IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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the Id in Schizophrenia], which was published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Volume XVIII (1932), 2. Traces of Garma’s thought can be found in the following authors:

VII. Aa. Heinrich Racker Native of Poland, H. Racker was forced by the Nazi persecution to emigrate to Buenos Aires in 1939. He began his training analysis with Angel Garma, and became very influential in development of psychoanalytic thought and practice in Latin America (Garma, 1931). Racker focused on what happened to the analyst in connection to the analysand during the analysis. Therefore, parallel to the dynamics of transference, he developed what he termed the dynamics of counter-transference, the consideration of which allows the analyst a fuller understanding of transference. He takes into account not only the repetitive aspects, but also all that is new within the exchange between the analyst and the analysand. Racker developed certain concepts at a time when, in his opinion, not enough attention was being paid to resistance to transference and to the interpretation of dreams. There was a tendency to interpret conflicts but the profound motivations, such as wish-fulfilment in dreams, which are in fact their essence, seemed to be ignored. He attributed these technical differences to oscillations in the Freudian thought itself. In Estudios sobre técnica psicoanalítica [Studies on Psychoanalytic Technique], Racker (1958) remarked that Freud wanted to spare patients from the intensity and the violence of repetition and therefore he sometimes seemed to want to limit his tendency to give transference neurosis a central role in the treatment. Racker’s contribution to transference has mainly been to emphasise certain unconscious processes that take place in the analyst, that inhibit him and prevent him from offering the appropriate interpretations throughout the treatment: he termed them counter-resistances to the task of interpretation. Counter-transference is the actual response to transference. In consequence, he applied the Freudian methodology of transforming what has become an obstacle (that is, counter-transference) into an instrument that broadens the understanding of ‘making conscious the unconscious’ (see separate entry COUNTERTRANSFERENCE). Racker’s suggestions could be differentiated from what at the time came to be termed ‘classical psychoanalysis’ – which emphasised the notions of ‘analyst as mirror’ and ‘analyst as surgeon’ in order to achieve an ideal asepsis – because he adhered to a more active technique on facing the analysand’s clinical production, something that can be attributed to the influence of Klein and, in particular, of Paula Heimann. He took up an active aspect of the Freudian statements by becoming aware of the processes of identification with the patient that entail empathy and the careful attention to the patient’s associations. He tended both to a microscopic and macroscopic approach to the patient’s activity, in the Siedehitze (intense heat) of transference.

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