Transference-countertransference Matrix Research Articles

Ethics, Ethos, and Dualities: Self and Culture, Talking in Tongues

Ethical considerations are experienced as a softly murmuring subtext in the analytic situation. The question of ethics and ethos opens the question of self and culture. Living ethically involves awareness of cultural norms as well as personal judgment, and therefore implies a permeable boundary between self and world. Right and wrong, self and society are de facto dualities, rigid splits or means of balance, perpetual conflict or reconciliation. Western culture has been shaped by the duality of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. In this dualistic tension, is there potential for balance between intoxication and logic in contemporary psychoanalysis? Do psychoanalysts share a common ethic? How do we reconcile the Apollonian ethic of honesty (M. Guy Thompson, The Ethic of Honesty, Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York: 2004) with the Dionysian ethic of the creative use of the self in the transference–countertransference matrix? Using clinical examples and the spiritual and ethical considerations of writers such as Rumi, Martin Buber, and Dostoevsky, psychoanalytic thinkers such as Joyce McDougall, and traditional sources such as Zen Buddhism and the Talmud, this essay examines the effect of the cultural biases of the analyst in the analytic situation, and the hidden ethical dilemmas we face. Is it possible to maintain a “purity of intention” as we maintain respect for the boundaries of the analysand while exploring and utilizing deep countertransferential responses?

Review of Relational and Intersubjective Perspectives in Psychoanalysis: A Critique.

JON MILLS (Ed.) Relational and Intersubjective Perspectives in Psychoanalysis: A Critique Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 2005, 384 pages (ISBN 1-4129-0405-6, US$60 Cloth) Reviewed by PAUL IAN STEINBERG Mills offers a substantial introduction sometimes employing lengthy cumbersome sentences. I question whether the practice of psychoanalysis has been forced to go underground and is exclusively for the rich and the elite, and whether contemporary psychoanalysis stresses consciousness at the expense of the unconscious and that therapy largely lacks originality. Part I, Theoretical Considerations, begins with Intersubjectivity: From Theory to Practice by Roger Frie and Bruce Reis. They examine psychoanalytic tenets of intersubjectivity and the philosophical premises on which they are based. They clearly outline the contribution of European philosophies to the concept of intersubjectivity, and thoughtfully discuss philosophical influences on Jessica Benjamin's, Thomas Ogden's, and Robert Stolorow's work, which follows an outline of their work on This chapter would be improved and more accessible to clinicians if clinical examples were provided. authors' critiques are balanced, although they offer a more involved discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of intersubjectivity then some clinicians might wish. Phenomenology of Intersubjectivity by Guy Thompson offers a historical review of the origins of the term intersubjectivity. Thompson employs long sentences that sometimes require multiple readings to be understood. His concern with intersubjectivity's philosophical roots and its lack of recognition among relationists is not that compelling to clinicians. This chapter is of more interest to academicians. Jim Frederickson's The Problem of Relationality raises important questions about what is original and what is inconsistent in the relational approach. His arguments are distant from clinical work. Sometimes he overstates his point, for example, regarding Stolorow and Orange's conflating of subjects with subjectivities. Frederickson makes too much of his criticism of Stephen Mitchell's acknowledge limited planet analogy. Peter Giovacchini's Subjectivity and the Ephemeral Mind is a frontal attack on the originality of work on Giovacchini argues futilely against gratuitous self-disclosure. He describes his very limited self-disclosure to a patient, appearing not to consider (never mind acknowledge) his contributions to the transference-countertransference matrix. This chapter, and one by Giovacchini's son, seems polemical. Giovacchini criticizes them for using legitimize as a verb, which is incomprehensible to me. Phillip Giovacchini, in Object Relations and Intersubjectivity, seems to misread the intersubjectivity literature as if it suggests that the functions and activities of analyst and analysand were identical. If this notion were true, analysts would not require training or personal analysis. Giovacchini writes as if the perspective of intersubjectivity is used in isolation, not as one of many useful developments in psychoanalysis; intersubjectivity enhances rather than supplants object relations theory. Giovacchini sees things in more either/or terms. Relational psychoanalysis is given short shrift in Part I; the book so far does not fulfil the promise of its title. Part II, Treatment Perspectives, begins with Frank Summers' Caution and Discovery in the Psychoanalytic Process. It is direct, clear, and enjoyable to read, an excellent chapter. Summers describes limitations in an interpretive approach. He uses Benjamin's concept of intersubjectivity to demonstrate helping patients change once insight is achieved, and describes theories of transitional space for the purpose of self-creation. Timothy Zeddies, in Moral Deliberation and Relationability in the Analytic Dyad, outlines problems with the relational approach in an unbiased manner, devoid of the polemic seen earlier. …

Listening Perspectives for Emotional-Relatedness Memories

When considering memory, it is as important to relinquish the distinctions of Platonic triadism—cognition, emotion, and motivation—as it is to abandon Cartesian dualism. Calling on contemporary infant research and neuroscience, the author asserts there is no memory save emotional memory. The human mind as given to us to know can be seen as springing from early-learned patterns of emotional relatedness that are retained in the personality and expressed in later significant interpersonal relationships, including the therapeutic one. Influenced by the current relational movement on psychotherapy theory and practice, six trends in modern psychoanalytic thinking constitute a paradigm shift in the direction of listening for emotional-relatedness memory patterns brought by both participants into the interpersonal field of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Four listening perspectives are suggested for systematically framing different types of relatedness possibility patterns as they emerge in the course of the therapeutic engagement. Of special interest is the earliest “organizing” relational experience that manifests in therapy as two participants move toward interpersonal connection, only to have one or the other break or rupture the developing intimacy. To illustrate how primal patterns of flight, fight, and flee emerge in the transference–countertransference matrix, clinical examples are given. This paper illustrates how the relational paradigm stands on new philosophical, epistemological, and interactional ground when relatedness perspectives are used for listening and responding to (i.e., for framing) various levels of relational complexity possibility.

What's Going On with Dora? An Interpersonal Perspective

Freud views Dora's symptoms as displacements of conflictual fantasies and affects. In this essay the focus is shifted to Dora's body in relation, a vehicle for communication. The schism between her soma and psyche—or act and word—is understood as Dora's response to the mystifying, hypocritical relatedness in her family. Freud's bifurcation of theory and clinical praxis may repeat this pattern at moments when metapsychological interpretations do not jibe with the interactive moment. A detailed inquiry regarding the often-embodied transference-countertransference matrix is therefore explored toward better understanding and integration.

What's Going On with Dora? An Interpersonal Perspective

Freud views Dora's symptoms as displacements of conflictual fantasies and/or affects. In this essay, the focus is shifted to Dora's body in relation—a vehicle for communication. The schism between her soma and psyche—or act and word—is understood as Dora's response to the mystifying, hypocritical relatedness in her family. Freud's bifurcation of theory and clinical praxis may repeat this pattern at moments when metapsychological interpretations do not jibe with the interactive moment. A detailed inquiry regarding the often embodied transference-countertransference matrix is therefore explored toward better understanding and integration.

The growth and transformation of American ego psychology.

The roots of ego psychology trace back to Sigmund Freud's The Ego and the Id (1923) and "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety" (1926), works followed by two additional fundaments, Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936) and Heinz Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1939). It was brought to full flowering in post-World War II America by Hartmann and his many collaborators, and for over two decades it maintained a monolithic hegemony over American psychoanalysis. Within this framework the conceptions of the psychoanalytic psychotherapies evolved as specific modifications of psychoanalytic technique directed to the clinical needs of the spectrum of patients not amenable to psychoanalysis proper. This American consensus on the ego psychology paradigm and its array of technical implementations fragmented several decades ago, with the rise in America of Kohut's self psychology, geared to the narcissistic disorders, and with the importation from Britain of neo-Kleinian and object-relational perspectives, all coinciding with the rapid growth of the varieties of relational psychoanalysis, with its shift in focus to the two-person, interactive, and co-constructed transference-countertransference matrix. Implications of this intermingled theoretical pluralism (as contrasted with the unity of the once dominant ego psychology paradigm) for the evolution of the American ego psychology are spelled out.

Black and White Thinking: A Psychoanalyst Reconsiders Race

This paper begins with an analysis of race as a social construction and then follows the argument that, at a deep structural level, race and racism are organized by the same rational–irrational polarity of Enlightenment philosophy that informs psychoanalytic structural theory. The heart of the paper is formed by two case examples, one from my own practice and one from Leary (1997). I argue that unconscious racism is to be expected in our clinical work at this point in history and that truly reparative efforts depend on an acknowledgement of racism in the transference–countertransference matrix.

“You've lost me, you've lost other people in the group”: Transference-countertransference matrix in the termination of difficult adolescent patients in group therapy

This paper, based on two year-long psychotherapy group consisting of six female adolescents, focuses on transference-countertransference reactions in group psychotherapy with difficult female adolescents who are facing the loss of their parents through AIDS. A clinical case is presented to illustrate the complications in the Termination phase with bereaved adolescent patients. The author suggests using Ferenczi's therapeutic techniques in treating adolescents.

Eros: Classical and contemporary considerations

Abstract The erotic in clinical treatment, deeply embedded as it is in the transference-countertransference matrix, is delineated and explored in this paper. As we journey through Eros' mythic tradition, to Plato's symposium, and on to Freud's “Observations on Transference Love”, we discover and rediscover Eros' essentially paradoxical essence as both provocateur, dangerous “mischief maker” to cohesive force—a source of universal cohesion. Struggling with Eros' fundamental dialectics, we experience the rich potential of translating its “disruptive” reverberations into relational-dynamics. What has remained in the realm of the dangerous, an enemy to insight, the dread of acting out, is brought to light. We talk in complex ways of the unique impact one human being can have on another. This impact includes the erotic: a world of desire, longing, surrender; the wish for penetration, merger, intimacy; the fear of engulfment and ultimate rejection.

The patient's dreams and the countertransference

Dreams reported in psychoanalysis may reflect not only the transference of the patient, but also the countertransference, counterresistance, and counteranxiety of the psychoanalyst. Because of the communicative capacity of dreams, the analyst may use the patient's dreams as supervision. Objective signs are described that may indicate countertransference interference in the analyst's dream interpretation. Through a process of reciprocal, interactive dream interpretation, the dream's meaning about the transference—countertransference matrix can be clarified. Usually, there is an intermediate stage in working on a dream, during which the dream meaning is enacted in the dream‐interpretation process. Clinical examples include the “Lovely Dream”; reported by Freud, along with examples from the casebook of Gill and Hoffman (1982) and from the author's own practice.

Transference and Countertransference

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1991, Vol 36(2), 156–157. Reviews the book, The Transference-Countertransference Matrix: The Emotional-Cognitive Dialogue in Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, and Supervision by Robert J. Marshall and Simone V. Marshall (see record 1