Transference Interpretation as a Resistance Against Free Association

Reflections with Christopher Bollas and Karla Woven-Buchholz

In psychoanalytic work, interpretation is often regarded as the analyst’s central instrument — a means of making unconscious meaning available to consciousness, particularly through the analysis of transference. Yet as Christopher Bollas and Karla Woven-Buchholz remind us, the act of interpretation can itself become a subtle form of resistance — a defense not only of the patient but of the analyst’s own position in the field of the transference.

The Analyst’s Desire to Know

Christopher Bollas, in The Shadow of the Object (1987), describes the analyst’s desire to “find” meaning as an expression of what he calls the transformational object. The analyst may unconsciously wish to transform the patient through understanding — to offer meaning in place of chaos. Yet this wish can easily become a resistance to the analytic process itself, especially when interpretation is used to foreclose the patient’s associative freedom. Bollas writes:

“In our effort to make sense of the patient, we may at times be drawn to tidy the analytic field — to impose coherence where the psyche needs to play.” (Bollas, 1987, p. 14)

Here, the interpretive act risks functioning not as a facilitation of free association, but as a defense against it. The analyst’s interpretive voice may become a way to manage the anxiety evoked by the patient’s unbounded, chaotic, or enigmatic material.

Woven-Buchholz and the Paradox of Interpretation

Karla Woven-Buchholz, in her essay Übertragungsdeutung als Widerstand gegen die freie Assoziation (2008), articulates a similar concern from within the German psychoanalytic discourse. She argues that the very tool intended to open psychic space — the transference interpretation — can paradoxically constrict it, especially when it is employed too early or too eagerly.

“Every act of interpretation, particularly of transference, bears within it the potential to halt the patient’s own associative process. The analytic intervention becomes a mirror for the analyst’s need for orientation, for control within the countertransference.” (Woven-Buchholz, 2008, p. 121)

For Woven-Buchholz, the issue is not the legitimacy of transference interpretation per se, but its timing and its function. When interpretation serves the analyst’s anxiety — for example, the discomfort of not-knowing or the wish to stabilize a fragile alliance — it risks undermining the patient’s capacity for self-discovery through association.

Free Association as Ethical Space

From this perspective, free association is not merely a technical instruction but an ethical commitment — an attitude of allowing the patient’s unconscious to unfold in its own rhythm. The analyst’s restraint becomes a form of reverence for psychic process, an acknowledgment that understanding must sometimes be deferred.

Bollas’ notion of the “unthought known” (1987) is relevant here: the analytic situation must allow for the emergence of that which has been known unconsciously but not yet thought. Premature interpretation — even when accurate — can interrupt this delicate process of psychic articulation. It imposes thought before the patient has arrived at it experientially.

The Analyst’s Resistance

Both Bollas and Woven-Buchholz point toward a crucial insight: that the analyst’s resistance is often expressed through too much activity — too much meaning, too much explanation, too much interpretive control. The challenge, then, is not simply to identify the patient’s resistances, but to recognize one’s own.

In this sense, the analyst’s capacity for negative capability (Keats, 1817; Bion, 1962) — the ability to remain in doubt, uncertainty, and not-knowing — becomes the ethical core of analytic work. The suspension of interpretation allows the transference to deepen, to become more fully lived rather than prematurely “understood.”

A Space for Transformation

In the end, both Bollas and Woven-Buchholz remind us that psychoanalysis is not a dialogue of explanations but a shared field of transformation. Interpretation is not a weapon against resistance but part of a dialectical movement in which the analyst’s silence, patience, and receptivity are as meaningful as speech.

To interpret is sometimes to resist — but to recognize this resistance is to restore the freedom that lies at the heart of the analytic encounter.

References

• Bollas, C. (1987). The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. London: Free Association Books.

• Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.

• Woven-Buchholz, K. (2008). Übertragungsdeutung als Widerstand gegen die freie Assoziation. In: Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, 57, 117–132.

• Keats, J. (1817). Letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 21, 1817: “Negative Capability.”