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interpretation and working through of these primitive transference regressions may represent the dominant therapeutic feature of these cases.
VI. F. Relational Perspectives The relational/interpersonal view of transference is firmly rooted in a two-person psychology and thus views the transference as inextricable from the countertransference. That is, for relationalists, transference cannot be simply the “transfer” of internalized templates in the patient onto the analyst but rather is a part of a clinical situation which in Racker’s view (1988), is an interaction between two personalities… “each personality has its internal and external dependencies, anxieties, and pathological defenses; each is also a child with his internal parents, and each of these whole personalities – that of the analysand and that of the analyst – responds to every event in the analytic situation” (p. 132). Steven Mitchell (2000) states that psychoanalytic knowledge is generated in the intersubjective mix between patient and analyst through the study of transactional patterns and with an internal structure derived from an interactive, interpersonal field. As the pattern is the object of analytic study, transference does not exist without participation from its object (countertransference). For relational analysts, transference is grounded in a social constructivist model. Irwin Z. Hoffman (1983) points out that the transference is not a distortion of reality but a selective attention to certain aspects of the analyst’s participation, both conscious and unconscious. One major implication of this view is that the analyst inevitably influences the nature of the patient’s transference. As Ogden (1994) observes out, a given patient will have a different analysis depending on the particularities of his analyst, both conscious and unconscious, as they co- create an “analytic third”. Sullivan’s “Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry” (1953) states that a person can only be known in the context of a social interaction that constitutes an ever-shifting “interpersonal field”. As he sees the “self system” as designed to reduce anxiety which comes with having to interact with a significant “other”, a patient’s “transference” to his analyst may likely be a form of adaptation designed to reduce the danger in the interaction, perhaps protecting the analyst. Irwin Hoffman critiques the classical view of transference by pointing to the impossibility of the analyst not influencing the patient’s reaction to him. As some contemporary relational analysts, notably Bromberg (1998, 2006, 2011) and D. B. Stern (2011), view the self as a collection of self-states (i.e. internalized object relationships) which may or may not be aware of one another, they view the transference as a particular self-state of the patient interacting with a self-state of the analyst. Bromberg (1998, p. 13) writes, “By being attuned to shifts in his own self-states as well as those of the patient, and using this awareness relationally, an analyst furthers the capacity of a patient to hear in a single interpersonal context the echo of his other selves voicing alternative realities that have been previously incompatible.”
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