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This paper proposes a conceptual and clinical integration of contemporary psychoanalytic theories that emphasize the repetitive dimension of the transference (the repeated relationship) and those that stress the developmental or selfobject dimension (the needed relationship). Such an integration is accomplished by enlarging our conception of the communicative matrix that includes transference, projective identification, and countertransference. It is suggested that patients actively seek to enlist the therapist both in old pathogenic interactional scenarios and in new therapeutically needed relational configurations. Thus, contrary to recent criticisms of the developmental paradigm, the therapist does not have to look outside the transference-countertransference matrix for a model of the developmentally needed relationship: the patient communicates it through a creative, proactive form of projective identification. The work of Racker, Sandier, Winnicott, Bollas, and various self psychologists is reviewed and found to support this reconceptualization. The paper then examines the theory of analytic cure in the light of this integrated perspective. It is suggested that the most compelling theories take into account the analyst's >embeddedness< in the transference – countertransference while recognizing the importance of the analyst's >mastering the countertransference< as the basis for providing a new developmental experience. The therapeutic models of Racker, Bollas, and Newman are described as exemplary in this regard.
Whenever the subject is explicitly addressed, all analysts agree that empathic perception is an attitude one takes toward making observations, not a privileged means of perception. Furthermore, analysts seem to agree that observations made with an empathic intention are interpretations like any other observations. Empathy is not a conduit to the patient's inner life. But despite these points of consensus, it often seems to be implied in the psychoanalytic literature, usually unintentionally, that empathy is a privileged means of knowing another person. This undercurrent is sometimes present even in the work of theorists who simultaneously state their opposition to this very point of view. In this paper, after presenting an example from the literature of this kind of contradiction, I, basing my argument in hermeneutics, offer the view that all observation, inside and outside psychoanalysis, is interpretation. Then, turning to the three papers of the symposium individually, I take the perspective that in one way or another they all portray empathic perception as a privileged means of observation. These portrayals are examples of the unconscious politics of theory.
This paper examines the effect patient transferences have on the analyst and on the analyst's stance in treatment. The paper suggests that certain features of what are commonly considered central to a >classical< psychoanalytic stance may derive from not fully understood dynamics of the transference situation and may be neither necessary nor useful aspects of technique. A comprehensive, developmental conception of transference as a general human endowment is proposed as a way of viewing the impact of transference in the treatment situation. The adaptive function of adolescent regression and adolescent developmental transference is examined as a paradigm for all transferences, both in and outside treatment. In this >adaptive< perspective, transference is understood not simply as a misconstrual of a new relationship on the basis of old struggles. Rather, transference is seen as an effort to bring to bear as much of one's own most vital interests, as they have been shaped developmentally, and to compel the object to provide what one deeply hopes to have gratified. This perspective provides a basis for understanding the powerful influence that the urgent transferences of patients have on therapists, who are not immune to some degree of enactment in response. Analysts may try, through a stereotyped treatment approach, to avoid the impact of the transference and the powerful vortex of feelings generated by it. Maintaining an adaptive view of transference, however, may enable the analyst to use his or her >countertransference< response to further the analytic work.
This paper addresses some assumptions underlying psychoanalytic theories. It uses Rorty's concepts of philosophy and poetry to capture distinctions: the former a search for universal truths and the latter an emphasis on meanings in discourse. Freud's embeddedness in 19th-century positivism organized his metatheorical assumptions, while some object relational theorists are inclined toward a con-structivist point of view. For many theoreticians these two vantage points overlap others insist on a sundering of the two. I maintain that polarizing these two positions is not useful. Both philosophical stances ask different kinds of questions and both types of questions are important for a general as well as clinical theory of psychoanalysis.
The Oedipus Complex: Some Observations and Questions Regarding Its Validity and Universal Existence
(1994)