ABSTRACT
This chapter describes in some detail the way in which Sigmund Freud's theories during the second phase of psychoanalysis can be organized into a topographical frame of reference. It considers some aspects of the clinical phenomenon of transference as it can be understood within the topographical frame of reference. The concept of transference was introduced by Freud during the first phase, in Studies on Hysteria, but it received its most extensive and coherent formulation in the second phase of psychoanalysis, 1897–1923. Transference is a concept whose range of use and span of meaning continues to represent a central aspect of the psychoanalytic theory of the therapeutic process in particular, and of the psychoanalytic psychology of interpersonal relationships in general. In the second phase, transference processes were thought to develop only as treatment progressed, induced and facilitated by the regression-inducing properties of the psychoanalytic situation. Preconscious phantasies include the large class of preconscious transference phantasies.
