ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a poem which demonstrates how the wakeful child makes a song out of frightening abandonment in the night. The refrain, 'Come back early or never come', is one of wounded ultimatum. In this way, it is a lullaby thrown into reverse and represents the resignation that a child might feel when faced with overwhelming trauma occurring too early for its level of cognitive development and understanding. Concrete transference sounds like a contradiction, transference is usually understood as a symbolic concept. The patient sees the analyst as a concrete figure and this inability to conceive of the analyst symbolically manifests itself in the patient's actions toward the analyst. Interpretation is therefore aimed at demonstrating to the patient that anxieties around life and death, and the facts of life may be able to be symbolised in the mind of the analyst, thus eventually in the mind of the patient.
