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multiple ways. Acknowledged as uncommonly creative and continuously influential, especially in regard to analytic work with traumatized patients (Papiasvili 2014), Ferenczi’s presentation of his views on countertransference and his practice of the elastic technique were, however, considered controversial and somewhat excessive from the beginning, as sympathetically yet rigorously reviewed by Balint (1966). The more radical parts of this perspective surfaced later in the North American analyst Harold Searles (1959, 1979), who urged that even erotic countertransference [the analyst developing a sexual interest in an analysand] could induce powerful psychic change in patients. The consideration of countertransference as a valuable therapeutic tool becomes explicit with Heimann in 1950. Starting from an emphasis on the analyst’s feelings towards the patient, Heimann’s basic assumption regarding countertransference was “that the analyst’s unconscious understands that of his patient. This rapport on the deep level comes to the surface in the form of feelings that the analyst notices in response to his patient, in his ‘countertransference’“ (Heimann 1950, p. 82). The analyst must use his/her emotional response to the patient—the countertransference—as a key to the understanding of hidden meanings; he or she has to be able to “sustain the feelings which are stirred up… as opposed to discharging them (as does the patient), in order to subordinate them to the analytic task” (1950, p. 81-82). Thus, the analyst’s countertransference is, according to Heimann, an instrument of investigation into the patient’s unconscious , one of the most important tools for the analytic work: the condition of its analytic use is, however, that it is recognized as such, and not lived out. Heimann’s (1960, 1982) formulations came to dominate and inform writing about countertransference in a wide range of psychoanalytic cultures. This is what came to be called the ‘two-person view’ of countertransference , which stands for a recognition that countertransference is in part a creation of the interaction between analyst and analysand, in addition to a transferring from the analyst onto the analysand of residues of earlier unconscious states. In this broader perspective, the term ‘countertransference’ refers to all the feelings, fantasies and experiences of all kinds that a therapist has about a patient, not just those derived from his or her own unconscious drives and anxieties, internal objects, and past relationships. This broadened perspective on countertransference was advanced simultaneously by other prominent thinkers such as Donald Winnicott (1949) in England and Heinrich Racker in Argentina (1948, 1953, 1957, 1968). These parallel developments in England and Latin America were noted by Horacio Etchegoyen (1986), who stressed that Heimann’s and Racker’s work proceeded independently from each other, with marked similarities as well as differences. In England, Heimann’s newly outlined perspective on countertransference sounded off against a background of controversial debates surrounding the introduction of the concept ‘projective identification’ by the Kleinian school (Klein 1946, Meltzer 1973). Although the term ‘projective identification’ had been used earlier by Edoardo Weiss (1925) and Marjorie Brierley (1944), it is Melanie Klein who is usually credited with formulating the concept, and with the corresponding omnipotent phantasy of intrusion into an object. Although Klein herself was apparently not interested in the use of countertransference clinically (Spillius, 1994), her concept of projective identification is closely linked to the concept of countertransference in
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