Varieties of transference in the analysis of an adolescent

Material from four and a half years of five times per week analysis of a 15-year-old boy is used to examine a series of transference issues, in particular the distinction between an externalizing and a differentiated transference. The initial year-and-a-half of intense anxiety and resistance to treatment is discussed in relation to this difference and the externalizing transference is viewed both as a resistance and as a step in the formation of integrated self and object representations, leading to a differentiated transference. The distinction is also of value near the end of the analysis when an attempted unilateral termination by the adolescent is conceptualized as a shift from a differentiated to an externalizing transference.