The Induction of Noninterpreted Benevolent Transference as a Vehicle for Change

Although constructed by Freud as a concept central to psychoanalytic treatment, transference has pertinence to all human relationships. It implies that relationships are affected to a greater or lesser extent by the emergence of old imagoes, often of the parents, real, fantasized, or wishful. In treatment much depends on the intensity of the developing relationship itself, which is not necessarily a function of the frequency of contact. The relative “absence” of the analyst in the psychoanalytic situation is designed to create a climate for the emergence of a variety of transference reactions over the course of the analysis.

It has become more widely accepted that nontransference interpretation can have power (Blum, 1983). My intent in this paper is to describe an active, intentionally evoked, but uninterpreted, positive transference designed to effect change in the patient in an otherwise psychoanalytically oriented therapy. The changes may range from symptom relief to more significant change as reflected in modifications in the patient’s self-perception, perception of others (self-object constellations), and experience in the world. Apart from interpretation of conflict revealed in the patient’s experience of the world, the positive transference offers a new object relationship devoid of significant conflict that may closely approximate an ideal of the good parent (the internalization of a good object). This contributes strongly to a more confident engagement in the world as a product of change in the representational world. The positive transference is not only the substrate of the ongoing process of therapy, but also a useful product of the process. To implement this change the therapist develops a therapeutic stance through specific actions and an attitude that offers the patient a new and benevolent object. The stance is neither contrived nor is it simply being nice to the patient. It is constructed in accordance with the unique characteristics of the patient and therapist dyad, and though guided by specific principles, is variable in its form from patient to patient, this reflective of the patient’s personality, social class, intelligence, introspective capacity, etc. The language that evolves in the dialogue is unique to the dyad, and the therapist’s interventions are both consciously formed and spontaneous, and intuitive; sometimes more formal, sometimes more idiomatic and colloquial, more or less affectively charged, etc. Moreover the availability of a patient for change may be facilitated by a situation of crisis with its accompanying disorganization, though substantial change may occur in long-term therapies. However a benevolent presence does not obviate the emergence and interpretation of negative transference (Norton, 1963).

The intent is to establish a therapeutic stance that will induce an ideal transference, a nonconflicted, positive one. Implicit in the encounter between patient and therapist is what Ornstein and Ornstein (1977) call a curative fantasy. Living in a state of anxiety or need, the patient unconsciously approaches therapy with the fantasy of finding a benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient object to protect him or fulfill his needs. This unconscious transference can be evoked, utilized for change, and experienced as part of change. In this respect, the fantasy is to an important extent realized in the new experience with the therapist over the course of treatment. It is to be understood that this is to be distinguished from the idealizing transference of the psychoanalytic situation that defends against rage, envy, devaluation, and so on (Viederman, 2008).

I will begin by reviewing work that describes the approach and the techniques for establishing it. This will include a description of the therapeutic stance, the broad goals designed to establish rapport with the patient, and then the specific maneuvers to implement this rapport. Patient descriptions will follow; first, as they pertain to symptom removal, followed by a description of more significant change in different patients, some in crisis and some in longer-term therapy.

Development of the Ideal Transference and the Therapeutic Stance

The essential task is to understand and define rapidly the important aspects of the patient’s current experience and to present them succinctly to the patient in an engaged manner. In so doing, the therapist actively creates a therapeutic stance and climate for the interaction that facilitates the development of an ideal transference. Communication tends to be declarative rather than questioning and the dialogue has the quality of a conversation, though admittedly an asymmetric one. As this evolves, the patient feels recognized, and reciprocally recognizes the therapist who thereby establishes himself as a presence in the patient’s life. By establishing a presence, the therapist mutes the loneliness and isolation that accompanies intrapsychic conflict and crisis. The important actions are to establish emotional resonance with the patient’s experience and to communicate this understanding. The value of this communication lies in its meaning to the patient, the sharing of experience and not simply in its cognitive, explanatory power. Its usefulness and validity resides in its emotional impact and the patient’s recognition of its personal truth value. Affective and associative responses confirm its significance. Submissive intellectual acquiescence by the patient should be recognized and commented on by the therapist as not meaningful to the patient. The inclination to submit to authority may be tactfully explored as characteristic of the patient’s personality.

Outlined below are specific modes of intervention designed to facilitate and describe the development of the ideal transference and the climate of the interaction (Viederman, 2008).

The descriptions of the therapeutic experiences, to be outlined below, are, of necessity, truncated and are guided by the interventions described above. In the anecdotes, emphasis is placed on the responses of the patient to illustrate change rather than details of how the result was achieved. Details involving complicated and subtle interactions, characteristic of the unique and special quality of relationships, cannot be described or even fully revealed in a written document.²

Symptom Relief

The following two cases illustrate the immediate relief of symptoms. In each case, the impact upon the patient was very specific to the dynamics of the relationships that had been established: the first in a particular action; the second, a product of a previous trusting relationship.

Case 1

The patient was a 45-year-old woman with a moderately severe depression that had not responded to multiple medication trials. She was married and had two children. The depression had developed in the context of the departure of these two children for college and was a manifestation of the “empty nest syndrome.” Striking in the patient’s history were two impaired relationships: one with a chronically depressed mother and the other with a cold and disinterested husband and a lifeless and ungratifying marriage. From the time she was a small child, the patient she had had an intense desire to have children. She had been a “baby-carriage peeker.”

Her description of her pregnancies was striking. For the first time in her life she had felt complete and had experienced an exhilarating rise in self-esteem. There had been a sense of fulfillment and richness as her body changed during pregnancy. It had been a uniquely gratifying experience for her, and never had she felt so good in her life. Although she had had a mild postpartum depression with each of her two pregnancies, she continued in her role as a mother with enthusiasm and ongoing gratification until the children left for college.

The patient was not psychologically minded, and she had difficulty in emotionally recognizing the relationship between her depression and the “loss of her children.” The therapeutic relationship was manifestly supportive and informal, but there was no change. When one day, she revealed that she was an excellent cook accomplished in preparing Italian food, I responded with interest and spoke of my pleasure in eating. Two weeks later, to my surprise, she appeared with a plate of Italian delicacies, which I tasted. My enthusiasm was authentic. Her depression lifted. Each week she brought a sizeable plateau and the remission persisted.

The patient fed, and I ate to our mutual gratification. The pleasure that she experienced in feeding me reflected her vicarious identification with the unborn child. This was reenacted in our relationship, and my behavior afforded her an internal regulation that she had lost (Lerner and Raskin, 1967). This may be considered a transference enactment.

Case 2

The patient was a woman in her early thirties who was cyclothymic and was struggling to deal with an alcoholic husband who had had difficulty maintaining a job. The therapy was a supportive one and facilitated her decision to seek employment that had been satisfying to her in the past. Her husband was successfully encouraged to join Alcoholics Anonymous.

Two years after treatment ended, I received a telephone call from the patient indicating that she had recently emerged from a five-month state hospitalization where, after the birth of her first child, she had been treated with chlorpromazine for postpartum psychotic depression with paranoid features. The patient’s interest in returning to treatment with me was prompted by her desire to have a second child and a concern about the risk of relapse. We decided on a monthly supportive treatment. After several months of treatment, the patient again became pregnant. Upon the birth of this second child, I visited the patient in the hospital. During the first few days she seemed to handle the delivery without emotional difficulty. On the fifth day, she called to reveal a return of paranoid delusions. These delusions included the idea that the FBI was watching her, had examined her, and could communicate through the water faucet. She was anxious and alarmed. Her responsible parents moved into the patient’s home to care for the children, and she remained at home, where she continued to interact with them under supervision. She was started on a major tranquilizer and was reassured when told her fears were delusional. For the next three weeks we had daily scheduled telephone calls, during which I corrected her delusional fears (to her great relief), and after which the delusional state remitted.

A trusting and benevolent transference had developed in the context of our previous therapeutic relationship. This special status placed me in the unique position of being able to assume the ego function of reality testing.

Case 3

The patient was an 84-year-old man, twice married, who had been in a twice-a-week supportive interpretive psychotherapy for about four years. He remained committed to therapy, and an ideal transference was revealed in his expression of admiration and affection for me. His attachments were profound but always permeated by intense fear of loss, this conditioned by the death of a beloved mother when he was eight. Her reputation as a generous and loving person was confirmed by her younger brother. The patient identified with her. Her death led to a violent disruption in the patient’s life as he was lodged with an angry, sadistic uncle, who was unhappy with the responsibility thrust upon him. The patient’s father was poor, depressed, and dominated by a wrathful vision of a punitive God.

After the patient emerged from a painful adolescence of considerable poverty, he married a controlling, unresponsive woman, whom he divorced. After the divorce all of the four children from this marriage remained warmly and lovingly attached to their father and were in constant communication with him. The eldest, a 55-year-old successful lawyer in Los Angeles, continues to call him three times a week and ended the conversations by saying “I love you.” The patient, an autodidact, has been very successful as the chief executive officer of a sizeable business. His second marriage, of 30 years to a woman 25 years younger than he, is extremely rich and gratifying. The wife is attentive and nurturant, consistently loving, and in an active sexual life with him. His 20-year-old son, the product of this union, is a brilliant student and active leader in a major university. He is warmly attached to his father. The patient struggles to keep his attachment and adoration of his son from intruding on the boy’s independence. Central to the patient’s character is an extremely generous attitude toward his family, his wife (including his first wife), and to friends, whom he has supported both emotionally and materially. Yet the patient has been dominated by the fear of loss. He had great difficulty in allowing himself to experience the pleasure of the special and successful life that he has created, that only gradually has he begun to see as a product of his own efforts. He recognizes the richness of his emotional connection to his family and other friends but remains dominated by a fear of loss. He is unable to experience the pleasure of his loving relationships without the painful expectation that to acknowledge and experience this pleasure will lead to its destruction, as had been the case with his mother. The patient evoked very positive and affectionate feelings in me and admiration for his human qualities. He recognized the irony in the contrast between his extreme good fortune and his inability to fully enjoy it. His dreams and feelings on awakening are dominated by the fear of loss and the experience of disaster.

In a recent session, the patient spoke of the inevitable accompaniment of fear when he had happy thoughts of his loving relationships. His thoughts returned to the loss of his loving mother. As he spoke of his affection for me, I commented on the fact that he was certainly aware of my admiration and affection toward him.

In the next session, he recounted two dreams. In the first, his skull is being cracked open and his wife is pouring love into the aperture. In the second, his children are overwhelming him with love. What surprised him was that the dreams were openly pleasurable, filled with affection, and not connected with the immediacy of loss. He acknowledged the affection I had expressed toward him in the previous session. Never in his childhood had he experienced affection from a man. His father and uncle were unloving disciplinarians. There was something special coming from me. To his surprise, he then remembered his mother’s younger brother who had offered to take the patient with him when he left New York. The patient regrets that he stayed with the sadistic uncle. He had never been fully accepting of the experience of affection from a man. It was audacious for him to allow himself to experience this from me. Cracking open his skull suggested to him that his fear of disaster had made him a tough nut to crack. He had to have his skull cracked to permit him to acknowledge affection without fear.

The change in perspective persisted. He returned from a trip to his home in Florida with a changed attitude. Previous trips had been a burden, influenced by his wife’s desire to go. This time, he was struck by the beauty of the landscape and the flowers. He felt comfortable, safe, and enveloped in this world.

In the following session, he described having been particularly pained by the sudden death of a man he had known professionally for 30 years, a man whom he admired as particularly gentle and kind. He cried as he stood outside the funeral home, as he was reminded of his experience as an eight-year-old standing outside the mortuary at the time of his mother’s death. He had been unable to cry as a child and was tearful as he recounted the story.

The quality of our relationship over a long period of time was experienced as mutually admiring and as affectionate. Over the course of years, there was no evidence of a negative transference, and one might infer that I became the good maternal object of childhood. It was in this context that for the first time, he was able to experience love and affection undiluted by anxiety and fear of loss and to experience grief about his mother’s death.³

Case 4

This patient illustrated the internalization of a benevolent transference object in the context of the crisis of approaching death. The patient was a 48-year-old woman, in a terminal state after some years of treatment for lung cancer. She had separated, by her choice, from her companion, the father of her six-year-old son. Treatment in the hospital consisted of four sessions, with telephone calls after her discharge. A brief anecdote limits the ability to describe the richness and emotionality that permeated these sessions. The relationship was characterized by my very active engagement of the patient, with consistent clarifications of the nature of her experience and periodic interpretations.

The patient was the second child of three. Mother was described as emotionally distant and father as absent. She had had problematic relationships with men, over whom she had to maintain control. Her only child, named Gabriel (the angel of the Annunciation), was with a man who wanted to marry her, but who she pushed away after the delivery of the boy.

The patient was in considerable pain when she first was seen by me, and I encouraged her to overcome her resistance to accepting analgesics. She recalled a visit home and the sense of alienation that she felt at the time. I attributed her painful sense of alienation to her inability to find the active, controlling figure she had been, which was now replaced with a sense of vulnerability and neediness: “You do not recognize yourself or the world about you, and experience yourself as an alien in that world. You feel that you have lost the valued self that you knew.”

She no longer maintained a close connection with her beloved son, who she had seen as the only real relationship in life. Her concern that he would no longer view her as an intact and powerful mother was interpreted as a projection of her fear that she was damaged. The interruption of her relationship with him, her primary connection with the world, had left her isolated and despairing.

In the second session, the patient spontaneously indicated she now recognized how her own fear of separation, vulnerability, and ultimate loss kept her from having any contact with her son, and how much this had alienated her. The guilt evoked by her inability to share Gabriel with his father reminded the patient of how she had sensed her mother had been a barrier to having a relationship with the father she (the patient) had seen as distant. She recognized the truth of the interpretation, and further, that her complaint about unresponsive doctors echoed her description of an ungiving mother.

In the third session, the patient revealed that in reflecting about her experience with her mother, she realized that her mother was not as removed and unresponsive as she had remembered. She admired her mother’s warmth, strength, and capability as revealed in the way she was caring for Gabriel. The patient changed her perception of her mother even as she changed the perception of herself.

She spoke with feeling:

I comment on her expressiveness and the fact that she knew I saw her as the person she had been before she got sick. She responded by saying that she could freely express herself that way with “people who touch my heart, with people who totally love me.” She remembered the pain of separation and feeling of abandonment when her father was hospitalized when she was 10 years old. She recognized her attachment to him and her love for him, realizing that they were close but that her mother had been a barrier to their relationship. His name was Milton, the same as mine. She tearfully spoke of her pain as she remembered his death 10 years before, a pain and sadness that she did not feel at the time. She had not cried.

As the patient declined physically, she spoke of the peace that our relationship had given her, and reiterated her sense of my presence even when I was not there. She spoke of regret about not having a man in her life.

I continued the relationship with her by telephone after she was discharged from this hospital to spend her last days at home. She experienced these conversations as comforting. Two weeks later she died.

This patient exemplified the possibility of personality change that may occur in the context of crisis, as elaborated in previous work (Viederman, 1988, 1989a, 1989b). She meets the criteria for the ingredients of a crisis:

This illustrates the special power of an idealized parental transference in the context of her regressive path to death. The internalization of me as a comforting presence is reminiscent of libidinal object constancy whereby the infant experiences the presence of an internalized good object even in the absence of the mother’s physical presence. I indeed had become an object of desire for her, both maternally and erotically; this was a product of my interpretive and emotional stance with her. The intensity of the relationship was generated by my having consistently mirrored my awareness of her experience and by clarifying her changed experience of self. My presence evoked the experience of a love relationship with the regret that she had never before established such a relationship with a man. She was relieved of the painful isolation of approaching death. Her experience of me as the good maternal object and the Oedipal father led to significant changes in her representational world, this reflected in her changed perception of mother and father (Sandler and Rosenblatt, 1962).

Case 5

The patient was a 67-year-old woman who was depressed in the context of the recurrence of a renal carcinoma, She had been treated by surgery five years before, at which time she believed that she had been cured (Viederman, 2010b).⁴

The patient, the only child of a very loving family, was born in Poland. Though her father had died at an early age, her stepfather and her mother had seen her as “a gift of God.” “They have given me so much love that I had a sense that I could do no wrong. If there was a problem at school, it was the teacher who was wrong and not dear little Alice.” This extremely protective and safe environment traveled with her as the family fled the Holocaust to France, then Siberia, and ultimately, the United States. She found a wonderful husband and family in this country and was not narcissistic.

The first meeting was a rich and engaged one in which I recognized and communicated to the patient my awareness of her as the vigorous, active, confident, optimistic, and happy woman she had been. Her core character was visible to me beneath the external expression of depression, and I let her know this. The fact that the dialogue was conducted partly in French facilitated the positive aspects of our relationship, though it was not essential.

She initiated a follow-up visit some months later and she explained her request for an appointment so that

I had recognized the patient as she had been for most of her life, had seen her strength and her wish to survive, as well as her “joie de vivre” and pleasure in people. In recognizing her strength and resiliance, I had entered her inner world, and in reminding her of the person she had been, I became the loving and admiring parents of the past.

Case 6

The patient was a 55-year-old married lawyer with two children. He had undergone a brief period of treatment with me a few years earlier in the context of an angry interaction with a relative. The relative contended that the patient had hurt him in the interaction and subsequently, the relative filed a lawsuit. At this time the patient returned to treatment because he was concerned about anger he expressed to his twin daughters.

The patient was a very articulate and expressive man, who, at times, had difficulty expressing his affection. He began a twice-weekly interpretive psychotherapy over the course of six months. His concern about his own anger had much to do with his an angry, unpredictable father who at times disarmed him with geniality and at other times was physically abusive. His mother was alternately seductive and berating, at times accusing the patient of being like his father.

The patient worked very well in therapy, recognizing that the anxiety he experienced as he approached our sessions had to do with the fear and uncertainty he felt about my reaction to him. He always read me carefully, as he had done with his father. His mother’s suggestion that he was like the father distressed him terribly; he desperately needed to see himself differently. Over the course of time, as he grew to understand his fear of me and what I might be thinking about him; he discovered that he could comfortably assert himself, saying, “I’m not like my father.” There was no evidence of a negative transference.

Three sessions before our planned termination of treatment, he stated that he felt good and was comfortable with me, and very pleased about what we had accomplished. I was aware that there had never been much evidence of an angry response to me, surprising in view of his capacity for anger. I brought this up with him, suggesting that my approach might have muted or prevented him from having such feelings toward me. He then remembered a time when I had inadvertently been 15 minutes late, and although I had acknowledged my responsibility, I had never revealed why I was delayed. He had been angry about it and had not spoken of it: “Why was he required to reveal himself and not me?”

As the patient went on to speak of his affection toward me, he remembered an incident when his father had invited him on a trip to the Caribbean. He had been anxious at the small hotel in which they shared a single room and slept in the same bed. He wondered whether his father had homosexual inclinations. I noted that his concern about homosexuality had emerged after he expressed affection for me. He did not respond immediately, but commented on the fact that my style was very different from that of his previous therapist, whose austerity and silence had been a source of much anxiety. He ended the session tearfully, stating that he would miss me and was aware of the closeness that has developed between us.

At the next session, he indicated that on leaving the previous session he had had the huge realization that he did not love his father. However, my statement that he had not expressed anger in our relationship made him very angry. He interpreted this to mean that his therapy had been incomplete and ineffective. Had I seen him as like his father, as someone who had something wrong with him (a theme that had pervaded the therapy). I suggested that in telling me off, he was finally telling off his father.

He began the next session with a renewed expression of tenderness and a sense that we were friends. He remembered a dream that he had before the previous session, in which he was furious at me for leaving a session prematurely and being preoccupied with something else. He’d never been able to express himself—to be heard by his family, and he realized that the dream conveyed that as well. The critical issue here was being his own man, being able to establish himself as an individual, and not allowing any psychiatrist to say who he was. He ended by reaching out tenderly to embrace me, and he offered me a present of a fine bottle of wine.

The patient had expressed his anger toward me without experiencing the damaging sense that anger made him like his father. I had accepted him as he was, I was different from his father.

Discussion

There is an extensive literature on the relationship of analyst to patient and an awareness of the need for a therapeutic alliance. Freud acknowledged that the first aim was to attach the patient to the person of the analyst and later spoke of the non-objectional transference. Stone (1961) and Greenacre (1975) focus on the unconscious transference as a substrate for the work of analysis. Kohut’s (1968) mirroring touches on this aspect of analytic work, as does Loewald’s (1960) view that the analyst, like the good parent, envisions what the patient is in the process of becoming and thereby facilitates this process.

The literature has been for the most part peppered by passing reference to transference cure, mostly as a contrast to the “pure gold” (Freud, 1919) of psychoanalysis. It is viewed as a resistance to significant analytic work. Freud (1919) took the lead in this when he said –

Freud did acknowledge the possibility of the dilution of psychoanalysis to create psychotherapy, but clearly the latter was an inferior product.

Some authors have approached transference cure in a more kindly fashion. Oberndorf (1946) considers suggestion as potentially helpful and, citing Ferenczi (1957), undoes the negative valence of suggestion. Transference itself is seen as an attempt at cure. Oberndorf further indicates that a transference cure may be durable and he states that analysts never know how much this participates in the treatment though unbeknownst to patient and analyst alike. Fenichels (1945) sees the giving up of symptoms as an attempt to obtain the love of the therapist. Alexander and French (1975) see the freedom of expression without fear of criticism as liberating and view a transference cure often as permanent.

Dysart (1977) offers an excellent review of the literature. Oremland (1972) has written the most definitive article. He categorized three successive levels, emphasizing that therapeutic change occurs primarily without understanding. The first implies flight from therapy to ward off dangers of a relationship with the therapist (and by implication danger of emergence of unconscious fantasy), second, idealized identification as defense against negative transference feelings (discussed above as the idealizing and not the ideal transference), and the third, improvement as a condition for acceptance and love. The third criteria most closely approximates what I describe, except that I see this not as a condition for love but as an experience of love.

Change in psychotherapy or analysis may be seen as a corrective emotional experience. Part of the change that I describe resides in the development of a new object relationship. This corrective emotional experience is to be clearly distinguished from the manipulative use of the transference described by Alexander (1960). He suggested that the analyst-therapist take a stance that directly contradicts the inferred transfer paradigm expected in a particular patient based on the initial evaluation of the description of the patient’s early experience with important objects. My approach involves the development of a positive, substantially nonambivalent object relationship that is authentic and not contrived.

Nacht (1962) most closely approximates my view of the nature of the relationship between patient and analyst. Though he values explicitly the classical stance, including neutrality, anonymity, and nongratification, he realizes its limitations and indicates that the analyst must be perceived as a good object, genuinely compassionate and accepting, with the certainty of being understood in the patient’s yearnings. “The analyst’s attitude of gratification, experienced by the patient as the longed for love of the parent, the ultimate reparative gift” (pp. 209-210, 233). Nacht cites Firenczi and agrees “on the importance in the patient’s finding in the analyst the love his parents denied him” (p. 210). However, Nacht indicates that this develops naturally in the analytic relationship, in the meeting of the unconscious of the two participants and by virtue of communication with the patient’s unconscious to the point of putting himself in the patient’s place while he remains in his own.

Nacht (1962) describes the climate of analysis in a way that closely resembles that which I present. It is a product of the analyst’s attitude. He views the climate as a substrate of the process, not directed significantly to the establishment of a new object relationship that is in its own right an important part of change. I describe the experience of a new relationship based on the goal of establishing presence by utilizing specific techniques. This new object relationship (now internalized) is reflected in a change in the representational world (perception of self, object, and relation to the world). This touched on what Nacht (1962) has described as an aim of treatment, namely “to live in permanent harmony with oneself and other people,” to find meaning in life a goal to be aimed at, if not achieved.

A final note! I have argued that one can, in a psychotherapy, actively and intentionally develop a representation of the therapist, as an internalized good object that in itself contributes to “cure,” to a changed perception of the world. One might consider the possibility that a classical analysis designed to undo conflicts, to utilize the interpretation of a full array of transference reactions including negative ones, may at the termination leave the patient with the internalized good object that I propose. Does Loewald’s (1960) good parent-good analyst remain as a new acquisition to fortify the patient in his confrontation with the world? The terminal phase is a real and rich experience for patient and analyst alike but it comes as no surprise that the analyst remains in the patient’s world after separation.

Summary and Conclusions

“YOUR ABILITY TO HELP OTHERS WILL NOT BE SEEN BY ALL.” (CHINESE FORTUNE COOKIE)

The traditional stance of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is based on the principles of neutrality, anonymity and nongratification inherent in the more formal psychoanalytic enterprise. These restraints have been modified in my approach to focus on the creation of an essentially nonambivalent benevolent transference. This is not to be seen as handholding, seduction, or a change in boundaries. It approximates the ideal physicianly role.

One of the desired goals of this approach is to create a new object relation with the therapist that itself reflects structural change, revealed in a change in the representational world. This is a modification of what Freud (1919) referred to as the pure gold of psychoanalysis and might be seen as the comic view of human experience rather than the tragic view (Schafer, 1970).

Even in the most rigorous classical analysis, one never achieves full conflict resolution and Freud (1937c) recommended renewed analysis in the context of new life situations. What has been presented is an alternate model for use with certain patients. It utilizes an evoked positive transference that does not lean on the evocation and interpretation of conflicted transference as a primary vehicle for change. This position is not in conflict with the requirement for more formal analysis with certain patients, but I offer the possibility that this point of view may have relevance to the therapeutic outcome in traditional psychoanalysis.