ABSTRACT
The deeper knowledge of psychopathology shows that the patients’ predicament is far worse than that of the average psychoneurotic, hysteric, or obsessional. When a patient in the analytical situation feels “very comfortable with nothing to say”, one can sure that the transference situation has arrived. This is the eventual situation which it is the task of analysis in due course to interpret and to make conscious to the patient. It is within this period of his emotional development that the nucleus of all his conflicts lies—and more than this, of all his emotional patterns and of his personality itself. The patient apparently thought it enough to reveal that he was conscious only of feeling very comfortable and hoped to be left undisturbed to enjoy that experience of comfort. However true the interpretation might be, it would be emotionally meaningless to the patient.
