ABSTRACT
Before I go on to the main topic of tonight’s lecture, namely interpretation, I shall discuss a few further aspects of the transference situation. In my last lecture, I suggest that during analysis the transference situation permeates the patient’s whole life. If this is true we must, in order to understand the transference situation in all its ramifications, consider the whole actual life of the patient at the time of analysis, as well as his phantasies, in relation to the transference. This is one more reason, and a very important one, why in analysis we should get to know as much as possible about the patient’s life. But our attempts to do so are often frustrated for some length of time by the very fact that the same mechanisms and processes which are underlying the transference phenomena are partly responsible for the patient’s temporarily keeping his actual life from us, whilst enabling him to tell us more of his phantasies.
