Concept
Countertransference neurosis
Racker's term for the neurotic part of the analyst's response to the patient, the counterpart of the patient's transference neurosis: Oedipal and pre-Oedipal, paranoid, depressive and manic conflicts revived in the analyst by the analytic relationship, with unreal anxieties and pathological defences that can distort understanding, interpretation and conduct. Racker first set it out to the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association in 1948, and held that even such reactions, once recognised, can serve as tools for understanding the patient.
Development
1948
introduced by Heinrich Racker
Racker's 1948 paper to the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, 'La neurosis de contratransferencia', published in English in 1953 as 'A Contribution to the Problem of Counter-Transference', traced how the analyst's infantile conflicts persist in a countertransference neurosis. When he returned to the term in 1957 he cited Margaret Little's 1951 paper beside his own.
In A Contribution to the Problem of Counter-Transference (1953);The Meanings and Uses of Countertransference (1957)
Relations
- 1948 introduced by Heinrich Racker
Racker's 1948 paper to the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, 'La neurosis de contratransferencia', published in English in 1953 as 'A Contribution to the Problem of Counter-Transference', traced how the analyst's infantile conflicts persist in a countertransference neurosis. When he returned to the term in 1957 he cited Margaret Little's 1951 paper beside his own.
Works
- 1953
A Contribution to the Problem of Counter-Transference
Racker’s paper, first read in Spanish to the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association in 1948 and published in English in 1953, argues that the analyst’s countertransference deserves the same systematic study as the patient’s transference. The analyst is at once the interpreter of the patient’s unconscious processes and an object of them, and since analysis never leaves the analyst wholly free of neurosis, their whole personality, healthy and neurotic, enters the analytic situation. Racker calls the pathological part of this response the “countertransference neurosis” and, as with any neurosis, traces it to the Oedipus complex: in its positive form, erotic attachment to the female patient as mother, a wish to keep her bound, and rivalry with her partner; in its negative form, a wish to be loved by the male patient, satisfied by his compliance and turned to hatred by his resistance. Drawing on vignettes, mostly from candidates, he shows how the analyst’s dependence on internal objects, re-projected onto supervisors, the analytic group or the patient, turns therapeutic and scientific success into a matter of castration anxiety and guilt, against which the analyst mobilises paranoid, depressive and manic defences, such as blaming the patient. He attributes the scant literature on the subject to analysts’ own resistance and asks that countertransference be investigated with every means psychoanalysis has.
See also
People
References
- A Contribution to the Problem of Counter-Transference1953Evidence for a relation
- The Meanings and Uses of Countertransference1957Evidence for a relation