Hans W. Loewald, On the Therapeutic Action of Psycho-Analysis
[Freud] writes to Jung on 6 December, 1906: 'It would not have escaped you that our cures come about through attaching the libido reigning in the subconscious (transference). . . . Where this fails the patient will not make the effort or else does not listen when we translate his material to him. It is in essence a cure through love. Moreover it is transference that provides the strongest proof, the only unassailable one, for the relationship of neuroses to love.' And he writes to Ferenczi, on 10 January, 1910: 'I will present you with some theory that has occured to me while reading your analysis [referring to Ferenczi's self-analysis of a dream]. It seems to me that in our influencing of the sexual impulses we cannot achieve anything other than exchanges and displacements, relinquishment or the resolution of a Complex (Strictly secret!)). When someone brings out his infantile complexes he has saved part of them (the affect) in a current form (transference). He has shed a skin and leaves it for the analyst. God forbid that he should now be naked, without a skin!