To a spectator, therefore—though, in fact, there can be none—an analytic treatment would seem completely obscure. Another advantage of the method is that it need never break down. It must theoretically always be possible to have an association, provided that no conditions are made as to its character. Yet there is one case in which, in fact, a break down occurs with absolute regularity; from its very uniqueness, however, this case, too can be interpreted. I now come to the description of a factor which adds an essential feature to my picture of analysis and which can claim alike technically and theoretically, to be regarded as of the first importance. In every analytic treatment, there arises, without the physician’s agency, an intense emotional relationship between the patient and the analyst which is not to be accounted for by the actual situation. It can be of a positive or of a negative character, and can vary between the extremes of a passionate, completely sensual love and the unbridled expression of an embittered defiance and hatred. This _transference_—to give it its shortened name—soon replaces, in the patient’s mind, the desire to be cured, and, so long as it is affectionate and moderate becomes the agent of the physician’s influence and neither more nor less than the main-spring of the joint work of analysis. Later on, when it has become passionate or has been converted into hostility, it becomes the principal tool of the resistance. It may then happen that it will paralyse the patient’s powers of associating and endanger the success of the treatment. Yet it would be senseless to try to evade it; for an analysis without transference is an impossibility. It must not be supposed, however, that the transference is created by analysis and does not occur apart from it. The transference is merely uncovered and isolated by analysis. It is a universal phenomenon of the human mind, it decides the success of all medical influence and, in fact, dominates the whole of each person’s relations to his human environment. We can easily recognize it as the same dynamic factor that the hypnotists have named “suggestibility,” which is the agent of hypnotic _rapport_ and the incalculable behavior of which led to such difficulties with the cathartic method. When there is no inclination to a transference of emotion such as this, or when it has become entirely negative, as happens in dementia præcox or paranoia, then there is also no possibility of influencing the patient by psychological means.