ABSTRACT
Freud is tentatively developing a new conception of transference. And while he wouldn’t use these terms himself, I think it’s fair to say that in the original conception, transference is a transfer of a desire or emotion across a world (a world that is largely taken for granted); while in the new conception transference is an idiosyncratic world coming into view in the analytic situation. This world is no longer taken for granted; it becomes the primary focus of inquiry and treatment. What makes transference a special class of structures is that in the analytic situation the idiosyncratic world can come into view as such. In ordinary life, people approach others in structured, idiosyncratic ways – and though that may lead to break-ups in personal relations, fights, misunderstandings, normally people do not recognize the extent to which the catastrophe was the outcome of a clash of structured approaches to life. The challenge, then, is to devise a form of interaction in which people can come to recognize their own activity in creating structures that they have hitherto experienced as an independently existing world.
