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situation were of necessity dyadic, involving interpenetrating feelings, fantasies, impulses, and memories of both patient and analyst and their mutual impact upon and interactions with each other. He framed transference-countertransference in terms of object relations, especially in the repetition of early ones, and introduced the terms “complementary” and “concordant” to describe their typical patterns of reciprocity. Racker’s work and his view of transference/countertransference and their inseparability has slowly worked its way into the North American “mainstream,” so much so that it is difficult to have a clinical article accepted for the “Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association” that does not have some description of the transference/countertransference dimension of the manuscript’s clinical illustration. Integration of the two-person implications of transference/countertransference has contributed to a degree of convergence of the points of view of the relational/interpersonal school and the “modern conflict” school – although fundamental differences remain as will be discussed below. Nevertheless, the decades of the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s have appropriately been called “the countertransference years”. (Jacobs, 1999, p. 575) Jacobs correctly identified countertransference a concept “long in the shadows, that has emerged as one of the issues most actively discussed and debated in psychoanalysis today.” Today it is difficult – although by no means impossible – to speak of transference without reference to its partner. This has been a radical evolution, perhaps a paradigm shift. The view of transference as repetition of past relationships into the present and most importantly into the analytic relationship, although modified in a variety of ways – perhaps unrecognizeably so by the relational/interpersonal school (see below) – remains acknowledged at its core by North American analysts today. Kernberg (this entry, see below) probably speaks for the great majority of North American analysts today when he says “the analysis of transference is the main source of specific change brought about by psychoanalytic treatment”. Transference analysis may well be the defining feature distinguishing psychoanalysis from other psychotherapies. Representing a further evolution of the “Ego psychology” (Hartmann, 1939) that dominated the field in North America between approximately 1940 and 1980, “modern conflict theory” (MCT) (also sometimes referred to as “conflict theory” or “classical analysis”) held fast to the view that the capacity for transference resided solely and uniquely in the mind of the analysand. This view contrasts strongly with the views of the “two person” theories that hold, variously, that the transference – perhaps a misnomer in this view – or better said, the relationship is a unique de novo product of the interactions within a particular analytic dyad. A variant of this idea is that transference is co-constructed and that therefore an analysand’s apparent transference will differ depending upon who is his analytic partner. Even the use of the term “transference” can be confusing since some two-person analysts may speak of transference but exclude or minimize the importance of the repetition of the past. Whereas the two-person psychology view is that the analytic relationship is created solely or primarily from present day elements, the MCT view retains Freud’s idea that the analytic relationship will be highly influenced by transference in the sense of the patient’s repetition of his past
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