Discovering Transference

Today we are marking the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud. Why? Because he founded a new clinical practice, named psychoanalysis. His radical step, which he himself described, retrospectively, as arising from "an insight such as... falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime", involved taking up a new clinical position in the treatment of his patients.[1] So radical was his step that one has to ask how a young medical doctor in the 1880's and 1890's found himself able to make it.…