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vitality , to Bollas (1983), who promoted a careful attunement to countertransference as the bearer of the disavowed aspects of the analyst. Overall, in England, there is a divergence in the further development of the concept of countertransference. One conceptualization, derived from Klein’s introduction of projective identification and emphasized in the ‘Kleinian Group’, is per se a great step in understanding the patient–analyst way of relating. The second conceptualization, the so-called countertransference of the early ‘Independent tradition’ (Winnicott, Heimann), maintains that what is from the analyst is from the analyst and not automatically the analyst’s response to the patient’s projection. This difference in the countertransference conception has relevant effects and consequences on the technical conduct of the treatment and on how the analyst considers and works with the patient’s communications. Parallel developments in the Argentinian school, starting with Racker, stay closer to Kleinian views, as they develop their own version of the use of projective identification within the context of countertransference. II. C. International Broadening of the Concept – Further Lines of Expansion (Second half of the 20 th century Europe, Latin America and North America) From the mid-1950s onwards, alongside the ‘widening scope of psychoanalysis’, countertransference was increasingly seen as a useful tool, while the broadened view became the dominant perspective. In the last fifty years, most psychoanalysts have stopped viewing countertransference as only an impediment and have come to see it instead as a source of insight into the analysand as well as into their own psychic functioning in relation to the analysand. Here, it is sometimes called ‘ personal countertransference ’ or ‘ diagnostic countertransference ’ (Casement 1987). In this perspective, countertransference came to be viewed as a two-person co-creation, and transference and countertransference are seen as the endpoints of a single dynamic process. This view of countertransference began to link the phenomenon closely to enactments , which some came to see as the first step toward boundary violations, transference and countertransference ‘actualizations’. In all these developments worldwide, the conceptualization of the relationship between ‘projective identification’ and ‘countertransference’ plays an important role. Heimann’s and Racker’s ideas, along with those of Winnicott and other independent authors, have been developed and extended by Grinberg (1956), Bion (1959), Ogden (1994a) and many others who have focused on the analyst’s use of reverie and on a process that makes the analytic object/space/setting/field a variously conceptualized triadic configuration and exchange (Baranger 1961/2008, Bleger 1967, Green 1974), which is a new creation of patient and analyst, a ‘Third’ in Ogden’s (1994b) terms. In Argentina, notable enrichment of the scope of discussion of metapsychology and clinical theory on the subject of countertransferential projective-introjective engagements (including dramatizations and enactments) was further enriched by Leon Grinberg’s (1956) conceptualization of projective counter-identification .
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