Back to Table of Contents
recently disputed, see Holmes, 2014) that beginning with Freud’s early writing and correspondence on the subject, countertransference was viewed – initially and through the 1950’s and ‘60s – as a largely unconscious, highly personal if not idiosyncratic reaction in the analyst that impeded or interfered with an analyst’s capacity to function as the analyst of the particular patient evoking the countertransference. In short, countertransference was a problem in the analyst that often if not regularly was deemed to require further analytic (or at least self- analytic) work by – or upon – the treating analyst. Despite its parallel to transference, countertransference was viewed as discontinuous, cropping up at particular moments or phases in an analysis. It was also viewed, like transference, not so much as an interpersonal event taking life from the interaction of two particular individuals but rather as the activation of a pre-existing template or schema of the analyst’s in response to – but not in its essence shaped by – the analysand. The deliberate intensive study of countertransference as a phenomenon in and of itself as well as a unique product of a specific dyad in a particular and unique analytic situation was to wait for future elaboration. VI. A. Edith Jacobson and Hans Loewald: Transitional Thinkers of Classical Psychoanalysis Within the “classical” tradition were transitional thinkers beginning to bridge the divide between one-person drive theorists and two-person relational perspectives. The two contributors who were perhaps most prominent and influential were Edith Jacobson and Hans Loewald. Both emerged from the ego psychological tradition but felt that perspective to be insufficiently attentive to the importance of the relational or object-relational environment in the formation of psychic structure and in the nature of the instinctual drives themselves. Jacobson’s monumental volume, “The Self and the Object World” (Jacobson, 1964), represented an integration of object relations theory with “classical” drive theory. Her views, like Loewald’s, had powerful implications for the understanding of transference, for both its formative early developmental experiences and relationships and its implications for psychoanalytic technique. Loewald, an ego psychologist writing in the 1970s and 1980s, bridged this divide (a relationship versus the transference of the patient versus the transferences of patient and analyst) by a proposing a somewhat different amalgamation drive theory with object relational theory. For Loewald instinctual theory was insistently “psychological” rather than “biological”. Loewald, whose philosophical background included Heidegger as a teacher, saw “…the inextricable interrelationship between what we call subject and object” (1970, p. 55). In this he was in tune with the philosophical postmodern deconstruction of objectivity in science, an intellectual trend that ultimately influenced the whole field of psychoanalysis, especially the relational school (see below). Developmentally, Loewald’s vision was that “object relations … [are] not merely regulative but essential constitutive factors in psychic structure formation … The psychoanalytic process and … early developmental processes
1074
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online