ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how at an advanced stage of analysis, with the onset of transference resistance and its interpretation, the patient’s ambivalent attachment to the father-image was so considerably weakened that he would cease from everlastingly seeking father-figures as an essential ingredient of his emotional life. It examines how the analyst, by virtue of his emotional detachment, can function equally well as a mother-image, and have placed upon him the patient’s forgotten emotional fixations to the mother of his infancy. The patient had lain on the analytical settee motionless and silent. After a considerable time of the sort of demonstration from the patient, chiefly characterized by persistent silences, he was pressed to do Free Association of Thought to the mood in which he was. The chapter explains the beginning of the undoing of the patterns responsible for the essential disorder of this patient’s mind.
