Transference in the psychoanalytic sense is a re-evocation in the present of feelings towards the parents in the past. ‘Transference’, as Freud (1922) defined it, is based on the capacity for relationships. It is also a symbolic activity based on the capacity to ‘recollect’. Thus, the transference situation with such children is different from that in the psychoanalytic treatment of other types of emotional disturbance. The fact that their emotional life is also a raw, crude elemental one, in which the extreme emotions of rage, terror and anguish (‘grief’ as Mahler terms it) are the only ones experienced by the child, also makes a difference to the transference situation. Also, premature transference expectations on the part of the therapist can seem to be pressurising and intrusive to children whose pathology has arisen from an inhibitory recoil from a ‘not-me’ mother, who is felt to be full of hardness, roughness, irritation, darkness, blackness and nastiness.