that he must ‘act out’ the regressive needs in his daily life, to be sure, the schizophrenic patient, whether in therapy or not, inevitably does so to a considerable degree, but to the extent that these needs can be expressed in the transference relationship, they need not seek expression, unconsciously, thorough acting out in daily life.
Focussing now upon the transference relationship with the therapist, we find that the patient naturally brings about the difficulties concerning differentiation in the process of integration which were engendered by the pathological upbringing as for being the one more interruption in the impeding principle of reconstructions of an identifying manufacture of the transference. And the every day, relationships are found in the interplaying form of corresponding advances in differentiated dynamic integrations necessarily occur first outside the patient - namely, in the therapist’s increasingly well or acceptably differentiated by the integrated extent or range of vision, that the position or attitude that determine how of the intent of something (as an aim or an end or motive)or by way the mind is directed. Its view of and the consequent response ought to become acknowledgingly established within them.
Because the schizophrenic patient did not experience, in his infancy, the establishment of and later emergence form, a healthy symbiotic relatedness with his mother such as each human bring needs for the formation of a healthy core in his personality structure, in the evolution of the transference relationship to his therapist he must eventually succeed in establishing such a mode of relatedness.
This means that he must eventually regress, in the transference, to such a level, in order to get a fresh start toward a healthier personality differentiation and integration than he had achieved before entering therapy. This is not to say that he must act out the regressive needs in his daily life. To be sure, the schizophrenic patient, whether in therapy or not, inevitably does so to a considerable degree; but to the extent that these needs can be expressed in the transference relationship, they need not seek expression, unconsciously, through acting out in daily life.
This symbiotic mode of relatedness is necessarily mutual, participated in by therapist as well as patient. Thus, the therapist must come to experience not only the oceanic gratification, but also the anxiety involved in his sharing a symbiotic, subjective oneness with the schizophrenic patient. This relationship, with its lack of felt ego-boundaries between the two participants, at times invokes the kind of deep contentment, the kind of felt communion that needs no words, which characterize a loving relatedness between mother and infant. But at other times It involves the therapists feeling unable to experience himself as differentiated from the pathology-ridden personality of the patient. He feels helplessly caught in the patient’s deep ambivalence. He feels one with the patient’s hatred and despair and thwarted love, and at times he cannot differentiate between his own subjectively harmful effect upon the patient, and the illness with which the patient was to come or go or nearly recede in the achievement afflicting when the therapist first undertook to help him. Thus, at these anxiety-ridden moments in the symbiotic phase, the therapist feels his own personality to be invaded by the patient’s pathology, and feels his identity severely threatened, whereas in the more contented moments, part of the contentment resides in both participants enjoying a freedom from any concern with identity.
This same profound lack of differentiation may come to characterize the patient’s view of the persons about him, including his therapeutic, and at time’s, in line with his need to project a poorly differentiated conglomeration of ‘bad’ impulses, he may perceive the therapist as being but one head of a hydra-headed monster. The patient’s lack of differentiation in this regard, prevailing for month after month of his charging the therapist with saying or doing various things which were actually said or have don e by others amongst the hospitalized presences to its containing of environmental surfaces, or by the family members, can have a formidably eroding effect upon the therapist’s sense of personal intensity. bu t the patient may need to regress to just such a primitivity, poorly differentiated view of the world in order to grow up again, psychologically, in a healthier way this time.
Among the most significant steps in the maturation which occurs in successful psychotherapy are those moments when the therapist suddenly sees the patient in a new light. His image of the patient suddenly changes, because of the entry into his awareness of some potentiality in the patient. Which had not shown itself before? From now on, his responses t o the patient is a response to this new, enriched view, and through such responding he fosters the emergence, and further differentiation, of this new personality area. This is another way of describing the process which Buber and in Friednan, 1955, calls ‘making the other person present, seeing in the other persons potentialities of such even presents: Seeing in the other persons potentialities of which even he is not aware of him and helping him, by responding to those potentialities, to realize them.
Schizophrenic patient’s feelings start to become differentiated before they have found new and appropriate modes for expressing the new feelings, thus patient’s may use the same old stereotyped behaviour or utterance to express nuances of new feelings. This is identical with the situation in those schizophrenics’ familiar which are permeated with what Wynne (1958) termed ‘pseudo-mutuality’ or toward maintaining the sense of reciprocal perceiving expectations. Thus, the expectations are left unexplored, and the old expectations and roles, even though outgrown and inappropriate in one sense, continue to serve as the structure for the relation.
The therapist, through hearing the new emotional connotation, the new meaning, in the stereotyped utterance and responding in accordance with the new connotation, fosters the emerging differentiation. Over the course of months, in therapy, he may find the same verbal stereotype employed in th e expression of a whole gamut of newly emerging feelings. Thus, over a prolonged time-span, the therapist may give as many different responses to a gradually differentiating patient as are simultaneously given by the various members of the surrounding environment, to the patient who shows the contrasting ego-fragmentation (or, in a loose manner of speaking, over-differentiations).
Persistently stereotyped communications from the patient tend to bring from the therapist communications which, over a period of time, become almost equally stereotyped. One can sometimes detect, in recordings playing during supervisory hours, evidence that new emotional connotations are creeping into the patient’s verbal stereotypes, and into the therapist’s responsive verbal stereotypes, before either of the two participants has noticed this.
What the therapist does which assists the patient’s differentiation often consists in his having the courage and honesty to differ from whether the patient’s expressed feelings or, often most valuable, with the social role into which his sick behaviour tends to fix or transfix the therapist. This may consist in his candid disagreement with some of the patient, and s strongly felt and long-voiced views, or in his flatly declining to try to feel ‘sympathy’ - such as one would be conventionally expected to feel in response to behaviour, which seems, at first glance, to express the most pitiable suffering but which the therapist is convinced primarily expresses sadism on the patient’s part. Such courage to differ with the expected social role is what is needed from the therapist, in order to bring to a close the symbiotic phase of relatedness which has served, earlier, a necessary and productive function. Through asserting his individuality, and at many later moments in the therapeutic interaction, the therapist fosters the patient’s own development of more complete and durable ego-boundaries. At the same time he offers the patient the opportunity to identify with a parent-figure who dares to be an individual-dares to be so in the face of pressures from the working group of which he is part, and from his own reproachful superego, it can be of notice, that of a minor degree a consciously planned and controlled therapeutic technique wherefore, the content descriptions are rather a natural flow of events as in the transference evolution, with which the therapist must have the spontaneity to go along.
The patient, particularly in the symbiotic phase of the therapy but in preceding and succeeding phases as well, is notably intolerant of sudden and marked changes in the therapeutic relationship - that is, of suddenly seeing himself, or feeling that his therapist sees him, through new eyes. He rarely gives the therapist to feel that the latter has made an importantly revealing interpretation, or should be concealed, but when to arrive at by reasoning from evidence or from its premises that we can infer from that which he was derived as to a conclusion, that it conveys of a higher illumination of mind. Methodologically historical information is an approving acceptation by the therapist, he does so causally, he tends to experience important increments of depreciated material, yet not as every bit for reverential abstractions as to make a new, amended, or up-to-date reversion of the many problems involved in revising the earthly shuddering revelations in his development. The things that he has known all along and simply never happened to think of. His experience of an inherent perception of the world as surrounding him is often permeated by ‘deja vu’ sensations, and misidentification of the emphasizing style at which the expense of thought for taking the rhetorical rhapsody to actions or a single inaction of moving the revolutions of the earth around the sun is mostly familiar an act from his past.
The motional progression in therapy, on the patient’s part, occur each time only after a recrudescence in his symptoms. It is as though he has to find reassurance of his personal identity, as being really the same hopeless person he has long felt himself to be, before he can venture into a bit or new and more hopeful identity.
Of what expressions is that object relations exist from th e beginning of life being the mother’s breast which it split into a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast; this splitting results in a division between love and hate. What is more, is that of the relation to the first object implies its introjection and projection, and thus, from the beginning object relations are moulded by an interaction between introjection and projection, between internal and external objects and situation.
. . . .With the introjection of the complete object in about the second quarter of the first year marked steps in integration are made. . . . The loved and hated aspects of the mother are no longer felt to be so widely separated, and the result is an increased fear of loss, a strong feeling of guilt and states akin to mourning, because the aggressive impulses are felt to be divorced against the love object, the depressive position has come to the fore . . .
. . . In th e first few months of life anxiety is predominantly experienced as fear of persecution and . . . this contributes to certain mechanisms and defences which characterize the paranoid and schizoid positions. Outstanding among these defences is the mechanism of splitting internal and external objects, emotions and the ego. These mechanisms and defences are part of normal development and at the same time form the basis for later schizophrenic illness. The descriptive underlying identification by projection, i.e., projective identification, as a combination of splitting off parts of the self and projecting them onto another person . . .
Rosenfeld, a follower of Klein writes that, he presents detailed clinical data which serve to document the implicit point, among others, that whereas, the schizophrenic patient may appear to have regressed to such an objectless autoerotic level of development as was postulated by Freud (1911, 1914) and Abraham (1908), in actuality the patient is involved in object-relatedness with the analyst, object-relatedness of the primitive introjective and projective identification kind. For example, Rosenfeld concludes his description of, the data from one of the sessions as follows:
. . . The whole material of the session suggested that in the withdrawal state he was introjecting me and my penis, and at the same time was projecting himself into me. So here, again, l suggest that it is something possible to detect the object-relation in an apparently autoerotic state.
. . . only at a later stage of treatment was it possible to distinguish between the mechanisms of introjection of objects and projective identifications, which so frequently go on simultaneously (1952).
We find, among the writings of the Kleinian analysts, a number of interesting examples of delusional transference interpretation, in all of which the keynote is the concept of projective (or introjective) identification. For instance, Rosenfeld writes at one juncture (1952),
The patient himself gave the clue to the transference situation, and showed that he had projected his damaged self containing the destroyed world, not only into all the other patients, but into me, and had changed me in this way. But, instead of becoming relieved by this projection he became more anxious, because he was afraid of what I was then putting back into him. Whereupon his introjective processes became severely disturbed. One would therefore expect a severe deterioration in his condition, and in fact his clinical state during the next ten days became very precarious. He began to get more and more suspicious about food, and finally refused to eat and drink anything. . . . everything he took inside seemed to him bad, damaged, and poisonous (like faeces) as there was no point in eating anything. we knew that projection leads again into reintroduction, so that also, it had felt as if he had inside himself all the destroyed and bad objects which he had projected into the outer world: And he indicated by coughing, retching and movements of his mouth and fingers that he was preoccupied with this problem. . . I told him that he was not only afraid of getting something bad inside him. But that he was also afraid of taking good things, the good orange juice and good interpretations, instead, since he was afraid that these would make him feel guilty again. When l said this, a kind of shock went right through his body; he gave a groan of understanding, and his facial expression changed. By the end of the hour he had emptied the glass of orange juice, the first food or drink he had taken for two days . . .
Bion (1956) defines projective identification as:
. . . a splitting off by the patient of a part of his personality and a projection of it into the object where it becomes installed, sometimes as a persecutor, leaving the psychic from which it has been split off correspondingly impoverished.
It now seems that the instances of verbal transference interpretation can be looked upon as one form of intervention, at times effective, which constitutes an appeal for collaboration to the non-psychotic area of the patient’s personality, an area of which both Katan (1954) and Bion (1957) have written. But, particularly among long hospitalized chronically schizophrenic persons, we are many a patient who is too ill to be able to register verbal statements, and even in th e foregoing examples from Rosenfeld’s and Bion’s experiences, it is impossible to know to what extent the patient is helped by an illuminating accurate verbal content in the therapist’s words, or to what extent that which is effective springs, rather from the feelings of confidence, firmness, and understanding which accompany these words spoken by a therapist who feels that he has a reliable theoretical value for formulating the clinical phenomena in which he finds himself.
In trying to conceptualize such ego-states in the patient, and such states of relatedness between patient and doctor. Additional value placed the concept presentation by Little in her papers, ‘On Delusional Transference’ (Transference Psychosis) (1958) and ‘On Basic Unity’ (1960).
One of the necessary development, in along-delusional patient’s eventual relinquishment of his delusions is for these gradually to become productions which the therapist sees no longer as essentially ominous and the subject for either serious therapeutic investigation, or argumentation, or any other form of opposition, rather, the therapist comes to react to these as being essentially playful, unmaligant, creatively imaginative, and he comes to respond to them with playfully imaginative comments of his own. Nothing helps more finally to detoxicate a patient’s previously self-isolating delusional state than to find in his therapist a capacity to engage him in a delightfully crazy playfulness - a kind of relatedness of which the schizophrenic patient had never a chance to have his fill during his childhood. Typically, such early childhood playfulness was subjected to massive repression, because of various intra-familial circumstances.
Innumerable instances of the therapist’s uncertainty how to respond to the patient’s communication turn upon the question of whether the communication is to be ‘taken personally’ - to be taken as primarily designed, for instance, toward filling the therapist with perplexity, confusion, anxiety, humiliation, rage, or some other negatively toned affective state; or whether it is to be taken rather as primarily an effort to convey some basically unhostile need on the patient’s par. Just as it is often essential that the therapist become able to sense and respond to personal communications in a patient’s ostensibly stereotyped behaviour or utterance, so too it is frequently essential that he be able to see, behind the overt ‘personal’ reference to himself - often a stinging or otherwise emotionally evocative reference - some fundamental need which the patient is hesitantly to communicate openly.
Some comments by Ruesch, although concerned primarily with nonverbal communication, are beautifully descriptive of the process which occurs in such patients as the transference evolves over the course of the therapy:
. . . .the primitive and uncoordinated movements of patient at th e peak of severe functional psychosis . . . may be viewed as attempts to reestablish the infantile system of communication through action. It is as if these were frustrating in early childhood, with the hope that this time there will be another person who will understand and reply in nonverbal terms. This thesis is supported by observations of the behaviour of psychotic children who tend to play with their fingers, make grimaces or assume bizarre body position. Their movements rarely are directed at other people but rather at themselves, something to the point of producing serious injuries. As therapy proceeds, interpersonal movements gradually replace the solipsistic movements, and stimulus becomes marching to response. Once these children have been satisfied in a nonverbal ways, they become willing to learn verbal forms of codification and begin to acquire mastery of discursive language.
It seems, but nevertheless, that there is widespread agreement concerning whose functional importance of dependency process in schizophrenia, for which the patient who is involved in a schizophrenic illness, probably nothing is harder to endure than the circumstance of his having intense dependency needs which he cannot allow himself to recognize, or which if recognized in himself he dare not express to anyone, or which are expressed by him in a fashion that, more often than not, brings an uncomprehending or actively rejecting response from the other person. For the therapist who is working with such a patient, certainly there is nothing that brings more anxiety, frustration, and discouragement than do these processes in the schizophrenic person with whom he is dealing.
The dependency on which is focussed upon an effectual acknowledge in the presence of which has its closest analogue, in terms of normative standards, is such that the personality development, in the experience and behaviour of the infant or of the young child. The dependency needs, attitudes, and strivings which the schizophrenic manifests may be defined in the statement that he seeks for another person to assume a total responsibility for gratifying all his needs, both physiological and psychological, while this person is to seek nothing from him.
Of the physiological needs, which the schizophrenic manifests, those centring about the oral zone of interaction are usually most prominent, analogous to the predominant place held by nursing in the life of the infant. Desires to be stroked and cuddled, likewise, so characteristic of the very early years of normal development, is prominently held within the schizophrenic. In addition, desires for the relief of genital sexual tensions, even though these have had their advent much later in the life history than have his oral desires, are manifested in much the same level of an early, infantile dependency. That is, such genital hungers are manifested in much the same small-child spirit of, ‘you ought to be taking care of this for me’ as are the oral hungers.
The psychological needs which are represented among the schizophrenic’s dependency processes consist in the desire for the other person to provide him with unvarying love and protection, and to assume a total guidance of his living,
In the course of furthering characterizations of the schizophrenic’s dependency processes will be defined much more fully, that is to say, it is to be emphasized that no of the dependency processes are but described is characteristic only of the schizophrenic, or qualitatively different from processes operative at some level of consciousness in persons with other varieties of psychiatric illness and in normal persons. With regard to dependency processes, we find research in schizophrenia has its greatest potential value in the fact that schizophrenic shows us in a sharply etched form that which is so obscured, by years progressive adaptation to adult interpersonal living, in human beings in general. Wherefore, but in some degree, are about the patient’s anxiety about the dependency needs, are (1) As nearly as can be determined, the patient is unaware of pure dependency needs; for him, apparently, they exist in consciousness, if at all, only in the form of a hopelessly conflictual combination of dependency needs plus various defences - defences which render impossible any thoroughgoing sustained gratification of these needs. These defences (which include, grandiosity, hostility, competitiveness, scorn and so forth) have so long ago developed in his personality, as a means of coping with anxiety attendant upon dependency needs, that the experiencing of pure dependency needs it, for him, lost in antiquity and so be achieved only relatively late in therapy after the various defences have been largely relinquished.
Thus it appears to be not only dependency needs ‘per se’ which arouse anxiety, but rather the dependency needs plus all these various defences (which tend in themselves to be anxiety-provoking) plus the inevitable frustration, to a greater or less degree, of the dependency needs.
Hostility as one of the defences against awareness of ‘dependency needs,’ that which for certainly repressed dependency needs are one of the most frequent bases of murderous feelings in the schizophrenic, in such instances the murderous feelings may be regarded as a vigorous denial of dependency. What frequently happens in therapy is that both patient and therapist become so anxious about the defensive murderous feelings that the underlying dependency feeling long remain unrecognized.
Every schizophrenic possesses much self-hatred and guilt which may serve as defences against the awareness of dependency feelings (‘I am too worthless for anyone possibly to care about me’), and which in any case complicate the matter of dependency. The schizophrenic has generally come to interpret the rejections in his past life as meaning that he is a creature who wants too much and, in fact, a creature who has no legitimate needs. Thus, he can accept gratification of his dependency needs, if at all, only if his needs are rendered acceptable to themselves by reason of his becoming physically ill or in a truly desperate emotional state. It is frequently found that a schizophrenic is more accessible to the gratification of his dependency needs when he is physically ill, or filled with despair, than at other times. In that way, th e presence of self-hatred, and guilt, one ingredient of the patient’s overall anxiety about dependancy needs has to do with the fact that these needs connote to him the state of feeling physical illness or despair.
In essence, then, we can see that the patient has a deep-seated conviction that his dependency needs will not be gratified. Further, we see that this conviction is based not alone on the fortunate past expedience of repeated rejection, but also, the fact that his own defences, called forth concomitantly with the dependency desires, make it virtually certain that this dependency needs will not be met. (2) The dependency needs are anxiety-provoking not only because they involve desires to relate in an infantile or small-child fashion (by breast - or penis sucking, being cuddled, and as so forth) which is not generally acceptable behaviour among adult s, but also, and probably more importantly, because they involve a feeling that the other person is frighteningly important, absolutely indispensable to the patient’s survival.
This feeling as to the indispensable of importance of the other person derives from two main sources: (a) the regressed state of the schizophrenic’s emotional life, which makes for his perceiving the other as being all-important to his survival, just as in infancy the mothering one is all-important to the survival of the infant, and (b) certain additional disabling features of his schizophrenic illness, which render him dependent in various special ways which are not quite comparable with the dependency characteristic of normal infancy or early childhood. Thereof, a number of points in reference to (b) are, first, we can perceive that a schizophrenic who is extremely confused, for example, is utterly dependent on or upon the therapist or, some other relevantly significant person to help him establish a bridge between his incomparable, incongruent, conflicting, conditions in which things are out of their normal or proper places or relationships. Such are the complete mental confusions that the authenticity of a corresponding to known facts are to discover or rediscover the real reason for which such things as having no illusions and facing reality squarely face-to-face, a realistic appraisal of his chances for advancing to the reasonable facts as we can see the factional advent for understanding the absolutizing instinct to fancy of its reality.
Second, we can see also that the patient who is in transition between old, imposed values and not-yet-acquired values of his own, has only the relationship with his therapist to depend upon.
Third, is the concern and consideration that, in many instances, the schizophrenic appears to be what one might call a prisoner in th e present. He is so afraid both of change and of the memories which tend to be called forth by the present that he clings desperately to what in immediate. He is in this sense imprisoned in immediate experience, and looks to the therapist to free him so that he will be able to live in all his life, temporally speaking - present, past and future.
Forth, it might be surmised that an oral type of relatedness to the other person (with the all-importance of the other which this entails) is necessary for the schizophrenic to maintain, partly in order to facilitate his utilization of projection and introjection as defences against anxiety.
Anxiety, is the constructed foundation whose emotional state from which are grounded to the foundation structural called the ‘edifice’, that an emotional state in which people feel uneasy, apprehensive, or fearful. People usually experience anxiety about events they cannot control or predict, or about events that seem threatening or dangerous. For example, students taking an important test may feel anxious because they cannot predict the test questions or feel certain of a good grade. People often use the words fear and anxiety to describe the same thing. Fear also describes a reaction to immediate danger characterized by a strong desire to escape the situation.
The physical symptoms of anxiety reflect a chronic ‘readiness’ to deal with some future threat. These symptoms may include fidgeting, muscle tension, sleeping problems, and headaches. Higher levels of anxiety may produce such symptoms as rapid heartbeat, sweating, increased blood pressure, nausea, and dizziness.
Bychowski (1952) says, ‘’The separation between the primitive ego and the external world is closely connected with orality, both form the basis for the mechanism which we call projection,’ and would add, for introjection. , that Starcke (1921) for earlier comments ‘I might briefly allude to the possibility that in the repeated alternation between becoming one’s own and no t one’s own, which occurs during lactation . . . the situation of being suckled plays a part in the origin of the mechanism of projection.
The patient has anxiety, and, least of mention, his dependency needs lead him either to take in harmful things, or to lose his identity.
The schizophrenic does not have the ability necessary to tolerate the frustration of his dependency needs, so that he can, once they emerge into awareness, subject them to mature discriminatory judgement before seeking their gratification. Instead, like a voraciously hungry infant, his tendency is to put into his mouth (either literally or figuratively) whatever is at hand, whether nutritious or with a potential of being harmful, this tendency is about th e basis of some of his anxiety concerning his dependency needs, for the fear that they will keep him blindly into receiving harmful medicines, bad advice, electro-shock treatment, lobotomy, and so forth. Schizophrenic patients have been known to beg, in effect, for all these, and many a patients have been known to beg, yet these patients have been ‘successful’ in his dependency desires. A need for self-punishment is, of course, an additional motivation in such instances.
A statement by Fenichel (1945) indicates that, ‘The pleasure principle, that is, the need for immediate discharge, is incompatible with correct judgement, which is based on considerable and post postponement of the reaction. The time and energy saved by this postponement are used in the function of sound and stable judgments. That in the early states the weak ego has not yet learned to postpone anything.
In the same symptomatic of one that finds that th e extent that the schizophrenic projects onto other persons his own needs too such and to devour, he feels threatened with being devoured by these other persons.
To elaborate now in a somewhat different direction upon this fear of loss of identity. Th e schizophrenic fears that his becoming dependent on another person will lead him into a state of conformity that other person’s wishes and life values. A conformer is almost the last sort of person as the schizophrenic wishes to become, since his sense of individuality resides in his very eccentricities. He assumes that the therapist, for example, in the process, requiring him to give up his individuality for the kinds of parental future in his past had e been able to salvage his refuge used to pay the price.
It seems of our apparent need to give the impression of being without necessarily being so in fact that things are not always the way they seem, as things accompanied with action orient of doing whatever is apprehended as having actual, distinct and demonstrateable existence from which there is a place for each thing in the cosmological understanding idea in that something conveys to the mind a rational allotment of the far and near, such of the values and standards moderate the newly proposed to modify as to avoid an extreme or keep within bounds.
For what is to say, in that we need to realize, that the patient is not solely a broken, inert victim of the hostility of persons in his past life. His hebephrenic apathy or his catatonic immobility, for example, represent for one thing an intensely active striving toward unconscious regressive goals, as Greenson (1949, 1953) has for his assistance to make clear in the boredom and apathy in neurotic patients. The patient is, in other words, no inert vehicle which needs to be energized by the therapist; rather, an abundance of energy is locked in him, pressing ceaselessly to be freed, and a hovering ‘helpful’ orientation on the part of the therapist would only get in the way. We must realize that the patient has made, and is continually making, a contribution to his own illness, however unwittingly, and however obscure the nature of this contribution may long remain.
More than often, it has been found that the histories of schizophrenic patients, whether male or female, describe the father as being by far, the warmer, the more accessible, of the responsive parents, and the patient as having always been very much attached to the father, whereas the mother was always a relatively cold, rejecting, remote figure, but for the repetitive correlative coefficient, that it was to be found that, disguised behind the child’s idol or inseparable buddy, is a matter of the father’s transference to the child’s being a mother-figure that the father, in these instances, is an infantile individual who reacts both to his wife and to his child, as the mother-figure, and who, by striving to be both father and mother to the child, unconsciously seeks to intervene between mother and child, that in such a way as to have each of them to himself, in the considerations that suggest of a number of cases when both are in the transference-development with the patient and the selective prospect of the patient’s generalization that limits or qualifies an agreement or other conditions that may contain or depend on a conditioning need for previsional advocates that include the condition that the transference phenomena would effectually raise the needed situational alliance.
The various forms of intense transference on the part of the schizophrenic individual tend forcibly to evoke complementary feeling-responses, comparably intense, in the therapist. Mabel Blake Cohen (1952) has made the extremely valuable observation, for psychoanalysis in general, that:
. . . it seems that the patient applies great pressure to the analyst in a variety of non-verbal ways to behave like the significant adults in the patient’s earlier life, it is not merely a matter of the patient’s seeing the analyst as like his father, but of his actually manipulating the relationship in such away as to elicit the same kind of behaviour from the analyst. . . .
It is no too much to say that, in response to the schizophrenic patient’s transference, the therapist not only behaves like the significant adults in the patient’s childhood, but experiences most intimately, within himself, activated by the patient’s transference the very kind of intense and deeply conflictual feelings which were at work, however repressed, in those adults in the past, as well as experiencing, through the mechanisms of projection and introjection in the relationship between himself and the patient, the comparably intense and conflictual emotion which formed the seed-bed of psychosis in the child himself, years ago.
The accountable explanation in the support for reason to posit for the necessarily deep feeling-involvement on the part of the therapist is inherent in the nature of early ego-formation. The healthy reworking of which is so central to the therapy of schizophrenia. Spitz (1959), in his monograph on the early development of the ego, repeatedly emphasizes that emotion plays a leading role in th e formation of what he described as the ‘organizers of the psyche’ (which he defines as ‘emergent, dominant centres of integration’) during the first eighteen months of life. H e says, for example, that:
. . . the road which leads to this integration of isolated functions is built by the infant’s object relations, by experiences of an effective nature. Accordingly, the indicator of the organizer of the psyche will be of an effective nature, it is an effective behaviour which clearly precedes development in all other sectors of the personality by several months.
The phases comprising the over-all course of psychotherapy with chronically schizophrenic persons, is that of recent years it has become increasingly reassuring that it is possible to delineate such phases amongst the complex, individualistic and dynamic events of clinical work. One can be said, that, in this difficult effort at conceptualization, from Freud’s delineation of the successive phases of libidinal development in healthy maturation, Erikson’s (1956) portrayal of the process of identity formation as gradual unfolding of the personality through phase-specific psycho-social crises of evolution of the reality principle in healthy development - the typical conflicts, the sequence of danger situations, and
the ways they are dealt with - can be traced in this process.
The successive phases of which are best characterised, the psychotherapy of chronic schizophrenia, are the ‘out-of-contact phases, the phase of ambivalent symbiosis, the phase of pre-ambivalent symbiosis, the phase of resolution of the symbiosis, and the late phase, - that of establishment, and elaboration, of the newly won individuation through selective new identification and repudiation of outmoded identifications.
The sequence of these phases retraces, in reverse, the phases by which the schizophrenic illness was originally formed: The way of thinking, the aetiological roots of schizophrenia are formed when the mother-infant symbiosis fails to resolve into individuation of mother and infant - or, still more harmfully., fails even to become at all firmly established - because of deep ambivalence of the part of the mother which hindered the integration and differentiation of the infant’s and young child’s ego, the child fails then to proceed through the normative development phases of symbiosis and subsequent individuation. In stead the core of his personality remains uniform, and ego-fragmentation and dedifferentiation become powerful, though deeply primitive and unconscious defences against the awareness of ambivalence in the object and in himself. Even in normal development, one becomes separate person only by becoming able to face, and accept ownership of, one’s ambivalence with which he had to cope in his relationship with his mother was too great, and his ego-formation too greatly impeded , for him to be able to integrate his conflictual feeling-states into an individual identity.
Of these, the theoretical concept has been fostered by Mahler’s (1956) paper on autistic and symbiotic infantile psychosis and by Balint‘s (1953, 1955) writings concerning phenomena of early ego-formation which he encountered in the psychoanalysis of neurotic patients. From a purely descriptive viewpoint, schizophrenia can be seen to consist essentially in an impairment of both ‘integration’ and ‘differentiation’ - which are but opposite faces of a unitary growth-process. From a psychodynamic view point seems basic to all the bewilderingly complex and varied manifestations of schizophrenia.
Taking in, is the matter of integration; when we assess schizophrenia individual in terms of the classical structural areas of the personality - id, ego, and superego - we discover these to be poorly integrated with one another. The id is experienced by the ego as a Pandora’s box, the contents of which will overwhelm one if it is opened. The ego is, as many writers have stated, severely split, sometimes into innumerable islands which are not linked discernibly with one another. And the superego has the nature of a cruel tyrant whose assaults upon the weak and unintegrated ego are, if anything, even more destructive to it than are the assessions of the threatening id-impulses, as Szalita-Pemow (1951), Hill (1955), and others. Moreover, the superego is, like the ego, even in itself not well integrated; it s utterance contain the most glaring inconsistencies from one moment to the next. Jacobson (1954) has shown that there is actually as dissolution of the superego, as an integrated destruction - a regressive transformation back into the threatening parental images whose conglomeration originally formed it.
Differentiation is a process which is essential to integration, and vise versa. For personality structure-functions or psychic contents to become integrated, they must first have emerged as partially differentiated or separate from one another, and differentiation in turn can emerge only out of a foundation of more or less integrated functions or contents. The intertwining mesh upon which is interwoven in the growth precesses of integration and differentiation, such that the impairment of both likewise interlocking. But in the schizophrenic these two processes tend to be out of step with one another, so that at one moment a patient’s more urgent need may be for increased integration, whereas at another he may more urgently need increased differentiation. And these are some patients who show for months end, a more urgent need in one of these areas, before the alternate growth-phase on the scene, that type is a modicum of validity in speaking and of two different ’types’ of schizophrenic patients.
One comes to realize, upon reasons of how premature have been one’s effort to find out what feelings the patient is experiencing or what thoughts he is having; one comes to realize that much of the time he has neither feelings nor thoughts differentiated as such and communicable to us.
Such differentiations as the patient posses an inclining inclination that tend to break down when intense emotion enters his awareness. A paranoid man, for example, may find that when his hatred toward another person reaches a certain degree of intensity, he is flooded with anxiety because he no longer knows whether he hates, or instead ‘really loves’ the other individual. This is not based, on any line or its course, whereupon the primary mechanism which Freud (1911) outlined in his classical description of the nature of paranoid delusions of persecution, a description in which repressed homosexual love played the central role. The central difficulty is rather that the ego is too poorly differentiated to maintain its structure in the face of such powerful affects, and the patient becomes flooded with what can only be described as ‘undifferentiated passion’, precisely as one finds an infant to be overwhelmed at times with affect which the observer cannot specifically identity as any one kind of emotion.
As for the feelings with which the therapist himself experiences in working within the variations in the differentiated patient, we find, again, a persistent threat of the therapist’s sense of identity. But, whereas in the unitary integration complex manifestations of such of a schizophrenic’s sense of identity. But as in the first instance that the threat was felt predominantly as a disturbance of one’s personal integration, it seems possible as a weakening of one’s sense of differentiation. In this instance, the ‘therapeutic symbiosis’ which implicate the necessary developments that it tends to occur earlier for which of the patient’s predominant mode of relatedness with other persons, at the developmental level at which we find him at the very beginning of our work, is a symbiotic one. Such descriptions, least of mention, agree with the necessary developments, in that it tends to occur for the patient ‘s predominant mode of relatedness with other persons, the symbiotic relatedness, with its subjective absence of ego-boundaries, involves not only special gratification, but anxiety-provoking disturbances on one’s sense of personal identity.
The comparatively rapid development of symbiotic relatedness is facilitated by the patient’s characteristically non-verbal, and physically more or less immobile, functioning during the therapeutic sessions. In response, the therapist’s own behaviour becomes more and more similar, is that each participant is now offering to the other, saying that over the hours of counselling, a silent, impassive screen which facilitates abundant mutual projecting and introjecting. Thus a symbiotic state is likely to be reached earlier than in one’s work with the typically much more verbal type of the patient when described for that instance, the patient’s and therapist’s more abundant verbalization’s tend persistently to stress the ego-boundaries separating the to persons from one another.
The applicability for which the predominantly non-differentiated patient, in that the therapist’s sense of identity as a complexly differentiated individual entity becomes further eroded, or undermined, as he finds the patient persistently operating on the unwavering conviction, that the hours of counselling is but an undifferentiated aspect of the whole vague mass of the institution, even in Psychodynamic terms, is in actuality the patient’s projection of his own poorly differentiated hostility, through which the patient’s tenaciously held view, is the way the world around him really is.
Further, since the patient typically verbalizes little but a few maddening monotonous stereotypes, the therapist tends to feel, over the course of time, with so little of his own intellectual content being explicitly tapped in the relationship, that his richness of intellect is progressively rusting away - becoming less differentiated, more stereotyped and rudimentary. Moreover, the patient presents but one of two emotional wave-lengths to which the therapist can himself tune in, rather than a rich spectrum of emotion which calls into response a similarly wide range of feelings from the therapist himself. Thus not only the therapist’s intellectual resources, but his emotional capacities too, become subjectively narrowed down and impoverished, as he finds that, over the sessions of counselling, his patient in him neither any wide range of ideas, nor any emotion except, for example, rage, or contempt or dull hopelessness.
The feeling experience on his part, anxiety-provoking and discouraging though he finds it, is a necessary therapeutic development. It is for him thus to experience at first hand something of the patient’s own lack of differentiation; for, as in the therapy with the non-integrated patient, as, once, again, the healing process occurs external to the patient, as it were, at an intrapsychic level in the therapist, before it becomes established in the patient himself. That is, the therapist’s coming to view the patient, his relationship with the patient, and himself in this relationship, all as being largely non-differentiated, is a development which sets the stage for the patient’s gradually increasing differentiation. Now the therapist comes to sense, time and again, newly emerging tendrils of differentiation in the patient, before the latter is himself conscious of them. In responding to these with spontaneity as they show themselves, again, that in the therapist, helps the patient to become aware theat they are a part of him.
To analyst and analytic student alike, the term ‘transference psychosis’ usually connotes a dramatic but dreaded development in which an analysand, who at the beginning of the analysis was overtly sane but who had in actuality a borderline ego-structure, becomes overtly psychotic, that the course of the evolving transference relationship. We generally blame the analyst for such as development and prefer not to think any more about such matters, because of our own personal fear that we, like the poor misbegotten analysand, might become, or narrowly avoid becoming, psychotic in our own analysis. By contrast, in working with the chronically schizophrenic patient, we are confronted with a person whose transference to us is no harder too identify partly for the very reason that his whole daily life consists in incoherent psychotic transference reactions, for which is to whatever, to everyone about him, including the analyst in the treatment session. Little’s comment (1960) that the delusional state ‘remains unconscious’ until it is uncovered in the analysts’ holds true only in the former instance, in the borderline schizophrenic patient; there, it is the fact that the transference is delusional which is the relatively covert, hard-to-discern aspect of the situation, in chronic schizophrenia, by contrast, nearly everything is delusional, and the difficult task to foster the emergence of a coherent transference meaning in the delusional symptomatology. In other words, the difficult thing in the work with the chronically schizophrenic patient is to discover the ‘transference reality’ in his delusional experience.
The difficultly of discerning the transference aspect of one’s relationship with the patient can be traced to his having regressed to a state of ego functioning which is marked by severe impairment in his capacity either to differentiate among, or to integrate, his experiences. He is so incompletely differentiated in his ego functioning that he tends to feel, not that the therapist reminds him of, or is like, his mother or that of his father (or whomever, from his early life) but rather his functioning towards the therapist is couched in the unscrutinised assumption that the therapist is the mother or father. When, for example, in trying to bring to the attention of a paranoid schizophrenic women how much like she seemed to find the persons in her childhood on the one hand, and the person about her in the institution, including myself, on the other, she dismissed this with an impatient retort, ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, What difference does it make? For years subsequently in our work together, all the figures in her experience were composite figures, without any clear subjective distinction between past and present experiences, figures from the institutional scene peopled her memories of her past, and figures from what has become known to be her past were experienced by her as blended with the persons she saw about her in current life.
Transference situations in which the psychosis is manifested at a phase in therapy in which the deeply chronically confused patient, who in childhood had been accustomed to a parent’s during his thinking for him, is ambivalently (a) trying to perpetuate a symbiotic relationship wherein the therapist to a high degree does the patient’s thinking for him, and (b) expressing, by what the therapist feels to be sadistic and castrative and nullifying or undoing the therapist’s effort to be helpful, a determination to be a separately thinking, and otherwise separately functioning, individual
Difficult though it is to discern the nature and progressive evolution of the patient’s transference to the therapist, it is even more difficult to conceptualize that which is ‘new’ which the therapist brings into the relationship, and which, as J. M. Rioch (1943) has emphasized, is crucial to the patient’s recovery. Rioch is quite right in saying that, ‘Whether intentionally or not, whether conscious of it or not, the analyst does express, day in and day out, subtle or overt evidences of his own personality in relationship to the patient.’
The conjectural considerations for which inadequate evidences in the understanding of questionable intent is that there is a companion evolution of reality relatedness between patient and therapist, concomitant with such a transference evolution as having had the impression that it is only when the reality relatedness between patient and therapist has reached, finally and after many ‘real life’ vicissitudes between them, a depth of intense fondness that there now emerges, in the form of a transference development, a comparably intense and long-repressed fondness for the mother.
Presumably, a point which Freud (1922) concerning projection also holds true for transference, he stated that projection occurs no ‘into the sky, so to speak, where there is nothing of the sort already’, but rather the persons who in reality posses an attitude qualitatively like that which the projecting person is attributing to them. So it is with transference, we may presume that when a patient comes to react to us as a loved and loving mother, this phrase - as well as other phrases - of the transference is founded upon our having come to feel, in reality, thus toward him. M. B. Cohen (1952) stresses the importance of the therapist’s inevitable feeling response to the patient’s transference, and, if only to suggest, that an equally healthy source of the therapist’s feeling participation is the evolving reality relatedness which pursues its own course, related to and parallelling, but not fully embraced by, the evolving transference relatedness over the years of person’s working together. What is more, is the countertransference which has already been written, but as to indicate, there is a great need for us to become clear about the sequence which the recovery process in the schizophrenic adult, very roughly analogous to the growth process in normal infancy, childhood, and adolescence, tends innately to follow. When we have become clearer and surer about this, and particularly about the validity-relatedness element necessary to it, in that the frequently - though by no means always - various manifestations of feeling regarded as unwanted countertransference will be seen to be inevitable, and utterly essential, components of the recovery process.
Further, the opening view of the personality as being divisible into the areas, id, ego, and superego, tends to shield us from the anxiety-fostering realization that in psychoanalytic change is not merely quantitative and partial - where id was, there shall ego be - in Freud’s dictum - but qualitative and all-persuasive. That is, that in such passages as the following. Freud gives a picture of personality-structure, and of maturation, which leaves the inaccurate but comforting impression that at least a part of us - namely, as part of the id - is free from change. In his paper entitled ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ in 1915, he said,
. . . the evolution of the mind shows a peculiarity which is present in no other process of development. When a village grows into a town, a child into a man, the village and the child become submerged in the town and the man, . . . it is otherwise with the development of the mind . . .the primitive stages [of mental development] can always be re-established, the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable (Freud, 1915).
In ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’, he says that in psychoanalytic treatment,
. . . By means of the work of interpretation, which transforms what is unconscious into what is conscious, the ego is enlarged at the cos of this unconscious . . . (Freud, 1915-17)
In ‘The Ego and the Id’ he said that,
. . . the ego is that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world . . . the pleasure-principle . . . reigns unrestricted by the id . . . the ego represents what may be called reason and common sense, in contrast to the id, which contains the passions (Freud, 1923)
Glover, in his book on technique published in 1955, states similarly that,
. . . a successful analysis may have uncovered a good deal of the repressed . . . [and] have mitigated the archaic censoring functions of the superego, but it can scarcely be expected to abolish the id (Glover, 1955)
The state of developmental sciences, and about our own individual the individual therapeutic skills, should not cause us to understate the all-embracing extent of human personality-growth in normal maturation at least a few psychoanalysis. It is believed that all encountered, and, at lest a few fortunate instances which have made us wonder whether maturation really leaves any area of the personality untouched, leaves any steel-bound core within which the pleasure principle reigns immutably, or whether, instead, we have seen such a genuine metamorphosis, from an erstwhile hateful and self-seeking orientation to a loving and giving orientation, quite as wonderful and thoroughgoing the metamorphosis of the tadpole into the frog thoroughgoing as the metamorphosis of the tadpole into the frog or that of the caterpillar into the butterfly.
Freud himself, in his emphasis upon the ‘negative therapeutic reaction’ (1923), the repetition compulsion, and the resistance to analytic insight which he discovered in his work with neurotic patients, has shown the importance, in the neurotic individual, of anxiety concerning change, and he agrees with Jung’s statement that ‘a peculiar psychic inertia’ hostile to change and progress, is the fundamental condition of neurosis (Freud, 1915). This is, as we know, even more true of psychosis - so much as that only in very recent decades have psychotic patients achieved full recovery though modified psycho-analytic therapy. Finding it instructive to explore in detail the psychodynamics of schizophrenia in terms of the anxiety concerning change which one encounters, in a particular intense degree, at work in these patients, and in oneself in the course of treating them. What the therapy of schizophrenia can teach us of the human being’s standing concerning change, can broaden and deepen our understanding of the non-psychotic individual also.
Both object and representations are made necessary by the basic phenomenon of original separation. The existence of an image of the object, which persist in the absence of the object, is one of the important beginnings of psychic life in general, certainly an indispensable prerequisite for object relationship. As generally construed. Whether this is viewed as (or a times demonstrably is) something unstable for allotting introjection, s always subject to alternative projection, or an intrapsychic object representation clearly distinguished from the self-representation, or firm identification in the superego, or in the ego itself, these phenomena are in various ways components of the system of mastery of the fact of separation, or separateness, from the original absolutely necessarily anaclitic (in the earliest period) symbiotic ‘object’. In the light of clinical observation, it would appear to be that the relative stabilities (parental) object representation. At which time of varying degree, are to a greater extent for the archaic phenomena. Even in nonpsychotic patients, overwhelmed by them, sometimes resembles the restoration from oedipal identification, which provides the preponderant basis for most demonstrable analytic transferences. That within the necrotic patients, the transference is effectively established when this representation invests the analyst to a degree - depending on intensity of drive and most of ego participation - which ranges in all the, wishing and strivings to remake and analyst to biassed judgements and misinterpretation of data, finally are the actual perceptual distortions.
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