Transference versus relationship

Abstract Ferenczi and Rank maintained that transference is mostly created by unfeeling analysts, rather than arising spontaneously. Because Ferenczi was reluctant to challenge Freud, Rank took the lead in conceptualizing new approaches to therapy. “Psychoanalysis as a therapy may be worthless,” Freud told his inner circle. Neither Ferenczi nor Rank was ready to accept Freud’s therapeutic nihilism. The first psychoanalyst to use the term “here-and-now,” Rank invented relationship therapy. Since the first home of every human being is the womb, Rank argued in The Trauma of Birth that the mother-child relationship is the template for all other relationships. Much later, Hannah Arendt observed that Freud had no theory of natality. For Arendt, the nation-state is an extension, a grand symbolic disguise in non-bodily form, of the womb. Willing, argued Arendt, who did not know of Rank’s work, is rooted in natality and the web of relationships in which we are embedded.