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the broader sense: Projective identification (see the separate entry PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION) implies that the patient projects into the analyst his/her own feelings (originally emphasizing mostly ‘bad’ and destructive ones, before the concept was broadened). Theoretically, within the realm of countertransference, it follows that the unconscious feelings and fantasies within the analyst would be viewed as induced by the analysand. Racker (1948, 1953, 1957), in Argentina, brought the concept of projective identification specifically into the clinical context of countertransference. While both Freudian and Kleinian influences are discernible in Racker’s conceptualizations of countertransference, de Bernardi’s (2000) review of Latin American tradition on countertransference locates Racker as more Kleinian than Freudian overall, due to his drawing prominently on ideas of unconscious fantasy and on the mechanisms of projection and introjection. In Racker’s view, countertransference is seen as the analyst’s own response to the patient’s projective identification : In the emotional responses to the patient´s projections, the analyst could identify either with the patient´s inner objects ( complementary identification ) or with the patient´s self ( concordant identification ). Expanding on Deutsch’s concept of countertransference as a ‘complementary position’ (Deutsch 1926), Racker referred to the analyst´s tendency to identify with the interior of the analysand. Conceptualized structurally, each internal agency of the analyst’s personality identifies with its counterpart in the analysand’s personality: the ego of one with the ego of the other, the id of one with the id of the other, and so on. Racker called these identifications ‘concordant’ and distinguished them from those in which the analyst identified with the analysand´s inner objects, which he called ‘complementary’. In his system, the concordant and complementary identifications are reciprocally proportional: to the degree to which analysts fail in understanding their concordant identifications, their complementary ones increase. Concordant identifications translate as a disposition to empathy and have their source in a sublimated positive identification. On the one hand, there is the analyst as a subject and the analysand as the object of knowledge, the object relation is in a sense obliterated and in its place there exists a rough identification based on the identity between some parts of the subject and some parts of the object, the combination of which could be called “concordant”. On the other hand, there exists an object relation of a true transference on the part of the analyst, in which he/she reproduces earlier experiences while the analysand represents some of the analyst´s inner (archaic) objects. This combination is called “complementary”. Thus, through countertransference reactions the analyst could sense the patient´s inner protagonists as projected into him or her. Heimann holds the opposite position in some respects: countertransference activates feelings in the analyst in response to the patient. Such feelings are the analyst’s feelings and not the result of the patient’s projective identification into the analyst, and their registration and understanding constitute access to the patient’s unconscious . In Heimann’s elaboration, countertransference is an unconscious “ cognitive instrument ” and a “highly significant tool for the analyst’s work…”, informing the analyst of the possible “lag between the conscious and
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