As Janet Malcolm puts it, Freud's patients "were in a state of readiness to fall in love." And, we might add, readiness to hate as well. From one angle, transference is about organismic readiness, a disposition to approach, a preparedness to avoid. Approach and avoidance evolved in the deepest level of the organism, from humans all the way down to the prokaryotes. Maybe positive transference is a refinement of dispositions to approach that are found in most life forms and negative transference the result of evolved avoidance strategies. Fight or flee? Friend or foe? To be, or not to be? These are the basic questions.

Hamlet was in a state of readiness to kill Claudius -- unfortunately it was Polonius behind the arras.

But there is this other sense of "readiness." Before Freud described transference, he first had to notice something there when it shouldn't be. To see transference, he had to have some understanding of the system of ideas that it was hiding in. He was working out his concepts of conversion, the unconscious, the id, libido, repression, and resistance. And instead of hypnosis and catharsis to cure hysteria, he was using free association. But something kept getting in the way of the patient freely associating, something that shouldn't be there -- which was later understood to be a special kind of resistance, a resistance caused by transference.

This opens the question of whether transference is a discovery of something that always has been -- or whether it's a construction within the closed system of psychoanalytic thought, an invention. When, without at first fully understanding it, Freud observed transference and saw the symbolic substitution of one person for another, we might say he invented it -- he observed the phenomenon, he coined the term, he formulated the explanation. But when Freud came to understand why the symbolic interchange was happening, what it really meant and what to do with it -- then we could say he discovered transference.

And this brings us full circle: Readiness is all. You have to be prepared to see it before you can see it. Freud's genius lay in making us ready, Shakespeare's in making Freud ready.

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