Concept
Countertransference
The analyst's emotional responses to the patient, including those evoked by the transference.
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- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 8
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1910 Names the analyst’s countertransference and asks analysts to recognise and overcome it.
derives from
- Transference 1910
developed by
- Heinrich Racker 1948 From his 1948 papers to the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association onward, Racker treated countertransference as a technical instrument for understanding the patient as well as a danger. In 1957 he argued for taking it as the totality of the analyst's psychological response, within which concordant and complementary identifications are distinguished. He reached this independently of Paula Heimann, who was working along similar lines.
- Donald Winnicott 1949 Argues that the analyst, especially with psychotic and antisocial patients, must acknowledge his own hate, sort out what is objective in it from personal residues, and keep it available for the work.
- Otto F. Kernberg 1965 Kernberg argued for a broad, "totalistic" view of countertransference as the analyst's whole emotional response to the patient, rather than only the analyst's own unresolved conflicts, and held it to be especially telling with borderline and other severely disturbed patients.