ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic method of treatment is built around recognition of the phenomena associated with transference. In Freud's thought and in that of the 'classical Freudians', transference is understood to be based on the psychological mechanism of displacement: a set of intense feelings is diverted from the person to whom they belong and instead is directed towards some other person, in this instance the psychoanalyst. Freud's first formulation of transference, in the 'Dora' case study, stresses the way such transferences represent, but are not in fact the same as, the unconscious complexes from which they arise. Transferences are: new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies which are aroused during the progress of the analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic of their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician.
