ABSTRACT
Donald Meltzer regarded Freud’s discovery of the transference as, together with Anna O’s ‘talking cure’, the birth of the psychoanalytic method. The preformed transference, based on greater or lesser knowledge of or fantasies about the analytic method and the analytic experience, has to be taken down like an old shed at the bottom of the garden before anything new can be constructed. In particular, the preformed transference consisted in the patient’s efforts ‘to follow Freud’s expectations regarding repetition compulsions’ and to see themselves as repeating or bringing up the past. Meltzer sees the countertransference dream as a special type of observation that is alert to aspects of meaning that are still incipient, shadowy: It is difficult to explain the technique of counterdreaming. Dreams, as Meltzer said, ‘come to the rescue’ of the analyst’s own poverty of symbol-formation. They facilitate the evolution of a private language between the analyst and the analysand, based on a long-term narrative of the patient’s dream-life.
