Transference and Countertheories, From a Moral Standpoint

Abstract

Although Alfred Adler is known as one of the first relationalists, he pays scant attention to the therapeutic relationship per se. The landscape changes with Ferenczi, O. Rank and H. Racker, and as interpersonalists and relationalists of neo-Freudian and object relations schools explicitly take up the questions of love and hate in the analytic setting. For Jung and Lacan, it is not only acknowledged but methodologically key that desire play itself out in the clinical space as it does everywhere else, but particularly here, given the paradoxical combination of intimacy and inhibition that characterizes this dyadic situation. It has by now become commonplace in the literature to acknowledge erotic (or anti-erotic) feelings, one-sidedly or mutually, and take these as normal and as contributive to the therapeutic process. Yet what does it mean that relationship “feelings” can be utilized therapeutically? And how is it that asymmetry - imbalance of power and knowledge - can be construed as therapeutic in a clinical context, but unhealthy in “real” relationships? This essay begins with an overview of friendship in general, best articulated by Aristotle; and then broadly surveys the normative implications of the instrumentalization of relationships and feelings in clinical work. Such considerations may either confound or greatly enrich our conception of practical reason.