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insufficiently attentive to the importance of the relational or object-relational environment in the formation of psychic structure and in the nature of the instinctual drives themselves. Jacobson’s monumental volume, “The Self and the Object World” (1964), represented an integration of object relations theory with “classical” drive theory. Her views, like Loewald’s, had powerful implications for the understanding of transference, for both its formative early developmental experiences and relationships and its implications for psychoanalytic technique. Loewald, an ego psychologist writing in the 1970s and 1980s, bridged this divide (a relationship versus the transference of the patient versus the transferences of patient and analyst) by a proposing a somewhat different amalgamation drive theory with object relational theory. For Loewald instinctual theory was insistently “psychological” rather than “biological”. Loewald, whose philosophical background included Heidegger as a teacher, saw “…the inextricable interrelationship between what we call subject and object” (1970, p. 55). In this he was in tune with the philosophical postmodern deconstruction of objectivity in science, an intellectual trend that ultimately influenced the whole field of psychoanalysis, especially the relational school (see below). Developmentally, Loewald’s vision was that “object relations … [are] not merely regulative but essential constitutive factors in psychic structure formation … The psychoanalytic process and … early developmental processes reveal the interactional origin and nature of psychic reality…” (1970, p. 67) Writing about “the transference neurosis”, holding to the importance of the centrality of the Oedipal situation, he enlarged a sense of an analytic process as a co-created scene of “transference and countertransference” (Loewald, 1971). He thus took “the transference” -- often referred to as a singular figure -- to mean also the many transferentially influential figures that were encoded in the child’s upbringing and thus in his/her growing mind, including the child’s sense of the caretakers’ emotional relationships to one another – all of whom became internalized, to be re-externalized in verbal and non-verbal ways once more in the analysis. He analogized the analytic situation and the emergent transferences and countertransferences to a dramatic play that is set up by the patient, where the analyst is co-creating the script that is being written by the patient, and where gradually in growing autonomy, the analysand takes over his/her own interpretation of that script. (Loewald, 1975). VI. B. Heinrich Racker’s Influence to further broadening of the concept in North America While North American Ego psychology dominated much of the region’s psychoanalysis, the Argentinian Heinrich Racker’s seminal studies on countertransference found a friendly reception within the North American Interpersonal school of Harry Stack Sullivan. Racker’s earliest published studies (1953, 1957, 1958b) emphasized not only the ubiquity of countertransference and its continuous nature, but perhaps most importantly its interpersonal or relational aspects. He also added essential developmental and genetic (that is, individual- historical) dimensions. For Racker, transferences and countertransferences in the analytic
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