Freud - Complete Works (418 page)

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THE DYNAMICS OF TRANSFERENCE

(1912)

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2457

THE DYNAMICS OF TRANSFERENCE

The almost inexhaustible topic of transference
has recently been dealt with by Wilhelm Stekel in this journal on
descriptive lines. I should like in the following pages to add a
few remarks to explain how it is that transference is necessarily
brought about during a psycho-analytic treatment, and how it comes
to play its familiar part in it.

   It must be understood that each
individual, through the combined operation of his innate
disposition and the influences brought to bear on him during his
early years, has acquired a specific method of his own in his
conduct of his erotic life - that is, in the preconditions to
falling in love which he lays down, in the instincts he satisfies
and the aims he sets himself in the course of it.¹ This
produces what might be described as a stereotype plate (or several
such), which is constantly repeated - constantly reprinted afresh -
in the course of the person’s life, so far as external
circumstances and the nature of the love objects accessible to him
permit, and which is certainly not entirely insusceptible to change
in the face of recent experiences. Now, our observations have shown
that only a portion of these impulses which determine the course of
erotic life have passed through the full process of psychical
development. That portion is directed towards reality, is at the
disposal of the conscious personality, and forms a part of it.
Another portion of the libidinal impulses has been held up in the
course of development; it has been kept away from the conscious
personality and from reality, and has either been prevented from
further expansion except in phantasy or has remained wholly in the
unconscious so that it is unknown to the personality’s
consciousness. If someone’s need for love is not entirely
satisfied by reality, he is bound to approach every new person whom
he meets with libidinal anticipatory ideas; and it is highly
probable that both portions of his libido, the portion that is
capable of becoming conscious as well as the unconscious one, have
a share in forming that attitude.

  
¹
I take this opportunity of defending myself
against the mistaken charge of having denied the importance of
innate (constitutional) factors because I have stressed that of
infantile impressions. A charge such as this arises from the
restricted nature of what men look for in the field of causation:
in contrast to what ordinarily holds good in the real world, people
prefer to be satisfied with a single causative factor.
Psycho-analysis has talked a lot about the accidental factors in
aetiology and little about the constitutional ones; but that is
only because it was able to contribute something fresh to the
former, while, to begin with, it knew no more than was commonly
known about the latter. We refuse to posit any contrast in
principle between the two sets of aetiological factors; on the
contrary, we assume that the two sets regularly act jointly in
bringing about the observed result.
Δαίμωυ
κα
ì
Τύχη
[Endowment and Chance] determine a
man’s fate - rarely or never one of these powers alone. The
amount of aetiological effectiveness to be attributed to each of
them can only be arrived at in every individual case separately.
These cases may be arranged in a series according to the varying
proportion in which the two factors are present, and this series
will no doubt have its extreme cases. We shall estimate the share
taken by constitution or experience differently in individual cases
according to the stage reached by our knowledge; and we shall
retain the right to modify our judgement along with changes in our
understanding. Incidentally, one might venture to regard
constitution itself as a precipitate from the accidental effects
produced on the endlessly long chain of our ancestors.

The Dynamics Of Transference

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   Thus it is a perfectly normal and
intelligible thing that the libidinal cathexis of someone who is
partly unsatisfied, a cathexis which is held ready in anticipation,
should be directed as well to the figure of the doctor. It follows
from our earlier hypothesis that this cathexis will have recourse
to prototypes, will attach itself to one of the stereotype plates
which are present in the subject; or, to put the position in
another way, the cathexis will introduce the doctor into one of the
psychical ‘series’ which the patient has already
formed. If the ‘father-imago’, to use the apt term
introduced by Jung (1911, 164) is the decisive factor in bringing
this about, the outcome will tally with the real relations of the
subject to his doctor. But the transference is not tied to this
particular prototype: it may also come about on the lines of the
mother-imago or brother-imago. The peculiarities of the
transference to the doctor, thanks to which it exceeds, both in
amount and nature, anything that could be justified on sensible or
rational grounds, are made intelligible if we bear in mind that
this transference has precisely been set up not only by the
conscious
anticipatory ideas but also by those that have
been held back or are unconscious.

   There would be nothing more to
discuss or worry about in this behaviour of transference, if it
were not that two points remain unexplained about it which are of
particular interest to psycho-analysis. Firstly, we do not
understand why transference is so much more intense with neurotic
subjects in analysis than it is with other such people who are not
being analysed; and secondly, it remains a puzzle why in analysis
transference emerges as
the most powerful resistance
to the
treatment, whereas outside analysis it must be regarded as the
vehicle of cure and the condition of success. For our experience
has shown us - and the fact can be confirmed as often as we please
- that if a patient’s free associations fail¹ the
stoppage can invariably be removed by an assurance that he is being
dominated at the moment by an association which is concerned with
the doctor himself or with something connected with him. As soon as
this explanation is given, the stoppage is removed, or the
situation is changed from one in which the associations fail into
one in which they are being kept back. At first sight it appears to
be an immense disadvantage in psycho-analysis as a method that what
is elsewhere the strongest factor towards success is changed in it
into the most powerful medium of resistance. If, however, we
examine the situation more closely, we can at least clear away the
first of our two problems. It is not a fact that transference
emerges with greater intensity and lack of restraint during
psycho-analysis than outside it. In institutions in which nerve
patients are treated non-analytically, we can observe transference
occurring with the greatest intensity and in the most unworthy
forms, extending to nothing less than mental bondage, and moreover
showing the plainest erotic colouring. Gabriele Reuter, with her
sharp powers of observation, described this at a time when there
was no such thing as psycho-analysis, in a remarkable book which
betrays in every respect the clearest insight into the nature and
genesis of neuroses.² These characteristics of transference
are therefore to be attributed not to psycho-analysis but to
neurosis itself.

  
¹
I mean when they really cease, and not
when, for instance, the patient keeps them back owing to ordinary
feelings of unpleasure.

  
²
Aus guter Familie
, Berlin,
1895.

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   Our second problem - the problem
of why transference appears in psycho-analysis as resistance - has
been left for the moment untouched; and we must now approach it
more closely. Let us picture the psychological situation during the
treatment. An invariable and indispensable precondition of
every
onset of a psychoneurosis is the process to which Jung
has given the appropriate name of ‘introversion’.¹
That is to say: the portion of libido which is capable of becoming
conscious and is directed towards reality is diminished, and the
portion which is directed
away
from reality and is
unconscious, and which, though it may still feed the
subject’s phantasies, nevertheless belongs to the
unconscious, is proportionately increased. The libido (whether
wholly or in part) has entered on a regressive course and has
revived the subject’s infantile imagos.² The analytic
treatment now proceeds to follow it; it seeks to track down the
libido, to make it accessible to consciousness and, in the end,
serviceable for reality. Where the investigations of analysis come
upon the libido withdrawn into its hiding-place, a struggle is
bound to break out; all the forces which have caused the libido to
regress will rise up as ‘resistances’ against the work
of analysis, in order to conserve the new state of things. For if
the libido’s introversion or regression had not been
justified by a particular relation between the subject and the
external world - stated in the most general terms, by the
frustration of satisfaction - and if it had not for the moment even
become expedient, it could never have taken place at all. But the
resistances from this source are not the only ones or indeed the
most powerful. The libido at the disposal of the subject’s
personality had always been under the influence of the attraction
of his unconscious complexes (or more correctly, of the portions of
those complexes belonging to the unconscious), and it entered on a
regressive course because the attraction of reality had diminished.
In order to liberate it, this attraction of the unconscious has to
be overcome; that is, the repression of the unconscious instincts
and of their productions, which has meanwhile been set up in the
subject, must be removed. This is responsible for by far the
largest part of the resistance, which so often causes the illness
to persist even after the turning away from reality has lost its
temporary justification. The analysis has to struggle against the
resistances from both these sources. The resistance accompanies the
treatment step by step. Every single association, every act of the
person under treatment must reckon with the resistance and
represents a compromise between the forces that are striving
towards recovery and the opposing ones which I have described.

  
¹
Even though some of Jung’s remarks
give the impression that he regards this introversion as something
which is characteristic of dementia praecox and does not come into
account in the same way in other neuroses.

  
²
It would be convenient if we could say
‘it has recathected his infantile complexes’. But this
would be incorrect: the only justifiable way of putting it would be
‘the unconscious portions of those complexes’. The
topics dealt with in this paper are so extraordinarily involved
that it is tempting to embark on a number of contiguous problems
whose clarification would in point of fact be necessary before it
would be possible to speak in unambiguous terms of the psychical
processes that are to be described here. These problems include the
drawing of a line of distinction between introversion and
regression, the fitting of the theory of complexes into the libido
theory, the relations of phantasying to the conscious and the
unconscious as well as to reality - and others besides. I need not
apologize for having resisted this temptation in the present
paper.

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   If now we follow a pathogenic
complex from its representation in the conscious (whether this
is an obvious one in the form of a symptom or something quite
inconspicuous) to its root in the unconscious, we shall soon enter
a region in which the resistance makes itself felt so clearly that
the next association must take account of it and appear as a
compromise between its demands and those of the work of
investigation. It is at this point, on the evidence of our
experience, that transference enters on the scene. When anything in
the complexive material (in the subject-matter of the complex) is
suitable for being transferred on to the figure of the doctor, that
transference is carried out; it produces the next association, and
announces itself by indications of a resistance - by a stoppage,
for instance. We infer from this experience that the
transference-idea has penetrated into consciousness in front of any
other possible associations
because
it satisfies the
resistance. An event of this sort is repeated on countless
occasions in the course of an analysis. Over and over again, when
we come near to a pathogenic complex, the portion of that complex
which is capable of transference is first pushed forward into
consciousness and defended with the greatest obstinacy.¹

  
¹
This, however, should not lead us to
conclude in general that the element selected for
transference-resistance is of peculiar pathogenic importance. If in
the course of a battle there is a particularly embittered struggle
over the possession of some little church or some individual farm,
there is no need to suppose that the church is a national shrine
perhaps, or that the house shelters the army’s pay-chest. The
value to the object may be a purely tactical one and may perhaps
emerge only in this one battle.