Edinger is marking a distinction that psychotherapy routinely collapses. The ordinary clinical understanding of transference treats it as a matter of misdirected feeling — you see your father in the analyst, the analyst holds your hunger for the mother, and the work consists of gradually withdrawing those projections until the other person becomes merely themselves. That is not wrong, but it is partial. What Edinger points to is the process running beneath the projections, using them the way a river uses its banks — shaped by them, visible through them, but not reducible to them.

The individuation process needs a vessel, and the analytical relationship furnishes one. The projections — idealization, rage, longing, dependency — are not the goal, nor are they simply obstacles. They are the medium through which something impersonal moves toward articulation. Strip away every charged feeling about the analyst and you have not arrived at truth; you have simply removed the scaffolding before the structure can bear its own weight. The transference, in Edinger's sense, is how the psyche stages its own drama at a specific moment in a specific life. The projection is the costume. What wears it is harder to name and does not disappear when the costume is finally laid aside.