IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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unconscious perception.” Such a lag amounts to “an unconscious introjection of his patient, and an unconscious identification with him” (Heimann 1977, p. 319). Even though Heimann’s initial relationships after her flight from Berlin were forged with the Kleinian group, she is mostly included in the group of analysts who took a two-person view of countertransference. She herself dates the beginning of her independence from Klein and her reconnection to the worlds of Ferenczi and Balint with her essay “On Counter- Transference”. That essay presents a balanced mix of intense focus on the rich play of emotional responsiveness in the analyst and caution as to emotional expression . She seems to have considered analytic countertransference as a kind of creation of the patient, useful to the analyst. However, her clinical vignette includes her sense of countertransference as both ‘clue’ and ‘mis-clue’. In the controversies surrounding the growing emphasis on the concept of countertransference, Winnicott’s “Hate in the Counter-Transference” presents an important, independent position. Published in 1949, this paper foreshadows Heimann’s elaborations and institutes Winnicott as a crucial figure in the emergence of ideas about countertransference, particularly in his conceptualization of the mutative and necessary role of aggression as an aspect of countertransference. Winnicott’s two papers, “Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development” (1950) and “Hate in the Counter-Transference” (1949), both identify the inevitability and clinical utility of aggression and hatred in the analyst . According to Winnicott, hatred is paired with , not opposed to, love and primary maternal preoccupation. It is boundary-making and aids in separation and in the ability of the analysand to disentangle fantasy and reality, to lessen the dangerous experience of omnipotence. In this way, the hating aspect of the analyst, including the hatred that is in the ending of the hour, is a crucial ingredient of change in the analysand. Winnicott distinguishes between (1) countertransference feelings that are under repression and possibly need more self-analysis by the analyst (these are idiosyncratic identifications and tendencies of the analyst) and (2) “the truly objective counter-transference, … the analyst’s love and hate in reaction to the actual personality and behavior of the patient, based on objective observation” (1949, p. 69-70). ‘Truly objective countertransference’ refers to the analyst’s feelings toward the patient, that are his or her own feelings and – as Heimann sees it later – not the result of the patient’s projection into the analyst. These feelings are thus reactions to the patient’s behavior: personal reflections to the patient´s ‘objective’ way of being. Sometimes it is necessary, according to Winnicott, that these feelings of the analyst be put at the patient’s disposal – through recognition by the analyst as his/her own feelings, and/or through interpretation – in order for the analysis to proceed. This view, like Heimann’s, is different from the concept ‘projective identification’ of the classical Kleinian frame of reference, which is considered the ubiquitous mechanism that affects the totality of the patient/analyst relationship. The work by Heimann and Winnicott casts a long shadow of influence over the third, so-called ‘Independent group’ in England (the first being the contemporary Freudians, the second the Kleinians), a shadow that spreads out from Little (1981), who explored the depth of the transference forms of hate and blocked

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