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of Ferenczi’s and Balint’s went via Clara Thompson (Green 1964) to the Sullivan interpersonal school in the US, where the co-constructive character of the analytic exchange was further accentuated (although regression, so crucial to Ferenczi, Klein and Racker, slipped away). In this context, as well as in the context of all developments that follow, it is important to stress that seeing co-construction or co-elaboration in transference and countertransference does not reduce the responsibilities or the demands made on the analyst. Countertransference work goes on at conscious and unconscious levels, and the work of understanding countertransference extends well beyond the hour in which some aspect of countertransference has emerged. Unlike countertransference, the mechanism of projective identification has not been universally accepted within psychoanalysis. While recognizing the aspect of countertransference where patients induce certain experiences and/or behavioral responses in their analysts, Ego psychologists and conflict theorists preferred to speak of ‘ transference actualizations’ and ‘ role responsiveness ,’ emphasizing the analyst’s ‘living out’ the patient’s unconscious fantasies , holding that these terms were closer to their experience (Sandler 1976). In England, Sandler (1976) – with his concept of ‘role-responsiveness’ – puts forward a specification from another theoretical orientation, the British ‘Contemporary Freudians’. He describes how the patient will attempt to actualize, to bring about in reality – that is in interactive behavior – his internal object relations. This intra-psychic interaction, involving a role for the subject and another for the internal object, will evoke a particular response in the analyst. Sometimes the analyst may notice an impulse to behave in a certain way, but often only afterwards notices that he or she has already started to behave with this patient in a particular mode (here the context of the discussion of the concept ‘enactment’ – in differentiation to countertransference – is of specific relevance). According to Sandler, the analyst´s countertransference reactions are compromises: they echo the patient´s unconscious expectations and wishes, but also the analyst´s own tendencies which the patient often unconsciously has noticed, and taken advantage of. The analyst’s awa r eness of such role- responses can be a vital clue to the dominant transference conflict in the patient. In the meantime, so called mainstream North American psychoanalysis of the 1950s and 1960s, rooted in Ego Psychology/Structural theory, remained a one-person model , subscribing to the narrow definition of countertransference. Classical conceptualizations located countertransference ‘in’ the psyche of analysts, in a spectrum of feelings, resistances, inner conflicts, blind spots, conscious and unconscious attitudes towards patients, reactions to patients’ transference, and transference to patients . However, the child analytic work by Anna Freud of highly developed clinical situations involving the child and its caretakers, influential in the US, the analytic work with psychotics at Chestnut Lodge (Fromm-Reichmann, 1939) and with traumatized and borderline patients at Menninger Clinic (Menninger, 1954) were attesting to the profound influence of the environmental factors and object relationships on the development and formation of intrapsychic structures. While such clinical experiences
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