Person
Heinrich Racker
Psychoanalyst born in Galicia and raised in Vienna, where he trained before fleeing Nazism to Buenos Aires in 1939; there he became a leading training analyst of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. He made countertransference a central instrument of technique, understanding it as the whole of the analyst's psychological response to the patient, and distinguished concordant from complementary identifications in the analyst. His papers were collected in Estudios sobre técnica psicoanalítica (1960), published in English as Transference and Countertransference (1968).
Ideas
- 1948 introduced Countertransference neurosis
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.
- 1948 developed Countertransference
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.
- 1957 introduced Concordant identification
Racker named the analyst's identification of each part of his personality with the corresponding part of the patient's (ego with ego, id with id, superego with superego) 'concordant' or 'homologous' identification. He did so in 'The Meanings and Uses of Countertransference', read to the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association in 1953 and published in 1957.
- 1957 introduced Complementary identification
Racker named the analyst's identification with the patient's internal objects 'complementary identification', adapting an expression of Helene Deutsch's. The analyst comes to feel treated as the object the patient projects onto him. He did so in 'The Meanings and Uses of Countertransference' (read 1953, published 1957).
Influence
Affinity
- 1957 influenced by Helene Deutsch
Racker took the name of his 'complementary identifications' from Helene Deutsch, who had spoken of a 'complementary position' for the analyst's identifications with the object imagoes.
Lineage
- analysed by Jeanne Lampl-de Groot
Racker's first analysis, begun in Vienna while he trained at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute and broken off when he fled the Nazis.
- analysed by Ángel Garma
In Buenos Aires Racker resumed his analysis, first with Garma, before his later training analysis with Marie Langer.
- analysed by Marie Langer
Langer conducted Racker's later training analysis in Buenos Aires, after his analysis with Garma.
- analysed Horacio Etchegoyen
Etchegoyen was Racker's analysand and later called him one of the most original and creative analysts in the history of the discipline.
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.
- 1960
Transference and Countertransference
Estudios sobre técnica psicoanalítica (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1960) collects Heinrich Racker's studies of psychoanalytic technique, written in Buenos Aires and published shortly before his death in 1961. The English translation, Transference and Countertransference, appeared in 1968 as no. 73 of the International Psycho-Analytical Library, and a Hebrew translation followed in 2010. The chapters move from the history of technique, classical and present, and the theory of transference, to the analysis of transference through the patient's relation to interpretation, and then to the analyst's side of the encounter: the countertransference neurosis, the meanings and uses of countertransference, the analyst's unconscious masochism and mania, and counterresistance in interpretation. Racker treats transference and countertransference as two sides of a single analytic relationship, each sustaining the other, and defines countertransference broadly, as the analyst's whole response to the patient, including the analyst's own transferences. Distinguishing concordant from complementary identification, he argues that the analyst's emotional reactions are not only an obstacle but can be read as information about the patient's inner world, provided the analyst keeps analysing them. The book was widely influential in Latin America and, alongside the work of Paula Heimann, helped make countertransference a central instrument of analytic technique.
References
- A Contribution to the Problem of Counter-Transference1953Evidence for a relation
- The Meanings and Uses of Countertransference1957Evidence for a relation