Transient Passages of Mental Activity

[A Study in Transference]

The difficulty of discerning the transference aspects of ones relationship with the patient can be traced to his having regressed to a state of ego functioning, which is marked by severe impairment in his capacity to differentiate among any of the integrated experiences. He is so completely differentiated in his ego functioning that he tends to feel that the therapist reminds him of, or is like, his mother or father, but more correctly, his functioning toward the therapist is couched in the unscrutinized assumption that the therapist is the mother or fatherThats what Ive been trying to tell you. Subsequently, in work of the transference, all the figures experienced are without any clear subjective distinction between past and present experience. Figures from mental activities and figures from what I knew to be experienced as blended with the persons current life. Yet it seems to me that the instance of transference of verbal transference interpretations can be looked upon as one form of intervention, at times effective, which constitute an appeal for collaboration to the non-psychotic area of the patients personality, an area which accompanies these words spoken by a therapist who feels he has a reliable theoretical basis for formulating the clinical phenomena in which he finds himself.