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A generative figure between Object Relations and Relational Theories, Mitchell (1993, 1997) conveys a powerful sense that countertransference affects are engines for psychic movement . His vignettes often catch the analytic pair in moments of hopeless despair. Without that experience of hopelessness, Mitchell holds, the analyst would not be impelled to do the work needed to understand the process by which such impasses come about. In his work, there are always two speakers with authority. The current situation within the broadly based classical tradition is one of an ongoing debate within and across orientations on the status, function and limits of countertransference analysis (Gabbard 1982, 1994, 1995). Jacob’s (1993) original theoretical work on the uses of the analyst’s countertransference draws from object relations, from contemporary Freudians (Sandler 1976), and from self-psychology. With Jacobs, countertransference emerges in the most florid and multiply configured forms, as rich (in its own way) and problematic as transference. In his work the whole of the analyst’s instrument, the creative use of all of body, mind, fantasy and interpersonal experience, is crucial for analytic work. Now countertransference is not a problem but (part of) a solution, a necessary register for the analyst’s work. Built into the suppositions of Jacob’s use of analytic subjectivity is his assumption of the subtle and pervasive communications – meta, conscious, preconscious and unconscious – that undergird and network through the experiences of all analytic couples. Meaning-making being so richly co-constructed inevitably requires that the analyst understand and explore very deeply his/her own part in these complex communications. For Jacobs (1991, 1999, 2001) and Smith (1999, 2000, 2003), and for the more object-relational analysts such as Ogden (1994, 1995) and Gabbard (1994), differences among them notwithstanding, the analyst’s subjectivity is crucial for the self-analysis that ultimately moves analytic work forward. In this line of thinking, countertransference is now thought of more typically as enactment (Harris 2005; See also the separate entry ENACTMENT). Reflecting on the repetitive and compulsive aspects of countertransference, Smith (2000) proposes that countertransference may (even simultaneously) both retard analytic progress and enhance it. Smith is doing here for countertransference what Freud did for transference, namely, showing that it is likely to be both a resistance and an engine of change. As with any repetition compulsion, there is simultaneously an impulse for health and for illness . Apprey (1993, 2010, 2014) extends Sandler’s notion of countertransference-driven role responsiveness “to address pleas, demands, and all the prodding in the transference- countertransference continuum driven by unconscious wishes to repeat or upend historical grievances in the public space of the contemporary clinical setting” (personal communication to Papiasvili, 2014). In what he sees as a uniquely contemporary North American extension and use of the concept, Apprey, a contemporary Freudian who bridges complexities of projective identification, enactments and role responsiveness, depicts the role-responsive analyst as potentiating ‘ psychical emancipation from the … destructive and oppressive internal objects’ who intrusively torment and violate the patient from within his or her own psyche.
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