The analyst’s countertransference reaction made clear to the analyst which of all these interpretations was most strongly indicated, for the countertransference reaction is the living response to the transference situation at that moment. The analyst feels (in accordance with the law of talion) a little anxious and angry at the aggression he has suffered from the patient, and we may suppose that the patient in his unconscious fantasy senses this annoyance in the internal object toward which his protesting behaviour is directed, and that his reacts to this annoyance with anxiety, since it because if this ‘disconnection’ that the analysand perceive no danger and felt no anxiety. By the patient’s projection of that internal object the analyst is to the patient a tyrant who demands complete submission and forbids protest. The transgression of this prohibition (the patient’s protest expressed to his friend, the physician) must seem to the analyst- in the patient’s fantasy - being of unfaithfulness, and must be responded to b y the analyst with anger and emotional abandonment; we deduce this from the countertransference experience. In order to reconcile the analyst and to win him back, the patient accepts his anger or punishment and suffers from stomach-ache - this he tells in his associations bu t without connecting the two experiences. His depression today is to be explained by his increasing ‘disconnection’.
The analyst explains, in his interpretation, the meaning of the ‘disconnection’. In reply the patient says that the previous day he recalled his conversation with the physician and that it did indeed cause him anxiety. After a brief pause he adds: ‘And just now the thought came to m e . . . and what am I to do with that? The analyst perceived that these words, once, again, slightly annoy him. We can understand why. The patient’s first reaction to the interpretation (he reacted by recalling his anxiety over his protest ), brought the analyst nearer to satisfying his desire to remove the patient’s detachments. The patient’s recollection of his anxiety was at least one forward step, for he thus admitted a connection that he usually denies or represses. But his next words frustrated the analyst once again, for they signified, ‘that is of no use to me, nothing has changed’. Once, again, the countertransference reaction pointed out to the analyst the occurrence of a critical moment in the transference interpretation, and that the opportunity to interpret. At this moment also, in the patient’s unconscious fantasy, must have occurred a reaction of anger from th e internal object - just as actually happened in the analyst - to which th e interpretation must be aimed. The patient’s anxiety must have arisen from just this fantasy. His anxiety - and with it his detachment - could be diminished only by replacing the fantasied anger by an understanding of the patient’s need to define himself through that denial (‘well . . . what am I to do with that?’ In reality the analyst, besides feeling annoyed, understood that the patient had to protest rebel, close himself up and ‘disconnect’ himself once again, deny and prevent any influence, because the patient would be indebted to him. The interpretation increases this danger, for the patient felt it to be true, because of the analyst’s tyranny - his dominating, exploiting, sadistic character - this dependence had to be prevented.
The analyst by awareness of his countertransference understood the patient’s anxiety and interpreted it to him, as his associations showed that this interpretation had also been accurate.
The patient says shortly afterward that his depression has passed off, and this admission is a sign of progress because the patient is admitting that there is something good about the analysis. The next association , moreover, permits a more profound analysis if his transference neurosis, for the patient now reveals a deeper stratum. His underlying dependence becomes clear. Hitherto the interpretation has been confined to the guilt feeling and anxiety that accompanied his defences (rebellion, denial, and others) against this very dependence. the associations refer to the fact that a mutual friend of the patient and of the analyst told him a few days before that the analyst was going on holiday that night and that this session would therefore be his last. In this way the patient admits the emotional importance the analyst possesses for him, a thing he always used to deny. We understand now also that his protest against analysis has been determined beforehand by the imminent danger of being forsaken by his analyst. When, just before the end of the session, the analyst explains that the information the friend gave him is false, the patient expresses anger with his friend and recalls how the friend has been trying lately to make him jealous of the analyst. Thus does the patient admits his jealousy of the analyst, although he displaces his anger onto the friend who roused his anxiety.
‘What has happened? And how is it to be explained’
The analyst’s expected journey represented, in the unconscious of the patient, abandonment by internal objects necessary to him. This danger was countered by an identification with the aggressor, the threat of aggression (abandonment by the analyst). Was a countered by aggression (the patient’s protest against analysis). His own aggression caused the patient to fear counteraggression or abandonment by the analyst. This anxiety remained unconscious but the analyst was able to deduce it from the counteraggression he perceived in his countertransference. If he had not interpreted the patient’s transference situation, or if in his interpretation he had included any criticism of the patient’s insistent and continuous rejection of the analyst or of his obstinate denial or of his bond with the analyst, the patient would have remained in the vicious circle between his basis fear of abandonment and his defensive identification with the persecutor (with the object that abandons); He would have continued in the vicious circle of his neurosis. But the interpretation, which showed him the a analyst’s understanding of his conduct and of the underlying anxiety, changed (at least, for that moment) the image of the analyst as persecutor. Hence the patient could give up his defensive identification with this image and could admit his dependence (the underlying stratum) his need for the analyst. and his jealousy.
And now, once, again, in his new situation countertransference will show the content and origin of the anxiety that swiftly drives the analysand back to repetition of the defence mechanism he has just abandoned (which may be identification with the persecutor, emotional blocking, or something else). And once again, interpretation of this new danger is the only means of breaking the vicious circle. If we take to consider the nature of the relationship that existed for months before the emotional surrender that occurred in this session. If we consider the paranoid situation that existed in the transference and countertransference (expressed in the patient by his intense characterlogical resistance and in the analyst by his annoyance) - if we take to consider all this background to the session just described, we understand that the analyst enjoys, in the patient’s surrender, a manic triumph, to be followed, of course, by depressive and paranoid anxieties, compassion toward the patient, desires for reparation, and other sequelae. It is just these guilt feelings caused in the analyst by his manic feelings that may lead to his failure adequately to interpret the situation. The danger the patient fears is that he will become a helpless victim of the object’s (the analyst’s) the sadism - of that same sadism the analyst senses in his ’manic’ satisfaction over dominating and defeating the bad object with which the patent was defensively identified. The perception of this ’manic’ countertransference reaction indicate’s what the present transference situation is and what should be interpreted.
If there were nothing else in the analyst’s psychological situation but this manic reaction, the patient would have no alterative but to have to make use of the same old defence mechanisms that essentially constitute his neurosis. In more general terms, we should have to admit that the negative therapeutic reaction is an adequate transference reaction in the patient to an imagine or real negative countertransference in the analyst. Even so, where such a negative countertransference really exists, it is a part only of the analyst’s psychological response. For the law of talion is not the sole determinant of the reservoir of continuities which of measures the continuative placement for unconsciousness, and, moreover, consciousness also is a contributive part in the phenomenons of discovery and rediscovery, such that the analyst’s psychological responses, as to the opening vault of consciousness, there is, of course, the tendency to repair, which may create a disposition to ‘return good for evil’. This tendency to repair is in reality a wish to remedy, albeit upon a displaced object, whatever evil one may have thought or done. and as to the conscious, there is, first , the fact that the analyst’s own analysis has made his ego stronger that it was before so that the intensities of his anxieties and his further countertransference reactions are usually demolished, second , the analyst has some capacity to observe this countertransference, to ‘get out of it’, to stand outside and regard it objectively, and third, the analyst‘s knowledge of psychology also act with and upon his psychological response . The knowledge, for instance, that behind the analyst to respond within and upon the negative transference and the resistance lies simply thwarted love, helps the analyst to respond with love to this possibility of loving, to this nucleus in the patient however d
deeply it is buried beneath hate and fear.
Nonetheless, the analyst should avoid , as far as possible, making interpretations in terms that coincide with those of the moral superego. This danger is increased by the unconscious identification of the analyst with the patient’s internal objects and, in particular, with his superego. The patient in a conversation with his friend, as an example, criticized the conduct of analysts, such that he was to assertively assume the role of superego toward an internal object that he projected upon the analyst. The analyst identified himself with this projected object and reacted with unconscious anxiety and with annoyance to th accusation. He inwardly reproached the patient for his conduct and there was danger that something of this reproach (in which the analyst, in his turn identified himself with the conduct of the patient as superego) might filter into his interpretation, which would then perpetuate the patient’s neurotic vicious circle. but the problem is wider than this. Certain psychoanalytic terminology is likely to re-enforce the patient’s confusion of the analyst with the superego. For instance, narcissism, passivity, and bribery of the superego are terms we should not use literally or in paraphrase in treatment without careful reflection, just because they increase the danger that the patient will confuse the imago of the analyst with that of his superego. For greater clarity two situations may be differentiated theoretically. In one, only the patient experiences these two terms as criticism, because of his conflict between ego and superego, and the analyst is free of this critical feeling. In the other, the analyst, also regards certain character traits with moral intolerance; he feels censorious, as if he were a superego. Something of this attitude probably will always exist, for the analyst identifies himself with the object’s that the patient ‘mistreats’ (by his ‘narcissism, or ‘passivity’, or ‘bribery of the superego’). Even so, in that the analyst had totally solved his own struggles against these same tendencies and hence remained free from countertransference conflict with the corresponding tendencies in the patient, it would be preferable to point out to the patient the several conflicts between his tendencies and his superego, and not run the risk of making it more difficult for the patient to differentiate between the judgment of his own superego and the analyst’s comprehension of these same tendencies through the use of a terminology that precisely lends itself to confusing these two positions.
One might object that this confusion between the analyst and the superego neither can nor should be avoided, since it represents an essential part of the analysis of transference (if the externalization of interiorized situations) and since one cannot attain except through confusion. That is true, this confusion cannot and should not be avoided, but we must remember that the confusion will also have to be resolved and that this will be all the more difficult the more the analyst really identifies in his experience with the analysand’s superego and the more these identifications have influenced negatively his interpretations and conduct.
To what transference situation does the analyst usually react with a particular countertransference, that would enable one, in practice, to deduce the transference situations from the countertransference reactions. Next we might ask, to what imago of conduct of the object - to what imagined or real countertransference situation - does the patient respond with a particular transference? Many aspect s of these problems have been amply studied by psychoanalysis, but the specific problem in the relation of transference and countertransference in analysis has received little attention.
Countertransference anxiety may be described in general and simplified terms as being of depressive or paranoid character. In depressive anxiety the inherent danger consists in having destroyed the analysand and made him ill. This anxiety arise to a grater degree when the analyst faces the danger that the patient may commit suicide, and to a lesser degree when there deterioration or danger of deterioration in the patient’s state of health. But the patient‘s simple failure to improve and his suffering and depression may also provoke depressive anxieties in the analyst . These anxieties usually increase the desire to heal the patient.
In referring to paranoid anxieties it is important to differentiate between ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ countertransference. In direct countertransference the anxieties are caused by danger of an intensification of aggression form the patient himself. In indirect countertransference the anxieties are caused by danger of aggression from third parties onto whom the analyst has made his own chief transferences - for instance, the members of the analytic society for the future of the analyst’s object relationships with the society is in part determined by his professional performance. The feared aggression may take several forms, such as criticism, reproach, hatred, mockery, contempt or bodily assault. In the unconscious it may be the danger of being killed or castrated or otherwise of the patient to which is menaced in an archaic way.
The transference situation of the patient to which the depressive anxieties of the analyst are a response, are, above all, those in which the patient, through an increase in frustration (or danger of frustration) and in the aggression that it evokes, turns the aggression against himself. We are dealing, on one plan e, with situations in which the patient defends himself against a paranoid fear of retaliation by anticipating this danger, by carrying out himself and against himself part of the aggression feared from the object transferred onto the analyst, and threatening to carry it out still further. In this psychological sense it is really the analyst who attacks and destroys the patient; and the analyst’s depressive anxiety corresponds to this psychological reality. In other words, the countertransference depressive anxiety arises, above all, as a response to the patient’s ‘masochistic defence’ - which at the same time represents a revenge (‘masochistic revenge’) - and as a response to the danger of its continuing. On another plane this turning of the aggression against himself is carried out by the patient because of his own depressive anxieties: He turns it against himself in order to protect himself against re-experiencing the destruction of the objects and to protect these from his own aggression.
The paranoid anxiety in ‘direct’ countertransference is a reaction to the danger arising from various aggressive altitudes of the patient himself. The analysis of these aptitudes shows that they are themselves defences against, or reactions to, certain aggressive imagoes, and these reactions are defences are governed by the law of talion or else, analogously to this, by identification with the persecutor. The reproach, contempt, abandonment, bodily assault - all these altitudes of menace or aggression in the patient that give rise to countertransference paranoid anxieties - are responses to (or anticipations of) equivalent altitudes of the transference object.
The paranoid anxieties in ‘indirect’ countertransference are of a more complex nature, since the danger for the analyst originates in the third party. The patient’s transference situations that provoke the aggression of this ‘third party’ against the analyst may be of various sorts. in most cases, we are dealing with transference situations (masochistic or aggressive) similar to those that provoke the ‘direct’ countertransference anxieties previously described.
The common denominator of all the various attitudes of patients that provoke anxiety in the analyst is to be found, such that in the mechanism of ‘identifications with the persecutor’: Th e experience of being liberated from the persecutor and of triumphing over him, implied in this identification suggests our designating this mechanism as a manic one. This mechanism may also exist where the manifest picture in the patient is quite the opposite, namely in certain depressive states; for the manic conduct may be directed either toward a projected object or toward an introjected object, it may be carried out alloplastically or autoplastically. The ‘identification with the persecutor’ may even exist in suicide, inasmuch as this is a ‘mockery’ of the fantasied or real persecutor, by anticipating the intentions of the persecutor and by one’s doing so oneself what they wanted to do, this ’mockery’ is the manic aspect of suicide. The ‘identification with the persecutor’ in the patient is then, a defence against an object felt as sadistic that tends to make the patient the victim of a manic feasts; and this defence is carried out either through the introjection of the persecutor in the ego, turning the analyst into the object of the ‘manic tendencies’, or through the introjection of th e persecutor in the superego, taking the ego as the object of its manic trend.
To illustrate as such, that of an example, is that of an analysand who decides to take a pleasure trip to Europe. He experiences this as a victory over the analyst both because he will free himself from the analyst for two months and because he can afford this trip whereas the analyst cannot, he begins to be anxious least the analyst seeks revenge for the patient’s triumph. The patient anticipates the aggression by him becoming unwell, developing fever and the first symptoms of influenza. The analyst feels slight anxiety because of this illness and fears, recalling certain previous experiences, a deterioration in the state of health of the patient, who still continues to come to the sessions. Up to this point, the situation in the transference and countertransference is as follows: The patient is in a manic relation to the analyst, and he has anxieties of preponderantly paranoid type. the analyst senses some irritation over the abandonment and some envy of the patient’s great wealth (feeling scribed by th e patient in his paranoid anxieties to the analyst); but at the same time the analyst feels satisfaction at the analysand’s real progress, which finds expression in the very fact that the trip is possible and that the patient has decided to make it. The analyst perceives a wish in part of his personality to bind the patient to himself for which is for the patient’s own needs. In having this wish he resembles the patient’s mother, and he as aware that he is reality identified with the domineering and vindictive object with which the patient identifies him Hence the patient’s illness seems, to the analyst’s unconscious, a result of the analyst’s own wish, and the analyst therefore experiences depressive (and paranoid) anxieties.
What object imago leads the patient to this manic situation? It is precisely this same imago of a tyrannical and sadistic mother, to whom the patient’s frustrations constitute a manic feast. It is against these ‘manic tendencies’ in the object that the patient defends himself, first by identification (introjection of the persecutor in the ego, which manifests itself in the manic experiences in his decision to take a trip) and then by using a masochistic defence to escape vengeance.
In brief, the analyst’s depressive (and paranoid) anxiety is his emotional response to the patient’s illness, and the patient ’illness is itself a masochistic defence against the object’s vindictive persecutor. This masochistic defence also contains a manic mechanism that it derides, controls, and dominates the analyst’s aggression. In the stratum underlying this we find the patient in a paranoid situation in face of the vindictive persecution by the analyst - a fantasy that coincides with the analyst’s secret irritation. Beneath this paranoid situation, and causing it, is an inverse situation: The patient is enjoying a manic triumph (his liberation from the analyst by going on a trip), but the analyst is in a paranoid situation (he is in danger of being defeated and abandoned). And, finally, beneath this we find a situation in which the patient is subjected an object imago that wants to make of him the victim of its aggressive tendencies, but this time not in order to take revenge for intentions or attitude in the patient, but merely to satisfy its own sadism - an imago that originates directly from the original sufferings of the subject.
Said in this way, that the analyst was able to deduce from each of his countertransference sensations a certain transference situation, the analyst’s fear of deterioration in the patient’s healthy enabled him to perceive the patient’s need to satisfy the avenger and to control and restrain him, partially inverting (through the illness) the roles of victimizer and victim, thus alleviating his guilt feeling and causing the analyst to feel some of the guilt. The analyst’s irritation over the patient‘s trip enable him to see the patient’s need to free himself from a dominating and sadistic object, to see the patient’s guilt feelings caused by these tendencies, and also to see his fear of the analyst’s revenge. By his feeling of triumph the analyst was able to detect the anxiety and depression caused in the patient by his dependence upon this frustrating, yet indispensable, object. And each of these transference situations indicated to the analyst the patient‘s object imagoes - the fantasied or real countertransference situation that determined the transference situation.
Countertransference aggression usually arises in the face of frustration (or danger of frustration) of desire that may superficially be differentiated into ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’. Both direct and indirect desires are principally wishes to get libido or affection. The patient is the chief object of direct desires in the analyst, who wishes to be accepted and loved by him. The object of the indirect desires of the analyst may be, for example, other analysts from whom he wishes to get recognition or admiration through his successful work with his patients, using the latter as means to this end. This aim to get love has, in general terms, two origins: An instinctual origin (the primitive need of union with the object) and an origin of a defensive nature (the need of neutralizing, overcoming, or denying the rejections and other dangers originating from the internal objects, in particular from the superego). The frustrations may be differentiated, descriptively, into those of active type and those of passive type. Among the active frustrations is direct aggression by the patient, his mockery, deceit, and active rejection. To the analyst, active frustration means exposure to a predominantly ‘bad’ object, the patient ma y become, for example, the analyst’s superego, which says to him, ‘you are bad’. Examples of frustration of passive type are passive rejection, withdrawal, partial abandonment, and other defences against the bond with and dependence on the analyst. These signify frustrations of the analyst’s need of union with the object.
Being able to deduce and establish in what it is that brings on nor upon the patient to behave in this way, to frustrate the analyst, to withdraw from him, to attack him, and the such, that if we know this we would know what we have to interpret when countertransference aggression arises in us, being able to deduce from countertransference the transference situation and its cause. This cause is a fantasied countertransference situation or, precisely, some actual or feared bad conduct from the projected object. Experience shows that, in somewhat general terms, this bad or threatening conduct of the object is usually an equivalent of the conduct of the patient (to which th e analyst has reacted internally with aggression). We also understand why this is so: The patients conduct springs from that most primitive of reactions, the talion reaction, or from the defence by means of identification with the persecutor or aggressor.
In an appearing summation we are found that the countertransference reactions of aggression (or of its equivalent) occur in response to transference situations in which the patient frustrates certain desires of the analyst’s. These frustrations are equivalent to abandonment or aggression, which the patient carries out or with which he threatens the analyst, and they place the analyst, at first, in a depressive or paranoid situation. The patients defence s in one aspect equivalent to a manic situation, for he is freeing himself from a persecutor. Also, this transference situation is the defence against certain object imagoes. There may be an object that persecutors the subject sadistically, vindictively, or morally, or an object that the patient defends from his own destructiveness by an attack against his own ego: In these, the patient attacks - as Freud and Abraham have shown in the analysis of melancholia and suicide - at the same time the internal object and he external object (the analysis). It is to consider that the analyst who is placed by the alloplastic or autoplastic attacks of the patient on a paranoid or depressive situation sometimes defends himself against these attacks by using the same identification with the aggressor or persecutor as the patient used. Then the analyst virtually becomes the persecutor, and too this, the patient (insofar as he presupposes such a reaction from his internal and projected object) responds with anxiety. This anxiety and its origin is nearest to consciousness, and is therefore the first thing to interpret.
3. Countertransference guilt feelings are an important source of countertransference anxiety; the analyst fears his ‘moral conscience’. Thus, for instance, a serious deterioration in the condition of the patient may cause the analyst to suffer reproach by his own superego, and also cause him to fear punishment. When such guilt feelings occur, the superego of the analyst is usually projected upon the patient or upon a third person, the analyst being the guilty ego. The accuser is the one who is attacked, the victim of the analyst. The analyst in the accused, he is charged with being the victimizer. It is therefore the analyst who must suffer anxiety over his object, and dependence upon it.
As on other countertransference situations, the analyst’s guilt feeling may have either real causes or fantasied causes, or a mixture of the two. A real cause exists in the analyst who has neurotic negative feelings that exercise some influence over his behaviour, leading him, for example, to interpret with aggressiveness or to behave in a submissive, seductive, or unnecessarily frustrating way. But guilt feelings may arise in the analyst over, for instance, intense submissiveness in the patient even though the analyst had not driven the patient into such conduct by his procedure. Or he may feel guilty when the analysand becomes depressed or ill, although his therapeutic procedure was right and proper according to his own conscience. In such cases, the countertransference guilt feelings are evoked not by what procedure he has actually used but by his awareness of what he might have done in view of his latent disposition. In other words, the analyst identifies himself in fantasy with a bad internal object of the patient’s and he feels guilty for what he has provoked in this role - illness, depression, masochism, suffering, failure. the imago of the patient then becomes fused with the analyst’s internal objects, which the analyst had, in the past, wanted (and perhaps managed) to frustrate, make suffer, dominate, or destroy. Now he wishes to repair them. When this reparation fails, he reacts as if he had hurt them. The true causes of the guilt feelings is the neurotic, predominantly sado-masochistic tendencies that may reappear in countertransference; the analyst therefore quite rightly entertains certain doubts and uncertainties about his ability to control them completely and to keep them entirely removed from his procedure.
The transference situation to which the analyst is likely to react with guilt feelings is then, in the first place, a masochistic trend in the patient, which may be either of a ‘defensive’ (secondary of a ‘basic’ (primary) nature. If it is defensive we know it to be a rejection of sadism by means of its turning against the ego; the principal objective imago that imposes this masochistic defence is a retaliatory imago. If it is basic (‘primary masochistic) the object imago is ‘simply’ sadistic, a reflex of the pains (‘frustrations’) originally suffered by the patient. The analyst’s guilt feeling refer to his own sadistic tendencies. He may feel as if he himself had provoked the patient’s masochistic tendencies. The patient is subjugated by a ‘bad’ object it seems as if the analyst had satisfied his aggressiveness, now the analyst is exposed in his turn to the accusation of his superego. In short, the superficial situation is that the patient is now the superego, and the analyst the ego who must suffer the accusation; the analyst is in a depressive-paranoid situation, whereas the patient’s id, from one point of view, in a ‘manic situation’ (Showing, for example, ‘manic for reproaching’), but in a deeper plane the situation is the reverse; the analyst is in manic’ situation (acting as a vindictive, dominating, or ‘simply’ sadistic imago). And the patient is in a depressive-paranoid situation.
4. Besides the anxiety, hatred, and guilt feelings in countertransference, there are a number if other countertransference situations that may also be decisive points in the course of analytic treatment, both because they may influence the analyst’s work and because the analysis of the transference situations that provoke such countertransference situations may represent tbs central problem of treatment, clarification of which may be indispensable if the analyst is to exert and therapeutic influence upon the patient.
Very briefly, as one of two situations is that the countertransference boredom or somnolence, which, of course assumes great importance only when it occurs often. Boredom and somnolence are usually unconscious talion responses in the analysts to a withdrawal or affective abandonment by the patient. This withdrawal has diverse origins and natures; but it has specific characteristics, for not every kind of withdrawal by the patient produces boredom in the analyst. One of these characteristics seems to be that the patient withdraws without going away, he takes his emotional departure from the analyst while yet remaining with him; there is as a rule no danger of the patient’s taking flight. This partial withdrawal with abandonment expresses itself superficially in intellectualization (emotional blocking), in increase control, sometimes in monotony in the way of speaking, or in similar devices. The analyst has at these times the sensation of being excluded and of being impotent to guide the course of the sessions. It seems that the analysand tries in this way to avoid a latent and dreaded dependence upon the analyst. This dependence is at the surface, his dependence upon his moral superego, and at a deeper level it is dependence upon other internal objects that are in part persecutors and in part the persecuted. These objects must not be projected upon the analyst; the latent and internal relations with them must not be made present and externalized. This danger is avoided through various mechanisms, ranging from ‘conscious’ control and selection of the patient’s communications to depersonalization, and from emotional blocking to total repression of any transference relation; it is this rejection of such dangers and the avoidance and mastery of anxiety by means of these mechanisms that lead to the withdrawal to which the analyst may react with boredom or somnolence.
Countertransference anxiety and guilt feelings also frequently cause a tendency to countertransference submissiveness, which is important from two points of view, both for its possible influence upon the analyst’s understanding, behaviour and technique and what may it may teach us about transference situations, by prompt ‘reduction’ of the transference of infantile situations, for example, o r by rapid reconstruction of the ‘good;, ‘real’ imago of the analyst. The analyst who feels subjugated by the patient feels angry, and the patient, intuitively perceiving this anger is afraid of his revenge. the transference situation that leads the patient to dominate and subjugate the analyst by a hidden or manifest threat seems analogous t o the transference situation that leads the analyst to feel anxious and guilty. The various ways in which the analyst reacts to his anxieties - in one case with an attitude of submission, in another case with inner recrimination - is also related to the transference attitude of the patient. Apparently, to indicate that the greater the disposition to real aggressive action in the analysand, the more the analyst tends to submission.
On the one hand, on must critically examine the ‘deductions’ one makes from perception of one’s own countertransference, for example, the fact that the analyst feels angry does not simply mean (as is sometimes said) that the patient wishes to make him angry. It may mean rather that the patient has a transference feeling of guilt, in that concerning countertransference aggression is significantly relevant. Whatever the analyst experiences emotionally, his reactions always bear some relation to processes in the patient. Even the must neurotic countertransference ideas arise only in response to certain patients and to certain situations of these patients, and they can, in consequence, indicate something about the patients and the their situations.
None the less it seems questionable about whether the analyst should or should not ‘communicate’ or ‘interpret’ aspects of his countertransference to the analyst - as it cannot be considered fully - much depends, of course, upon what when, how, to whom, for what purpose, and in what condition the analyst speaks out his countertransference. It is probable that the purpose sought by communicating the countertransference might often (but not always) be better attained by other means. The principal of other means is analysis of the patient’s fantasies about the analyst’s countertransference (and of the related transference) sufficient to show the patient the truth (the reality of the transference of his inner and outer objects); and with this must also be analyzed to the doubts, negations, and other defences against the truth, intuitively perceived, until they have been overcome. but there are also situations in which communication of the countertransference is of value for the subsequent course of the treatment. Without doubt, this aspect of the use of countertransference is of great interest, we need an extensive and detailed study of the inherent problems of communication of countertransference.
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