Will anyone ever penetrate the secret of this disease which
transcends ordinary experience, this reverberation of the
shadow of the mind, which manifests itself in a state of coma
like that between death and resurrection, when one is neither
asleep nor awake?

Sadegh Hedayat

T he Oedipus complex is a web of troubled relationships. If
the issues that we bring to therapy are all about early rela-
tionships, it might be that the relationship between patient
and therapist is in itself an essential element of the treatment.
Freud covered the interpersonal aspect of the psychoanalytic pro-
cess by the term "transference".

Transference [ Übertragung ] was first mentioned in Studies on Hys-
teria ( 1895d), where Freud wrote that psychotherapy patients

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