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 relations of his childhood, to discover the appropriate formula for his attitude to the doctor, for this relationship also is very intimate, and to some extent different from the sexual relationship, just as is that of the child towards its parents. This relationship—child to parent—which Christianity has everywhere set up as the symbolic formula for human relationships, provides a way of restoring to the patient that directness of ordinary human emotion of which he had been deprived through the inroad of sexual and social values (from the standpoint of power, etc.). The purely sexual, more or less primitive and barbaric valuation, operates in far-reaching ways against a direct, simple human relationship, and thereupon a blocking of the libido occurs which easily gives rise to neurotic formations. By means of analysis of the infantile portion of the transference-phantasies, the patient is brought back to the remembrance of his childhood’s relationship, and this—stripped of its infantile qualities—gives him a beautiful, clear picture of direct human intercourse as opposed to the purely sexual valuation. I cannot regard it as other than a misconception to judge the childish relationship retrospectively and therefore as exclusively a sexual one, even though a certain sexual content can in no wise be denied to it.

Recapitulating, let me say this much of the positive transference:—

The patient’s libido fastens upon the person of the doctor, taking the shape of expectation, hope, interest, trust, friendship and love. Then the transference produces the projection upon the doctor of infantile phantasies, often of predominatingly erotic tinge. At this stage the transference is usually of a decidedly sexual character, in spite of the sexual component remaining relatively unconscious. But this phase of feeling serves the higher aspect of the growth of human feeling as a bridge, whereby the patient becomes conscious of the defectiveness of his own adaptation, through his recognition of the doctor’s attitude, which is accepted as one suitable to life’s demands, and normal in its human relationships. By help of the analysis, and the recalling of his childish relationships, the road is seen which leads right 18