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Such heat is attained, according to Racker, only if the analyst contributes enough heat (enough positive countertransference while carrying on with his task) to the analytic situation. Certain asepsis, he remarked, should not prevent us from showing interest and affection towards the analysand, because only Eros can create Eros. Certain defences of the analyst against aspects of his own unconscious hinder his task when he faces the analysand’s unconscious. These defences manifest themselves as excessive aloofness, inflexibility, coldness, and inhibited behaviour in the presence of the analysand. Following Freud, Racker considered that transference needed to be interpreted when it was being used by the force of resistance. However, he differentiated himself from Freud when he pointed out that ‘transference resistances’, such as transference anxieties, appeared from the very beginning in the analyses and must therefore be addressed early on. Racker claimed that transference is resistance but it is also the resisted. He made his position clearer based on a Freudian idea from Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) with regard to the position of the analyst, who teams up with the id and its tendency to repetition and fights against the Ego resistances that oppose repetition. He emphasised that the resisted is present in repetition. In Racker’s opinion, analytic therapy is focused on the analysis of transference neurosis. Transference is resistance as well as the resisted; that is to say that the analysand repeats infantile defences (which constitute the transference resistances) in order not to make conscious certain infantile anxiety situations that he is about to re-experience within transference. He further explained that certain resistances to making something conscious are not connected to actual occurrences, but rather to something that has never become past and is therefore re-experienced in the present. Here Racker appeared to be referring to that which has not achieved inscription and, as a result, lives on in a constant present. He claims that “every recollection at the same time represents a certain transference relationship and every refusal to remember represents a rejection of a certain transference relationship” (Racker,1958, p. 63; translated here from Spanish original). In order to state the existence of resistance originated in the counter-transference, Racker takes as a starting point the Freudian statement that the analyst wishes that the patient would remember things as belonging to the past, instead of repeating the repressed as something present and in transference. In Racker’s theory, transference and countertransference represent two components of a unity that mutually feed each other. In counter-transference Racker establishes a distinction between the response of the analyst to manifest transference, and another response to potential, latent transference but which has been repressed and blocked. Countertransference is an expression of the relationship of the analysand with his internal and external objects and, in addition, constitutes an actual experience; for this reason, taking it into account will be important (see separate entry COUNTERTRANSFERENCE).
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