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emphasises the repetitive aspect of transference led by the death drives, and the resistance to transference mobilised by the pleasure principle, by libido. With regard to counter-transference, Etchegoyen points out that it was Heinrich Racker in Argentina (and also, at the same time, Paula Heimann in London) who drew attention to the role played by counter-transference as a sensitive instrument. Etchegoyen suggests that countertransference feelings and drives appear in the analyst’s Unconscious as a result of the patient’s transference (Etchegoyen, 2005, p. 297) The starting point is the patient’s transference, while countertransference is its counterpoint, and both are generated within a setting. The setting operates as a contextual reference that creates a non-conventional, asymmetric relationship. “The analyst could respond to the patient´s transference in an absolutely rational way, maintaining himself always at the level of the working alliance. But the clinical facts prove that the analyst responds at first with irrational phenomena in which infantile conflicts are mobilized. In this sense, this is clearly a transference phenomenon on the part of the analyst. But if we are to preserve the analytic situation, it has to be a response to the patient. If it is not, then we would have to say that we are not within the analytic process but are, instead, reproducing what happens in everyday life between two persons in conflict.”. (“The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique”, Revised English edition, 1999, pp. 268-269) Transference is, at the same time, past and present. As the Unconscious is timeless, the cure consists in giving temporality to it, claims Etchegoyen. For this reason, memory, transference, and history are inseparable. The analyst must help past and present blend in the mind of the patient, leaving behind the mechanisms of repression and splitting that try to separate them. Etchegoyen considers that referring transference to the past is not enough; rather, the situation can only be solved if we acknowledge the hic et nunc (here and now) – the present dimension of transference; that is, what is happening in the present should also be taken into account. With regard to the interpretation of counter-transference, it should be carried out in such a way so as to prevent it from becoming a mere act of ‘levelling with’ the other. Therefore, for transference to become a technical instrument, interpretation should be blended. In this way, the analyst’s confidence in his own thinking is recovered. Based on the concept of transference put forward in two Freudian texts, “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900) and the postscript of the case of Dora (1905), Etchegoyen says that Freud discusses two different ideas about transference that are, nevertheless, connected: one takes into account the person of the analyst (rudimentarily already in “Studies on Hysteria” of 1895, but mainly in “Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria” [Dora] of 1905) while the other (in chapter seven from the “Interpretation of Dreams”) describes the same phenomenon from the perspective of the dream-work. As stated above, they are two different, but somehow connected, psychological processes rooted in childhood, and in which the present and the past become (con)fused.
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