ABSTRACT
Psycho-analysis has been built up on two well-established facts of clinical experience. The one is resistance. The situation is entirely different with regard to the second, equally important observation: transference. This important fact of experience which led to a psycho-analytic theory of instincts, and recently to the beginnings of a psycho-analytic characterology, has been challenged, often disapproved of, even completely rejected. This attitude has two main causes. The one is that transference, though in the same way a general phenomenon, needs a trained, unprejudiced observer; the other is that it is intimately connected with the field of emotions. The cause is always the circumstance that (at that moment) the emotion cannot be lived out on the original person or object or even cannot be lived out on it at all. All the emotions originate from the immense reservoir of the Oedipus complex.
