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.