ABSTRACT
The transference relationship between the patient and the therapist is a major component of the psychoanalytic psychotherapeutic process. In large part it is what distinguishes psychotherapy from other kinds of psychological therapies. As psychoanalytic theory has begun to acknowledge more and more, transference doesn't involve only the specific unconscious memories of mind. Rather, what are also–and perhaps more importantly–transferred in the clinical relationship are our typical ways of relating and reacting. One feature of transference that story is intended to bring forward is the intensity of feeling that transference produces. The discomfort and disease this intensity produces is often an occasion for getting out of therapy, or at least resisting the terms of the psychotherapeutic conversation. In the transference relationship with the therapist is the re-experiencing of events, situations and emotions from the past, even if what they appear to be in the present seems totally different and unrelated to anything we have ever experienced before.
