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his countertransference to their mutual patient Emma Eckstein (‘Irma’ in the dream, and later the first female psychoanalytic therapist). Blum and Bonomi demonstrate how this countertransference shaped Freud’s theoretical development (among other matters from bisexuality to heteronormativity, from seduction trauma theory to the psychoanalytic conceptualizations of psychosexual development, unconscious fantasy and intrapsychic conflict). In this context, the concept of countertransference exemplifies and illustrates the constant interaction of theory and practice, of clinical work and conceptualization, from the ‘birth of psychoanalysis’ throughout its further evolution. Freud introduced the concept, but did not take the step of explicitly elaborating countertransference as a useful tool in analytic work – a step that he did take with transference. Freud’s explicit early view has come to be called the ‘narrow’ perspective on countertransference, and many of his early followers subscribed to this ‘narrow’ perspective, as evidenced in the early psychoanalytic textbooks, presentations and journal publications (Stern, 1917; Eisler, 1920; Stoltenhoff, 1926; Fenichel, 1927, 1933; Hann-Kende, 1936). The narrow perspective often used a hyphenated ‘counter-transference’ wording in English, stressing the unconscious (transferential) response of the analyst to the patient’s transference. An interesting specification coming out of this perspective was made by Helene Deutsch (1926) who introduced the idea of a counter-transference as a ‘ complementary position’ , which was later elaborated on within Heinrich Racker’s original contribution. In looking at the fate of this narrow definition, one can see its persistence among others in the works of the standard bearers of Freudian technique, such as Annie Reich (Reich, 1951), but also, from a somewhat different perspective, Jacques Lacan (1966/1977). While Reich underscores ‘counter-transference’ as the analyst’s transferential obstacle to psychoanalytic empathy , Lacan, in spite of his conceptual recasting and broadening of the impact of the analyst’s knowledge and ‘power’ within the asymmetrical relationship between the analyst and the patient, regards countertransference solely as the repository of mistakes, misconceptions, neuroses and gaps in the analyst’s overall functioning, and as having no use in the interpretive work (Lacan 1966/ 1977). The Lacanian concept of countertransference as the need to include the precession of the analyst’s desire over the patient’s in understanding the entire intersubjective dynamic of the situation – echoed by his famous statement that ‘resistance’ in analysis is first and foremost the resistance of the analyst – still resonates today, especially with the French intersubjective orientation in Europe and North America (Furlong, 2014). However, Freud made some remarks that may be seen as envisioning the view of countertransference as a therapeutic tool through which the analyst could see or sense something of the patient´s unconscious. He wrote that the “analyst must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver converts back into sound-waves the electric oscillations, … so the doctor’s unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconscious which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient’s free associations” (1912, p. 115-116). Furthermore, while elaborating his views on unconscious processes, Freud (1915) directed special attention not only to the patient’s unconscious dynamics but also explicitly to those of the analyst in the analytic situation. He was clear about the fact that the conscious and
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