ABSTRACT
The transference concept can only be fully appreciated in terms of its historical development, and different schools within psychoanalysis at present tend to emphasize different aspects of what is understood by the term. Freud suggested that the particular characteristics of a patient's transference stem from the specific features of that patient's neurosis; they are not simply an outcome of the analytic process. From the outset, the analytic technique introduced by Melanie Klein has emphasized the centrality of transference interpretation. The elaboration of theoretical ideas relating to internal objects led to a view of transference in which the 'projection' or 'externalization' of internal object relationships played a major part. The analysis of past internalized object relations in the transference constitutes, at the same time, the analysis of the constituent structures of ego, superego, and id and their intra- and interstructural conflicts.
