IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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where there is no rush, the nature of which is sometimes circular, but which at other times can bring about all that is new.

VIII. CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Starting from humble beginnings in Freud’s having assigned a name to an error made by the human mind, the multifaceted exploration of transference ever since, in Freud’s own creative thought and those who followed, has designated transference as one of the most defining aspects of psychoanalytic thought and clinical work. Throughout the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, different conceptualization of the forces behind the repetitive aspect of transference and its activation in the interactive context vis-à-vis the analyst developed. While traditionally, displacement and or projection were understood to be the primary mechanisms of how the infantile passions and conflicts surrounding early self-object world were ‘replayed’ in transference, the picture became progressively much more complex. Some of the contemporary views hold that besides re- creation of old object relations, transference involves a search for developmentally new objects, and that transference phenomena may be co-created, within the variously conceptualized dynamic field or various other ‘triadic’ and/or transitional conceptualizations, or dialectics of analyst-analysand interaction. As the understanding of multiple connections between the intrapsychic and inter- psychic processes, communications, ‘roles’ and temporalities within the context of psychoanalytic setting deepened, many authors of different schools of thoughts have made powerful cases for the clinical and theoretical importance of the bidirectional influences that flow between analyst and analysand. The analytic “pair”, “dyad”, or “couple” became a pre- eminently important unit for clinical and theoretical consideration, and Transference and its counterpart of Countertransference became dynamically linked partners. The mechanism of “projective identification” is one of many attempts to name and explain those mutual and bidirectional influences. Similarly, such concepts as “self-object” and ‘self-object transference’, speak of the importance of inseparable entwinement of self and object from a different theoretical perspective. Within the widened arch of transference-countertransference matrix, there is growing emphasis on the issues of “representation” or “representability” of psychic or bio-psychic experience and the view of the analytic process as one in which the analyst’s participation helps the analysand to represent symbolically experiences that had previously been inchoate and incapable of representation. In Latin America, where the tendency has historically been specially focused on the definition of Transference centered on the analyst’s person, the countertransference

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