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II. HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT
II. A. Freud and the ‘Narrow Definition’ of Countertransference The first appearance of the term is in a letter from Sigmund Freud to Carl Gustav Jung in 1909 addressing the latter´s experiences in his love affair with Sabina Spielrein: “Such experiences, though painful, are necessary and hard to avoid. Without them we cannot really know life and what we are dealing with. ... They help us to develop the thick skin we need and to dominate ‘countertransference’, which is after all a permanent problem for us; they teach us to displace our own affects to best advantage. They are a ‘blessing in disguise’“ (Freud, 1909, p. 230-231). The first officially published introduction of the concept is in 1910, in “The Future Prospects Of Psychoanalytic Therapy” , where Freud said of the analyst: “We have become aware of the ‘counter-transference’, which arises in him as a result of the patient’s influence on his unconscious feelings, and we are almost inclined to insist that he shall recognize this counter-transference in himself and overcome it … No psychoanalyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resistances permit” (1910, p. 144-145). It is worth noting that the German term ‘Gegenübertragung’ used by Freud in this statement was first translated into Spanish by López-Ballesteros (1923) as ‘transferencia reciproca’, or ‘reciprocal transference’. Two years later, in “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis” , Freud (1912 ) advocated for training analysis to recognize, address and overcome such counter- transference, in preparation for working analytically with patients. Still later, he added: “we ought not to give up the neutrality towards the patient, which we have acquired through keeping the counter-transference in check” (Freud 1915, p. 164). Freud considered the analyst’s mind as an ‘instrument’, its successful functioning being hindered by countertransference, by the limitations imposed on the analytic work by the analyst’s unresolved conflicts and his blind spots . Thus, countertransference was regarded as an impediment to the analyst’s freedom and capacity to understand the patient. Countertransference should first be noticed, and then overcome. Yet throughout, in enigmatic hints of contradiction or conflict, true to his self- subversive theoretical endeavor which anticipates and models a multiplicity of conceptualizations (Reisner, 2001), in many of his letters and re-evaluations of his theoretical thinking, Freud also noted that his pupils had learned to bear a part of the self-awareness and self-knowledge. The deepening of our knowledge of countertransference accords with this principle. In this context, it is noteworthy that the first dream reported in the text that inaugurated psychoanalysis, “The Interpretation of Dreams” (Freud, 1900), is the ‘Irma Injection dream” of 1895, a countertransference dream par excellence. Historical reconstructions of Freud’s life during his self-analysis in the years of 1895- 1899, coinciding with his writing of “The Interpretation of Dreams”, by Harold Blum (2008) and Carlo Bonomi (2015), reveal the complexity of Freud’s transference to Fliess, as well as
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