ABSTRACT
145One of the casualties of the present intense interest in the ‘here and now’ transference interpretation is the diminution of the ‘there and then’. It is maintained that, as all perception is selective, there is no registration of the actuality of family life, only the subject’s personal experience of the actual world. Furthermore, any recollection of the past must be viewed as a phantastical reading that reflects present-day internal object relations, so recollecting the past only serves the selective aims of the present. Since a patient thinking of his history does so in the presence of the analyst, such historical considerations must be regarded as unconscious representations of the patient’s present experience of the analyst. The point is often stressed that all that we can truly know anyway is the present experience, the precise nature of how the patient relates to us and constitutes us in his inner world, and how we experience the presence of the analysand. To go beyond this immediate experience, whether we try to think with the analysand about some distress in present-day relations, or aim to reflect on his childhood, is to leave the immediacy of the analyst–analysand interaction. To consider contemporary issues or the past is to collude with the patient’s splitting of the transference and to accept the projective identification of the elements of the transference into the narrative objects that refer to persons and events external to the analytic relationship. To avoid this mutual enactment, the analyst must firmly hold his ground and only interpret the patient’s material and behaviour as it speaks his ego’s relation to the analyst–object.
