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and then in symbolizing” (Bolognini 2004). This has been elaborated within many divergent contemporary psychoanalytic traditions, including neo-Kleinians and neo-Bionians whose interpsychic work lies mainly in focusing on the readiness to receive projective identifications (Steiner 2011, Pick 2015). Linking with this view is a strand of French Inter-subjective thinking, with a focus on unconscious communication via enigmatic messages, attention to the patient’s space not being violated, the analyst’s subjectivity, and the analyst’s representational and symbolic capacity being put in service of the patient’s subjectivization, representation and symbolization. Within the context of countertransference, an example may be Faimberg’s (1992, 2005, 2012, 2013, 2015) countertransference position of de-centered clinical listening, also known as listening to listening , consisting of closely monitoring how the analyst hears what the patient has heard and said (and vice-versa), leading to numerous surprises, as a guide to understanding the patient’s state of receptivity and symbolic representation. Jaqueline Godfrind-Haber’s and Maurice Haber’s (2009) concept of shared acted experience constitutes an interpsychic entity of a lived out ‘image of action’ not yet symbolized in words, but containing symbolic capacity. The symbolic leap from potential to realization, from action register to thought register, can be accomplished through the analyst’s countertransferential participation. Similarly, the work of René Roussillon (2009) traces how patient’s actions and bodies carry events-messages from the patient’s pre-verbal history. The interpsychic transmission on the level of transference- countertransference can facilitate their becoming part of ‘psychic life’. From a variety of angles, also Green (2000), Aulagnier (2015), de Mijolla-Mellor (2015/2016) and others stress the analyst’s fine-tuning to the interpsychic and/or inter-subjective flow of unconscious communication as a vital prerequisite to the analytic ‘ co- re-construction ’ and historization of the patient’s early trauma, and restoration of symbolic capacity for any interpretation to have a meaning. In the US and worldwide, the two-person, inter-systemic view has also been professed by analysts with a background in infant research, systems theory and Self-psychology. Contemporary infant research of mutual affect regulation and affect infusion (Tronick 2002) may be especially relevant to the clinical focus on interpsychic transmission. Applied to the clinical work with adults, many authors (Nahum, 2013) underline the joint creation of the implicit rules of the psychoanalytical process. However, they play down the concepts of transference and countertransference, emphasizing rather the facilitating meetings between patient and analyst. While in many contemporary schools of thought, most recently, the concept’s explicit use, the explicit mentioning of ‘countertransference’, may be less in the foreground, it does not mean that the contribution of the personal side of the analyst has gone out of focus, quite the contrary: The inter-twining of patient and analyst is one of the major perspectives in psychoanalysis today. If one examines the longer historical lineage, countertransference has undoubtedly acquired a specific weight in the context of the essential elements of the psychoanalytic method.
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