Countertransference and the analytic instrument.

Abstract

Morris Eagle (2000) argued against recent trends that equate countertransference with anything and everything an analyst thinks and feels about a patient. He argued against the idea that countertransference is always a reliable window on the unconscious life of the patient. And he argued against a concept of projective identification in which a patient is presumed able to (quite literally) take something out of her/himself and put it into the analyst instead. He suggested that it would be useful to make a clear separation between: A) the kind of countertransference (the “classical” view) that impedes analytic work; and, B) the constructive use of the analyst’s internalized representations of the patient (“trial” identifications) that build empathic resonance and thus serve the positive interests of the analysis. If we don’t call this a form of countertransference, what should we call it? Eagle does not say. Calling it “the analytic instrument” seems to me a good way to characterize it. That term differentiates the concept from the conscious intellectual work done by the analyst, and it has utility as a descriptive kind of shorthand for an aggregation of complex phenomena. Eagle gave us an important introductory statement in his paper, and I intend to address some of those issues in greater dynamic detail and, then, to expand upon them. There will be no review of the literature on either countertransference or enactment here because many very excellent and thorough reviews are quite readily available. After a discussion of the evolution of the concept of countertransference, an evolution complicated by the different and sometimes contradictory meanings Freud gave to the concept, I will amplify Eagle’s position by spelling out in a clinically precise way some of the differences between: A) compromised behavior of the analyst that damages the integrity of the transference neurosis; B) compromised behavior of the analyst that has little or no effect on the organization of the transference neurosis; and, C) why making that distinction matters. Using that as a jumping off point I will then, in a formal way, introduce and elaborate the concept of “the analytic instrument” (not to be confused with Isakower’s concept of the analyzing instrument, which I will discuss later). I will describe (in considerable dynamic detail) some of the ways that an analyst uses both conflicted as well as unconflicted aspects of his/her inner life in order to: A) build an intensely vital internal representation of the patient; and, B) identify aspects of the transference that have not yet been consciously recognized by either analyst or patient. In this view problematic internal states of the analyst do not necessarily lead to analytically destructive acting out and, although this seems paradoxical at first glance, they can