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There is now abundant evidence that Freud was correct in believing Edward de Vere (1550-1604) wrote under the pseudonym "William Shakespeare." One common reaction is "What difference does it make?" I address that question by examining many significant connections between de Vere's life and The Tempest. Such studies promise to bring our understanding of Shakespeare's works back into line with our usual psychoanalytic approach to literature, which examines how a great writer's imagination weaves a new creation out of the threads of his or her life experiences. One source of the intense controversy about de Vere's authorship is our idealization of the traditional author, about whom we know so little that, as Freud noted, we can imagine his personality was as fine as his works.

This article draws attention to a topic that has been mostly ignored in our literature: the manifold transference meanings of our patients' reactions to our other patients. Central aspects of the patient's transference may be displaced onto the analyst's other patients. The author includes clinical examples of hospitalized patients, where such transferences to other patients are often more dramatic and obvious, as well as examples from neurotic patients, where such transferences may be less dramatic and may tend to resolve more readily through interpretation. The displacement of transference feelings onto the analyst's other patients also has important implications for training analyses, where analysands are likely to have multiple relationships with the analyst's other analysands, supervisees, and students.