A Healing Relationship in Margaret Drabble's Novel The Needle's Eye

This chapter draws a parallel between the psychoanalytic process with its power to engage and transform and a spontaneously occurring healing process depicted in Margaret Drabble’s novel The Needle’s Eye . Despite widespread controversy as to what constitutes psychoanalytic process, the interpersonal relationship between therapist and patent is central to change in treatment. The concept of transference in its broadest sense underlies the power of this process (Freud, 1905, 1912). People constantly seek out and attempt to resume, reenact, and repair old love relationships; elements of both transference and reality coexist in all relationships and become the focus of psychotherapeutic ones (Bird, 1972).