ABSTRACT
The development of the technique of psychoanalysis has been determined essentially by the evolution of knowledge about the nature of transference. The greatest advances in psychoanalytic technique were derived from Freud's major discoveries about the twofold power of transference; it is an instrument of irreplaceable value, and it is the source of the greatest dangers. By transference the authors refer to a special kind of relationship toward a person; it is a distinctive type of object relationship. The main characteristic is the experience of feelings to a person which do not befit that person and which actually apply to another. The usual restrained, nonintrusive, consistent behavior and attitudes of the analyst do not realistically call for intense reactions. The converse of intense reactions to the analyst, the absence of reactions, is just as surely a sign of transference. All transference reactions are characterized by ambivalence, the coexistence of opposite feelings.
