ABSTRACT
S. Freud's perspective on transference seems uniformly personal, that is, ontogenetic. The tendency for certain transference free-falls to diminish or to become more rapidly cycled and resolved during a successful psychoanalysis suggests that the core changes occurring during the process involve a complex reorganization of the brain. Such "learning" involves so many potential changes within different levels of the brain's plastic, hierarchical structure that any analogy to computer reprogramming is a gross oversimplification indeed. The nontransference state would correspond with the non-right hemisphere activation (REM) period. Most importantly, the pattern of REM/nonREM cycles and transference/nontransference cycles would indicate that in both wakeful states and in sleep the same fundamental brain strategy would be active as a major method for analyzing sensory data: alternate cycles of "consolidation" and "downloading". Transferences of different types result either in complementarity and the meeting of primary needs or in noncomplementarity and the formation of new judgments about the utility of old strategies for obtaining need gratification.
