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in an actual relationship, as well as an object in a transference relationship—offered the potential to forge with the patient a new beginning, tapping heretofore unexplored potentials for growth and change. The American Interpersonal School, and the Relational School that followed developed a clinical perspective in line with Ferenczi’s discoveries, that placed at its center the radical recognition that the analyst was inevitably a participant in the mix of the process with the patient, co-creating their shared analytic experience as a particular encounter between their two subjectivities, their conscious and unconscious experience. It emphasized that transference and countertransference were inevitably complementary, each begetting the other in an infinite Mobius strip of mutual influence and transformations that could be studied and explored in the psychoanalytic relationship to good effect. The analyst was a participant observer, and so the impact of his or her actual personality, and idiosyncratic ways of being and relating to the patient constituted important dimensions of analytic experience that an intersubjective point of view saw as central. These ideas, too, were anticipated by Ferenczi, who had himself noted the centrality of countertransference as a mutually shaping complement to transference. He discerned the role of reciprocal influence in the analytic relationship and the crucial importance of the analyst’s recognition of his own impact on the patient, a factor that he recognized would go a long way toward ameliorating the inevitable iatrogenic risks of retraumatization. Ferenczi highlighted the implications for analytic treatment of recognizing the analyst as a real person (ideas picked up in the British School by Fairbairn, Guntrip, and Balint, and in the American School by Thompson, Wolstein, Singer, Levenson, and many others). Ferenczi discerned that the patient read and reacted to the smallest nuances of the analyst’s behavior. The patient, according to Ferenczi’s 1932 Clinical Diary entry (in: Dupont, 1988), “detects from little gestures (form of greeting, handshake, tone of voice, degree of animation, etc.) the presence of affects” (ibid, p. 11), which may reveal to the patient more about the analyst than even the analyst may know. Ferenczi’s observations made the mirror metaphor (below) obsolete for many analysts and were recognized as central to the perspective of many interpersonal psychoanalysts in the 1950s and beyond, and to Relational theorists who followed, as intersubjectivity became more and more central to the theory. For Freud (1912) with his telephonic metaphor: “The analyst must bend his own unconscious like a receptive organ toward the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver transmutes the electrical oscillations induced by the sound waves back again into sound waves, so is the physician’s unconscious mind able to reconstruct the patient’s unconscious, which has determined his free associations” (ibid, pp. 115-116), the analyst’s unconscious was to be used as a highly sensitive listening instrument, guided by key principles such as neutrality, anonymity and blank screen or mirror function. That meant that the transmitting function of the analyst must remain well disciplined, lest its reception by the patient’s listening apparatus endanger the process through which
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