Transference and Countertransference

Malcolm Macmillan

The concepts of transference and countertransference, together with that of transference neurosis, properly belong to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. In Sigmund Freud's original formulations they were inextricably intertwined with his propositions about the determinants of development and neuroses, and they have very limited meaning outside that framework. Where they are so used, their meanings derive from a simple attribution of current client behavior to events in the client's past. Freud's earliest discussion of transference was in the case of Dora, whom he saw late in 1900. After interpreting some of her behavior toward him as a repetition of her behavior toward her father, he said that transferences were “new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the progress of the analysis [and] replace some earlier person by the person of the physician. To put it another way: a whole series ...

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