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In addition to countertransference potentiating growth and knowledge, Gabbard (1995) maintains that countertransference has become an emerging common ground among psychoanalysts of different schools. He traces this to the development of two key concepts such as projective identification and countertransference enactment (see separate PROJECTIVE IDENTIFICATION and ENACTMENT entries). Following the long evolving history of viewing the emotional reactions of the analyst as an instrument of accessing and affecting the inner world of the patient, the recent discussion has included the inquiry about if and how to extend the active and explicit use of countertransference in the analytic situation, i.e. whether, under certain circumstances, one should disclose the countertransference to the patient, with the aim being to facilitate the patient´s understanding of his or her own experience (Renick 1999; Gediman 2011; Greenberg 2015). However, at the present time there is no consensus on the usefulness of this intervention technique.
IV. CONCLUSION
Starting with Freud’s ‘Irma Injection dream’ of 1895, a countertransference dream par excellence, the development of the concept of countertransference exemplifies the constant interaction of theory and practice, of clinical work and conceptualization, from the ‘birth of psychoanalysis’ throughout its further evolution. Although early on countertransference was seen mainly as a risk to the analyst’s clinical effectiveness, the ‘other’ trend of understanding countertransference as the result of inter psychic processes, only hinted at in the beginning, was becoming progressively more explicit in the analytic discussions of the 1920s and 1930s, as the definition of countertransference was gradually broadened. The last decade of the 20 th century and the beginning of the 21 st century have seen a further focusing on the interpsychic phenomena and processes going on not only in but also between the psyches of the two protagonists of the analytic situation. However, within this focusing there have been very different thematic priorities: the pre-subjective level of exchange, the intertwined subjectivities of patient and analyst, the relationships of both, the psychic field between them and the various channels of exchange – unconscious reactions, affects, and emotions, language, physicality, behavior, etc. As countertransference is increasingly seen as a treatment tool, its potentials and pitfalls, clinically and theoretically, remain of major interest for analysts. The different meaning aspects which show throughout the development of the concept can be organized according to what other concepts they refer to and what conceptual universes they are emerging from: “Countertransference” referring to the topographical model of the mind (conscious/unconscious) ; “Countertransference” referring to the structural model of the mind (ego-ideal/superego, ego, id); “Countertransference” referring to specific psychic mechanisms (resistance, projection, projective identification, container/contained);
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