“If you don’t see and feel the intensity and the immediacy of the transference, then you see it in this diminished light as simply a repetition of the past.”

This chapter resumes the question of experiencing the clinical material in the transference versus experiencing it outside the transference. The question was first dealt with in the previous chapter. It is now argued that the two classical ways of responding to the clinical material crucially depends on the way the analyst experiences the transference. “The difficulty about the transference is the counter-transference. If you don’t see and feel the intensity and the immediacy of the transference, then you see it in this diminished light as simply a repetition of the past. This is most people’s problem: to feel the intensity, the concrete reality of the transference. It’s a matter of a kind of humility that you can’t imagine that the patient should so be attached to you … you are carrying the transference of an internal figure, and it is immediate, it is concrete and it is intense, and it is attached to you.”

The idea that mother’s new baby may be experienced, in the transference, as robbing the placenta from the patient while expelling her out of projective identification is discussed.

Sophie is now shown to develop a strong maternal transference. However, a technical mistake disturbed the evolution of this key aspect of the transference and led to a crisis in her analysis. It was, however, the discussion of this mistake that shed a new light over the meaning of the transference.

The meaning, in psychic reality, of the feeling of triumph, is now perhaps better seen at work in the transference.

NB: This report ends the first year of supervision.