Volume 31, Number 20 · December 20, 1984
The Patient Is Always Right
By Janet Malcolm
Analysis of Transference, Vol. I: Theory and Technique
by Merton M. Gill
International Universities Press, 193 pp., $22.50
Analysis of Transference, Vol. II: Studies of Nine Audio-Recorded Psychoanalytic Sessions
by Merton M. Gill, by Irwin Z. Hoffman
International Universities Press, 236 pp., $22.50
Freud stumbled on the concept of transference while desperately casting about for an antidote to the epidemic of latrogenic lovesickness that had spread through his practice in the 1890s. When, one by one, all of his women patients stopped doing the work of free association that they had at first enthusiastically taken up and began shyly and then importunely to declare their love for him, he shrewdly surmised that it was not 'the charms of my person' that were the cause of the disturbance but, rather, that the women were in a state of readiness to fall in love, and he was simply Bottom to their Titania.
Review, 4386 words
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