Book
Transference and Countertransference
Estudios sobre técnica psicoanalítica
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.
Main ideas
- Transference and countertransference form a single unity: each sustains the other, and together they make up the analytic relationship.
- Countertransference is defined broadly, as the analyst's whole response to the patient's transferences together with the analyst's own transferences onto the patient.
- In concordant identification the analyst identifies with the corresponding parts of the patient's personality, ego with ego, superego with superego, id with id; in complementary identification the analyst identifies with the patient's internal objects.
- The analyst is not free of neurosis: a countertransference neurosis arises in answer to the patient's transference neurosis and, once examined, becomes a means of understanding the patient.
- Countertransference has three meanings: a danger to the analysis, an instrument for understanding and interpretation, and a reliving that is at the same time a new piece of life.
- The analyst's own resistances, the counterresistances, distort understanding and weaken interpretation; the remedy is the analyst's continuous self-analysis throughout the treatment.
- Unconscious masochism and unconscious mania in the analyst shape technique, and each is examined as a distinct way the analyst's work can be distorted.
- Transference can be analysed through the way the patient receives and treats the analyst's interpretations.
- Positive countertransference, the analyst's love for the patient, is a force for understanding and a condition of a productive analysis.
Gallery
Cover of העברה והעברה נגדית (Transference and Countertransference), the Hebrew translation of Heinrich Racker's book by Dana Rufin (Tel Aviv: Tola'at Sefarim, 2010)