ABSTRACT
Transference is pathological insofar as the unconscious is crowded with ghosts, haunting the patient in the dark of his defenses and his symptoms, are allowed to taste blood are let loose. Parricide involves murder not only of a parent but also of someone who stands for a parent, a parent figure like a doctor or teacher or another family member—anyone on whom one is dependent enough to invoke parental equivalence. A patient once remarked that he hated President’s Day and the more Martin Luther King Day, because, he said, presidents and kings were father figures, and he hated his father. Paradoxically for some individuals, the accompanies change for the better. Parricide inevitably is associated with the terrors of separation from the initial all-promising, omnipotent primal parents; these primitive dynamic presences remain at least in the unconscious part of one’s mind.
