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Chapter Two Part One – Literature review - Page 32
conceptualised, transference enters into all significant relationships (including those
with places, objects and ideas as well as people), that is, all relationships that are
invested with considerable emotional meaning (Bird, 1972).
Clinically, transference may be of less direct importance than countertransference for
two reasons. The first is that there is a rational, modernist trend in Freud’s work, so that
insight came to be seen, at times by Freud and by some amongst his followers, to have a
central and relatively uncomplicated role in psychological change. Thus, from this
perspective the role of the analyst is to understand the transference on to them by the
patient, and to share that understanding, in the form of interpretations, with the patient.
Quite apart from the question of resistance that Freud quite quickly identified, it now
seems clear that the process of change is far more interpersonal and intersubjective than
this (Ogden, 1994). This idea is elaborated further in the consideration of
psychoanalysis later in this chapter.
Secondly, psychoanalysts have come to work with patients with difficulties at earlier
levels of development than those relating to the Oedipus complex (ideally at least partly
resolved at around 5 years of age), which is how Freud saw the bulk of his patients’
difficulties. There is now a fuller awareness, both that some of Freud’s patients
described in his case studies indeed had difficulties originating earlier in their
development than he thought, and that for patients with difficulties at these earlier levels
of development, what is needed (at least initially) is a relational form of understanding
rather than the offering of insight. Nonetheless, transference is still a crucial concept in
psychoanalytic theory and practice.