Part 2 book “Psychodynamic interventions in pregnancy and infancy” has contents: Extending the field to therapy with toddlers and parents, babies and their defences, metaphors in parent–infant therapy, a vision for the future, brief interventions with parental couples, and other contents. | Chapter 13 Brief interventions with parental couples – II In the previous chapter, I applied the concept “unconscious belief” to couple work. Here I will link it to the concept of transference, also described in that chapter. Any psychoanalytically oriented therapy, whatever its target group and setting, must account for how it appears and how we handle it. The transference has a therapeutic leverage. As Freud (1912a) wrote in another belligerent formulation: It is on that field that “the victory must be won” (p. 108). In this arena, we aim to help the patient reap laurels in the battle against neurosis. We do this by inviting her to analysis, a “highly specialized form of playing in the service of communication with oneself and others” (Winnicott, 1971b, p. 41). During this play – here we shift to a more prankish metaphor – the patient discovers distortions of herself and others and acquires a truer view of herself and the people around her. The classical conception of transference was born in treatments with one patient and one therapist. Can we also apply it to marital relationships? A spouse may voice accusations, expectations, and praises that seem exaggerated. We also know they can lead to hassles and quarrels. Have they anything to do with transference? The distortions that form its base emanate from wishes that are modelled on “infantile prototypes” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, p. 455) and rooted “in the deep layers of the unconscious” (Klein, 1952b, p. 55). Freud (1912a) emphasized that transference does not cover impulses which have “passed through the full process of psychical development”, or are “directed towards reality”, and stand “at the disposal of the conscious personality” (p. 100). If a spouse says the partner is self-centred and heartless, is this built on such mature considerations? If so, we cannot call it transference. Or, have the emotions taken up a “regressive course and [revived] the subject’s infantile imagos” (p. 102)? If so, we .
