Countertransference, Conflictual Listening, and the Analytic Object Relationship

Abstract

Analytic listening is an ongoing conflictual process, containing all the components of conflict and shaped in every moment by both the patient's and the analyst's conflicts. The mutual responsiveness that develops between analyst and patient stems from a complex conflictual object relationship, fundamentally no different from any other object relationship, in which countertransference at all times simultaneously facilitates and interferes with the analytic work. Detailed clinical process is used to illustrate these and related phenomena, including the use of signal conflict, the benign negative countertransference, the function of countertransference structures, and the analyst's use of projection. The analyst's affects, thoughts, and actions trace the shifting nature of the patient's transference and resistance, and the level of the object relationship continuously being created between patient and analyst.

Countertransference Identification and Fantasy in Psychoanalytic Process

“…Being a complex compromise-like all identifications-each type of conscious identification and countertransference experience is inevitably associated with warded-off identifications of the other type, as Carveth (2012), LaFarge (2007), Smith (2000), and others describe. Such warded-off identifications lie on a spectrum with respect to awareness; some may emerge as flickering intrusions into feeling with or as momentary fadings away of feeling toward, for example, while others are held more rigidly apart from conscious experience and require more intense self-scrutiny and self-analysis to enter awareness.…”

Neutrality, tenderness and the analyst's subjectivity

“…Segal (1977) referred to the double face of and the risk of abusing countertransference phenomena, when she wrote that: " ... it is very important to be aware that countertransference is the best of servants but he worst of masters ... " ( p. 37). Smith (2000) aims at the same problem when he writes that countertransference is: " ... a source of data, but not a source of evidence" (p. 105).…”

The Quest for a Unified Psychoanalytic Theory: A Retreat from Uncertainty

“…I have chosen a few as illustrations. Smith (2000) expanded the definition of countertransference to include the entire relationship between analyst and patient.…”