ABSTRACT
In the psychoanalytic setting one has the opportunity to observe and study these processes as they emerge in the relationship with the analyst. Sigmund Freud's great discovery that feelings and impulses were transferred from earlier relationships, not remembered but re-lived and re-experienced in the relationship with the analyst – the transference – was also applied by Melanie Klein in the field of child analysis. This chapter presents some clinical material, not to prove the existence of the forces, but rather to illustrate how one might try to understand them. It focuses on the way in which an interaction of the past is re-enacted in the present. The chapter illustrates the emergence of the early object relationships in different contexts, and in child and adult patients; sometimes this is covert and subtle, sometimes more like a violent eruption.
