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Transference interpretation has always been regarded as very important to psychoanalytic practice. However, analysts differ on its centrality relative to other forms of intervention. This paper argues that transference interpretation as introduced by Freud and then taken up and developed by Klein ("transference interpretation proper") is, in fact, the only form of intervention that could bring about essentially analytic change. To understand why, a taxonomy of different forms of intervention commonly practiced within the analytic situation is presented, including interventions that relate to transference, but do not constitute transference interpretation proper. The latter kind is then described in detail. Next, the paper defines analytic change. It relies on a particular perspective on what it is to come to know psychic truth; one that sees such knowing as a lived state of mind, rather than a state of having knowledge about one's dynamics. This foundational Freudian perspective has been especially advanced through Klein's notion of phantasy. Given this view of analytic change it becomes clear that it can only be brought about through transference interpretation proper. The paper also addresses reasons why it seems especially difficult to embrace this view in contemporary psychoanalytic culture, while stressing how crucial it is to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I explore some similarities between experiences of music and of analytic sessions. I focus on qualities of evanescence, the way that music – in contrast to many other arts – in one perspective only lasts as long as it is actually being played. Then it's over. The analyst-patient discussion in a session is similar. Yet the psychic reverberations of some transient, fugitive moments may last a lifetime. And even when no verbally profound understanding is occurring, nevertheless the patient-analyst encounter is emotionally significant. I illustrate this with a clinical example. I explore transference as illusion, and the relationship between truth and illusion in terms of Bion's O. I end with thoughts about the paradoxical value of the illusoriness of aesthetics and nature as considered by Freud in his short paper "On Transience" (1916), and the grin of Lewis Carol's Cheshire Cat, left hanging in the air. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a presentation of the concept "transference" in psycho-analysis. In Freud's thought, transference movements are new editions, copies of tendencies or phantasies that are the repetition of infantile prototypes, relived with a lively feeling of actuality. The text shows Freud's reflection on transference, and the importance of the countertransference which has been much developed by the post-freudians authors. Then, the principal forms of transference are presented, for example passionate transference, or transference by reversal. The psychoanalytic reflection about transference leads to study the analyst's neutrality, and to pay attention to the setting of the sessions. André Green emphasizes that the transference that is addressed to the analyst is at the same time a transference on the setting and on to speech. In the complexity of the "analytic situation" (Donnet), speech is transformed under the effect of the transference address (Rolland). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief introduction gives an historical outline of the development of the concept of transference in the different psychoanalytic traditions. It goes back to the various meanings of the German term "Übertragung" – transference, transcription, transmission, transposition and assignment – and how they were accentuated by the different psychoanalytic schools. The paper depicts the transition from a mainly intrapsychic understanding of transference as repetition to a more bipersonal and intersubjective approach exploring the different meanings of "intersubjectivity" and the forces that operate within the analytic field. Major developments arose from a new understanding of the role of the analyst's countertransference and the detection of transference mechanisms in narcissistic, borderline and psychotic states. The exploration of different forms of splitting and projective and introjective identification deepened the understanding of the analytic communication and led to concepts like "acting in", role-responsiveness, "actualization" and "enactment". As the author tries to show, all these approaches can find a legitimization in Freud's original writings, but the main differences concern technical issues, i.e. the interpretation of transference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translations of summary This manuscript, dated 1941, is a class on technique taught by James Strachey to first-year candidates at the British Psychoanalytical Society ( BPS), located in the Archives of BPS. As the last of three written manuscripts on transference interpretation, it offers an opportunity to trace the development and subtle shift in Strachey's thinking following his 1934 paper (Strachey, 1934, 1937). The lecture is striking in its precise language, and in the complexity of the issues discussed. Through the use of an optical metaphor, the magic lantern, Strachey illustrates transference, what is therapeutic about a transference interpretation and describes projective identification and some aspects of counter-transference without naming them as such. Strachey makes a persuasive case for careful attention being paid to the analytic situation, the 'artificially simplified relationship between analyst and patient' with systematic comparison to psychotherapeutic techniques of support and reassurance, which he argues lead to only temporary and limited results. The author argues that Strachey continues to be influenced by Klein's developmental, technical, and object relational theories as was already evident in his 1934 paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What psychoanalysts consider psychoanalytic interpretation, in what setting it emerges and specifically why, when and how transference should be interpreted, have become increasingly unclear and controversial. In this paper I set out, elaborate, illustrate and argue the value for post-session reflection, certainly within the object relations traditions, of adopting a parsimonious model of practice. The model rests on the foundations of a specific understanding of free association, evenly suspended attention, resistance and transference and separating two epistemologically distinct intentions in transference interpretation. One, transference construction, aims to make a patient aware of the unconscious ways a patient is behaving in sessions (and then outside them) and how and why that is happening. A second, transference designation, focuses on the more limited aim of making patients aware of how they unconsciously experience the psychoanalyst at specific moments of resistance in sessions. Both types of interpretation may help but, I argue, it is the latter that must form the bedrock for fundamental change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of the fact that Freud's self-analysis was at the centre of so many of his discoveries, self-analysis remains a complex, controversial and elusive exercise. While self-analysis is often seen as emerging at the end of an analysis and then used as a criteria in assessing the suitability for termination, I try to attend to the patient's resistance to self-analysis throughout an analysis. I take the view that the development of the patient's capacity for self-analysis within the analytic session contributes to the patient's growth and their creative and independent thinking during the analysis, which prepares him or her for a fuller life after the formal analysis ends. The model I will present is based on an over lapping of the patient's and the analyst's self-analysis, with recognition and use of the analyst's counter-transference. My focus is on the analyst's self-analysis that is in response to a particular crisis of not knowing, which results in feeling intellectually and emotionally stuck. This paper is not a case study, but a brief look at the process I went through to arrive at a particular interpretation with a particular patient during a particular session. I will concentrate on resistances in which both patient and analyst initially rely upon what is consciously known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In parent-infant treatments, babies sometimes exhibit symptoms such as screaming, clinging, and fearful gaze avoidance of the analyst. The paper investigates if such phenomena may be regarded as transference manifestations, and if so, if they appear both in younger and older infants. Based on three case presentations, it is concluded that some babies are capable of forming both brief and enduring transferences. The term 'indirect infant transference' refers to when a baby reacts emotionally to the analyst as long as the parent's transference remains unresolved. 'Direct transference' refers to when a baby reacts in a non-mediated way to the analyst. The necessary tool of investigation for discovering these phenomena is a psychoanalytic method with an explicit, though not exclusive, focus on the baby. Discerning them in the clinical encounter may help us understand the baby's predicament and when and how to address the baby or the parent. These treatments constitute an empirical field awaiting more extensive clinical and theoretical investigation. Already now, they suggest that transference may be rooted in, and may appear during, very early developmental stages. The paper's positions are compared with those put forward by other parent-infant clinicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the twice-weekly psychoanalytic psychotherapy of a young woman who had undergone major bowel surgery in her early 20s, with no clear medical indication for the surgery. Whilst the concept of 'No Entry' described by Williams (, b) aptly describes many features of more 'typical' anorexic patients, this paper describes a particular group of anorexic patients, referred by their physicians for multiple medical procedures; and proposes there is a group of anorexic patients, repeatedly referred for medical investigations, into whom particular types of entries occur. These are entries into the body 'legitimized' as medical, with a trajectory towards multiple procedures, examinations and surgical operations. Other entries (outside the medical setting) may occur in a state of altered consciousness, under the influence of alcohol or drugs, such that any wish for intrusion is disowned and denied. In both sets of events, intrusion is both invited, and consciously denied. The case example illuminates some of these features, and aspects of the countertransference are also described. Attention is drawn to relevant research focusing on surgical intrusion. Finally, there is an exploration as to how such patients may invite intrusions into the body through surgery and medical procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysts may incorporate many of Melanie Klein's important contributions (e.g., on preoedipal dynamics, envy, and projective identification) without transforming their basic analytic approach. In this paper I argue that adopting the Kleinian notion of unconscious phantasy is transformative. While it is grounded in Freud's thinking and draws out something essential to his work, this notion of phantasy introduces a radical change that defines Kleinian thinking and practice and significantly impacts the analyst's basic clinical approach. This impact and its technical implications in the analytic situation are illustrated and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problems posed in understanding and working through the patient's layers of self-criticism are challenging for both patient and analyst. In particular, this paper explores some countertransference phenomena related to underlying grandiosity embedded in self-criticism. For patients who are self-critical, analyzing grandiose elements may create further grounds for self-reproach or open up new modes of self-experience and freedom. The paper tries to focus on how the analyst's experience of the patient's self-criticism often shifts over the course of analytic work. It is important for the analyst to not be crippled by a fear of considering the relevance of underlying grandiosity in relation to self-reproach. Understanding this dimension of self-reproach can help elucidate why it is so durable and refractory to interpretation. The patient has a stake in holding on to this self-punishment because it perpetuates self-regulatory fantasies. These fantasies sometimes relate to the feeling that the patient will be more successful or better loved by holding on to aspects of self-reproach. Sometimes these fantasies are based in competitive or dominant strategies related to winning out or retaliating over parents or siblings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that if one considers just a single clinical moment there may be no principled way to choose among different approaches to psychoanalytic technique. One must in addition take into account what Aristotle called the final cause of psychoanalysis, which this paper argues is freedom. However, freedom is itself an open-ended concept with many aspects that need to be explored and developed from a psychoanalytic perspective. This paper considers one analytic moment from the perspectives of the techniques of Paul Gray, Hans Loewald, the contemporary Kleinians and Jacques Lacan. It argues that, if we are to evaluate these techniques, we must take into account the different conceptions of freedom they are trying to facilitate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author discusses a specific type of dreams encountered in her clinical experience, which in her view provide an opportunity of reconstructing the traumatic emotional events of the patient’s past. In 1900, Freud described a category of dreams – which he called ‘biographical dreams’– that reflect historical infantile experience without the typical defensive function. Many authors agree that some traumatic dreams perform a function of recovery and working through. Bion contributed to the amplification of dream theory by linking it to the theory of thought and emphasizing the element of communication in dreams as well as their defensive aspect. The central hypothesis of this paper is that the predominant aspect of such dreams is the communication of an experience which the dreamer has in the dream but does not understand. It is often possible to reconstruct, and to help the patient to comprehend and make sense of, the emotional truth of the patient’s internal world, which stems from past emotional experience with primary objects. The author includes some clinical examples and references to various psychoanalytic and neuroscientific conceptions of trauma and memory. She discusses a particular clinical approach to such dreams and how the analyst should listen to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author revisits the problem of 'premature ego development' first introduced by Melanie Klein in 1930. She also highlights several developments in post-Kleinian thinking since the publication of that paper, which can be seen as offshoots of or complements to Klein's work. The author proposes a link between this category of precocious development and the absence of the experience of what Biontermed the 'containing object.' She puts forward several technical considerations relevant to analytic work with patients who suffer as a result of early developmental failures and presents various clinical vignettes in order to demonstrate the ways in which these considerations take shape in the analytic setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translations of summary The delusional experience is the result of a grave disjunction in the psyche whose outcome is not readily predictable. Examination of the specific mode of disjunction may help us understand the nature and radical character of delusion. I will present the therapy of a psychotic patient who after many years of analysis and progresses in his life continues to show delusional episodes although limited and contained. In his case, the two visions, one delusional and the other real, remain distinct and differentiated from each other because they both possess the same perceptual character, that of reality. He has a bi-ocular vision of reality and not a binocular one because his vision lacks integration, as would necessarily be the case if the two visions could be compared with each other. The principle of non-contradiction ceases to apply in delusion. A corollary of the failure of the principle of non-contradiction is that, if a statement and its negation are both true, then any statement is true. Logicians call this consequence the principle of explosion. For this reason, the distinction between truth, reality, improbability, probability, possibility and impossibility is lost in the delusional system, thus triggering an omnipotent, explosive mechanism with a potentially infinite progression. The paper presents some thoughts for a possible analytic transformation of the delusional experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translations of summary This paper focuses on the offer by the art writer Adrian Stokes to commission and pay for a portrait of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein by the artist William Coldstream. It details some of the precursors of this offer in Stokes's preceding involvement first with Klein and then with Coldstream; her response to this offer; and its outcome and aftermath in Stokes's subsequent writing about Klein and Coldstream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surprisingly often in the psychoanalyses of chronically depressed patients, depression represents an unconscious attempt to psychically cope with unbearable psychic pain following severe traumatisation: dissociative states, a chronified psychic state of shock, a disappearance of emotions, an emptying of the self and the object relationships, as well as a disappearance of the psyche in the body are among the possible consequences. The treatment of these difficult groups of analysands can also frequently bring analysts to the limits of the endurable. Often related to this is the repeated danger of denying the trauma, and a re-traumatisation of the analysand in the analytic situation. The lecture discusses the fact that in comparison with other therapeutic approaches, psychoanalysis has a highly differentiated conceptualisation of the psychic determinants and the treatment of chronic depression at his disposal. However, in order to retain its creativity and innovation as a scientific discipline and to be thus perceived in the non-psychoanalytic world, it must constantly further develop its conceptualization by way of systematic and extra-clinical research - as is witnessed in the insufficient conceptual account of severe traumatisation during the genesis of chronic depression. In this connection, several exemplary examples from extra-clinical studies in the sphere of psychotherapeutic research, neurobiology, epigenetics and embodied cognitive science will be accounted for. As will be treated in the final part of this paper, of no less importance are the conceptualizations in clinical research on psychoanalysis, which are based on meticulous, careful analyses of trauma reactivation in the transference, and understanding and working through them in the analytic relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aristotle's theory of tragic katharsis is the most ancient and debated theory of the effect of the theatrical experience on the audience. It affirms that tragedy effects the katharsis of fear and pity, engaging readers with the controversy whether by katharsis Aristotle meant purification of the emotions (i.e. their perfection within the mind) or purification of the mind from the emotions (i.e. their abreaction from the mind). In this paper I will explore how Freud's theory of transference can suggest a new interpretation of Aristotle's tragic katharsis. Transference allows for the representation and expression of repressed emotions through the re-enactment of past relational dynamics. Although this process is essential to the psychoanalytic method, it is the subsequent analytic endeavour which allows for the 'working through' of repressed emotions, bringing into effect the transference cure. I argue that the dynamic between emotional arousal in re-enactment and emotional distancing in analysis offers an effective parallel of the dynamic between katharsis of fear and katharsis of pity in Aristotle's theory. Such interpretation of tragic katharsis suggests that the theatrical effect in audiences may be an opportunity for self-analysis and the 'working through' of unconscious psychic dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author provides some scaffolding for thinking about emerging and unintended integrative developments in clinical theory. The emergent theory to which the author refers works at a different level of theoretical discourse than explicit attempts at comparative translation of psychoanalytic concepts or theories. In contrast, most of the theory that is explored in this paper involves clinical discourse aimed at solving important common clinical problems. The work of a group of authors (Jay Greenberg, John Steiner, Anton Kris, Michael Feldman and Charles Spezzano) is described as simultaneously embedded within a particular orientation while demonstrating a kind of unwitting reach to a broad swathe of analysts. Distinctions are made between this kind of linking of clinical theory versus self-consciously syncretic and integrative approaches to theory development. The author also discusses the educational implications of this emergent theory for teaching and learning during psychoanalytic training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the impact of the current economic crisis on the psychic functioning of the patient and the analyst, their relationship and collaboration. This intrusion of 'external reality' is multidimensional, and thus with multiple meanings. The critical role of the economic factor brings various dimensions of money into play, such as self-preservation, power as well as aspects of psychosexual development. In addition, the crisis involves symbolic loss of basic ideals such as honesty and social responsibility. Patient and analyst are affected in similar and different ways in their respective roles as well as according to the specific intrapsychic functioning of each. Moreover, unique characteristics of the crisis often create a crisis in the analysis. In order to avoid deformation of the analytic relationship, the analytic dyad must examine and work through the multiple meanings of the crisis as well as the meaning of the impact of the crisis on the analytic relationship for both patient and analyst. This complex transference- countertransference interplay poses specific challenges to the analyst. After discussion of these issues, clinical material is presented that demonstrates how they appear in analytic practice today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author investigates the main difficulties the analyst encounters in borderline patient analysis, focusing on the specific way in which such patients put the analyst's mental functioning to the test and highlighting the most salient elements of the transference-countertransference dynamic. The author picks out several of the paradoxes that characterize the analytical relationship with these patients, who are constantly seeking contact with the object, which is inevitably traumatic for them. On the basis of highly detailed clinical material, the author demonstrates how - no matter which theoretical-clinical model is adopted - a specific technical problem with these patients is how to manage their intense destructiveness. With these patients, countertransferential difficulties are inevitably predominant because of the looming threat of the destruction of the analytical relationship. Maintaining a balance between the recognition-legitimization of primary narcissistic mirroring needs and the recognition-control of narcissistic demands and attacks on the analytical link is as crucial as it is complex. The paper examines the most important therapeutic and anti-therapeutic factors, highlighting the importance of countertransference analysis and self-analysis as ways of accessing as yet unrepresented elements of the patient and analyst respectively. Particular attention is given to the role played by the analyst's subjectivity and to the enactment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author views paper, The nature and function of phantasy , as making an important contribution to the development of a radically revised psychoanalytic theory of thinking. Perhaps Isaacs's most important contribution is the notion that phantasy is the process that creates meaning, and that phantasy is the form in which all meanings - including feelings, defense 'mechanisms,' impulses, bodily experiences, and so on - exist in unconscious mental life. The author discusses both explicit formulations offered by Isaacs as well as his own extensions of her ideas. The latter include (1) the idea that phantasying generates not only unconscious psychic content, but also constitutes the entirety of unconscious thinking; (2) the notion that transference is a form of phantasying that serves as a way of thinking for the first time (in relation to the analyst) emotional events that occurred in the past, but were too disturbing to be experienced at the time they occurred and (3) a principal aim and function of phantasy is that of fulfilling the human need to get to know and understand the truth of one's experience. The author concludes by discussing the relationship between Isaacs's concept of phantasy and Bion's concepts of alpha function and the human need for the truth, as well as the differences between Fairbairn's and Isaacs's conceptions of the nature of unconscious internal object relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author explores the clinical significance of the presence of a depressed internal object in a patient with marked obsessional features, dominating the patient's internal world and restricting relations in external life. After discussing important aspects of the contribution of Freud and later writers to the study of obsessional neurosis, the author provides clinical material that shows the patient's tormented relationship to a feared depressed object that was manifested in the transference. Developing her argument, the author suggests that if the analyst does not fully grasp the primitive anxieties of the underlying state of mind she can be prone to enter into an aggressive enactment with the patient's sadistic superego. This kind of enactment may arouse excitement and triumph in the patient, but actually confirms his doubts and fears about the capacity of his object to contain him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child analysis continues to be seen as a different technique from adult analysis because children are still involved in a developmental process and because the primary objects continue to play active roles in their lives. This paper argues that this is a false dichotomy. An extended vignette of the analysis of a latency-aged girl is used to demonstrate that the psychoanalytic process that develops in child analysis is structurally the same as that in adult analysis. Both revolve around the analysis of resistance and transference and use both to promote knowledge of the patient’s mind at work. And both techniques formulate interventions based on the analyst’s appraisal of the patient’s mental organization. It is hoped that stressing the essential commonality of both techniques will promote the development of an overarching theory of psychoanalytic technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will attempt to broaden the conception of witnessing in analytic work with traumatized patients by extending the idea to incorporate the patient’s developing and varied capacity for witnessing, as well as a witnessing that occurs within the analytic relationship itself. Actions occuring as part of traumatic repetition are understood to represent memory phenomena and are distinguised from dissociated self-state experience. These experiences are not therapeutically intended to be symbolized, but rather lived-through with the analyst, thus transforming the patient’s own relation to the experience. I suggest that the scene in which this living-through takes place is the transference–countertransference matrix, and that it is the analytic encounter that allows traumatic repetition to take on the quality of a communication, an address to another, rather than remain meaningless reproduction. A clinical vignette illustrates the turning of trauma’s imperative for witnessing into an address in the analytic encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a new model for the action of psychoanalysis based on concepts from non-linear dynamics (chaos theory and complexity theory). It shows that the analyst–analysand couple may be conceptualized as a new configuration with its own properties that promote complex development in both members of the couple. These developments are an emergent result of the formation of the analyst–analysand couple and are significantly independent of the particular content of the manifest interaction of the couple. The well-studied phenomena of coupled oscillators suggest the specific features of the analysand–analyst interaction that are likely to be most important in conceptualizing analytic change. The model has substantial clinical applications since efforts to arrange for a coupled oscillator system that is central to it are distinct from many of the traditional considerations associated with creating an analytic situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author explores situations when a patient seems to regress masochistically from a progressive development. She is concerned with moments when the patient’s struggle towards oedipal relating may be easily confused with a situation where the patient is only caught up with pre-oedipal conflicts and as a result the analyst might interpret in a way that pushes the patient backwards. The author revisits and focuses upon Freud ’s classical concept of ‘feminine masochism’ as a particularly illuminating example of an element in the clinical picture which may alert us to this situation. She aims to show that, viewed as part of a developmental model, the concept of feminine masochism can offer the analyst a signal that the patient is fleeing from sexual oedipal conflicts. Reviving the concept may therefore be clinically useful in highlighting the regression from oedipal anxiety in situations where this might otherwise be missed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between ‘narrative’ and ‘historical–biographical truth’ in psychoanalytic treatment has become the subject of many controversial debates in recent years. Findings of contemporary memory research have lead to great scepticism as to whether therapists are able objectively and reliably to reconstruct biographical events on the basis of their observations in the therapeutic situation. Some authors even claim that psychoanalysts should concentrate exclusively on observing the here and now of the patient′s behaviour within the transference relationship to the analyst. In this paper it will be discussed whether the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater in this debate. Centred around the insights from a third psychoanalysis with a patient who suffered from a severe case of childhood polio, the hypothesis will be discussed that working through the traumatic experience in the transference with the analyst, as well as the reconstruction of the biographical–historical reality of the trauma suffered, prove to be indispensable for a lasting structural change. Integration of the trauma into one′s own personal history and identity is and remains one of the main aims of a psychoanalytic treatment with severely traumatized patients. The reconstruction of the original trauma is indispensable in helping the patient to understand the ‘language of the body’ and to connect it with visualizations, images and verbalizations. The irreversable wounds and vulnerability of his body as the ‘signs of his specific traumatic history’ have to be recognized, emotionally accepted and understood in order to live with them and not deny them any longer. Another important aspect in psychoanalysis is to develop the capability to mentalize, in other words, to understand the intentions of central (primary) objects related to the trauma. The concept of ‘embodied memory’ might be helpful in understanding precisely in what way ‘early trauma is remembered by the body’. Observing in detail the sensory-motor coordinations in the analytic relationship enables one to decode the inappropriate intensity of affects and fantasies which match the original traumatic interaction and are revealed as inappropriate reactions in the present, new relationship to the analyst. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I briefly review some significant points in the development of ideas on transference which owe so much to the discoveries of Freud. I then discuss some of the subsequent developments which were based on Freud ’s work and which have personally impressed me. In particular I mention Melanie Klein’s elaboration of an internal world peopled by internal object and her description of the mechanisms of splitting and projective identification, both of which profoundly affect our understanding of transference. Using some clinical material I try to illustrate an important transference situation which I do not think has been sufficiently emphasized although it is part of the ‘total situation’ outlined by Klein. In this kind of transference the analyst finds himself in an observing position and is no longer the primary object to whom love and hate are directed. Instead he is put in a position of an excluded figure who can easily enact rather than understand the role he has been put in. In this situation he may try to regain the position as the patient’s primary object in the transference or avoid the transference altogether and make extra-transference interpretations and in this way enact the role of a judgemental and critical super-ego. If he can tolerate the loss of a central role and understand the transference position he has been put in, the analyst can sometimes reduce enactments and release feelings to do with mourning and loss in both himself and his patient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I describe the impact of cyberspace on the analytical relationship. My reflections will move from two clinical histories. In the first history, I describe the case of Melania, a patient who, at a certain moment of her analysis, started sending me e-mails, almost building a ‘parallel setting’. I describe the relational dynamics linked to the irruption of the electronic mail into the boundaries of our psychoanalytic relationship. The second case is Louis, a 25 year-old young man with a schizoid personality who uses cyberspace as a psychic retreat. Over the years Louis told me, initially from a sidereal distance, of his necessity to create dissociative moments. The entrance to these retreats procures for Louis an immobile pacification, which may assume the characteristics of a trance: life comes to a halt in a state of ‘suspended animation’. We can see the use that Louis makes of the computer as an attempt to live into a non-human object and to protect himself from relational anguish, but also to warm up a mechanical mother. Melania used technology to communicate with me, albeit in a roundabout way; for Louis, virtual space was a ‘dissociative retreat’ located on the border between sleeping and waking, which for years went untouched by our analytical discourse. For both patients, the computer was a tool for emotional regulation, and the analytical relationship aimed to give this tool some relational meaning, facilitating the shift from compulsive usage to a transformative use of the object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]