ABSTRACT
A true understanding of transference phenomena includes not only the knowledge of who or what the analyst is representing, but also what are the affects that a person or object from the past is felt by the patient to have had towards the patient. It also includes the affects that the patient had towards these significant figures from his past, especially during infancy and early childhood. This chapter discusses some of the problems analysts can be faced with when they attempt to make use of their affective responses as tools for understanding the vicissitudes of their patients’ transference and the development of transference neuroses. These affective responses not only present the analyst with another tool that he can use, but they also confront him, at times, with the perception in himself of a conflict that psychologists would call “cognitive dissonance”.
