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reveal the interactional origin and nature of psychic reality…” (1970, p. 67). Writing about ‘the transference neurosis’, holding to the importance of the centrality of the Oedipal situation, he enlarged a sense of an analytic process as a co-created scene of ‘transference and countertransference’ (Loewald, 1971). He thus took ‘the transference’ -- often referred to as a singular figure -- to mean also the many transferentially influential figures that were encoded in the child’s upbringing and thus in his/her growing mind, including the child’s sense of the caretakers’ emotional relationships to one another – all of whom became internalized, to be re- externalized in verbal and non-verbal ways once more in the analysis. He analogized the analytic situation and the emergent transferences and countertransferences to a dramatic play that is set up by the patient, where the analyst is co-creating the script that is being written by the patient, and where gradually in growing autonomy, the analysand takes over his/her own interpretation of that script (Loewald, 1975). VI. B. Heinrich Racker’s Influence to further broadening of the concept in North America While North American Ego psychology dominated much of the region’s psychoanalysis, the Argentinian Heinrich Racker’s seminal studies on countertransference found a friendly reception within the North American Interpersonal school of Harry Stack Sullivan. Racker’s earliest published studies (1953, 1957, 1958b) emphasized not only the ubiquity of countertransference and its continuous nature, but perhaps most importantly its interpersonal or relational aspects. He also added essential developmental and genetic (that is, individual- historical) dimensions. For Racker, transferences and countertransferences in the analytic situation were of necessity dyadic, involving interpenetrating feelings, fantasies, impulses, and memories of both patient and analyst and their mutual impact upon and interactions with each other. He framed transference-countertransference in terms of object relations, especially in the repetition of early ones, and introduced the terms ‘complementary’ and ‘concordant’ to describe their typical patterns of reciprocity. Racker’s work and his view of transference/countertransference and their inseparability has slowly worked its way into the North American ‘mainstream’, so much so that it is difficult to have a clinical article accepted for the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association that does not have some description of the transference/countertransference dimension of the manuscript’s clinical illustration. Integration of the two-person implications of transference/countertransference has contributed to a degree of convergence of the points of view of the relational/interpersonal and the modern conflict theory (MCT) thought and clinical work – although fundamental differences remain as will be discussed below. Nevertheless, the decades of the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s have appropriately been called “the countertransference years” (Jacobs 1999, p. 575) by Theodore Jacobs, who, in his paper “Countertransference Past and Present: A Review of the Concept” identified countertransference as a concept “long in the shadows, that has emerged as one of the issues most actively discussed and debated in psychoanalysis today” (Jacobs, 1999, p. 575). Today it is difficult – although by no means
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