The Power of Countertransference: Innovations in Analytic Technique

The Power of Countertransference: Innovations in Analytic Technique: Second Edition

Countertransference Issues at Termination. Review quote "The Power of Counter-transference: Innovations in Analytic Technique teaches readers, both students and experienced clinicians, how to lead a, hopefully, successful psychotherapy session. Dr Maroda guides her readers through challenges, sharing her experiences and referencing experiences of others.

She explains with great detail what kind of feelings the therapist might feel, what he or she should share with the patient, and what the therapy sessions should feel like. She explains how counter-transference would work, how to incorporate it into therapy sessions, and what the issues or consequences of it might be. Through her experiences, Dr Maroda is able to reveal the fine details of what she views as a successful therapy. Through rich and self-disclosing clinical material, she chronicles her development from a constrained novice who hid behind 'neutrality' into a world of intimate relating with her patients.

We hear about her clinical failures, successes, and experiments with what is for many therapists the uncharted territory of countertransference use and disclosure. This book is filled with compelling clinical vignettes and solid advice to guide therapists through the deepest currents of their own growth in the context of therapeutic relating.

It is a book not just about countertransference but about doing and being a therapist. Maroda's challenge to the typical understanding of the therapeutic relationship has import for therapists of all theoretical persuasions We find rare books for you These take a little longer to source. Please check the expected dispatch details above. Huge range Over 7 million titles and growing, all at extremely competitive prices. Maroda Paperback, Delivery UK delivery is usually within 11 to 13 working days. International delivery varies by country, please see the Wordery store help page for details.

Paperback Language of text: About Wordery Wordery is one of the UK's largest online booksellers. It is also a central feature of much recent interesting work of writers in the Independent Group, for example Nina Coltart, Neville Symington, Gregorio Kohon all in Kohon, , Christopher Bollas , chs.

That's enough of lists. I'll unpack them later. For the moment I want to offer a trailer on Searles before leading up to his work in my own way. One reason I suspect that he's less well-known in this country than he ought to be is the meanness of his American publishers. Searles' publishers, International Universities Press and Jason Aronson, ill-serve him and the rest of us by pricing him out of the market in spite of many pleas to bring out paperbacks.

The only reason his schizophrenia essays are in paperback is that The Hogarth Press controls the British rights, and they routinely allow Karnac to do paperbacks. Affordable access to significant thinkers is important, especially for people of limited means who are doing trainings. I think Searles is the friend of the therapist's secret knowledge, things we know for ourselves but rarely share with colleagues. Consider for a moment a few of his more tantalising titles: Don't those titles whet your appetite? Don't they conjure up a friend who knows good secrets one cannot easily share with rigid, rule-bound and priggish colleagues and supervisors?

Searles knows the secret that our patients do look after us, that there is at least a phase of symbiosis or mutual dependency in the relationship, that the things they accuse us of are often bullseyes and that the projections that evoke our countertransference don't just find an echo but a home in our characters. He is also spot on and hilarious on the sadistic pleasure a part of the patient's mind often gets from frustrating all our concern and our efforts, including our efforts to hide how furious they can make us.

What the titles of these and about sixty other papers say to me is that it's all much more complicated than some of the simplistic and scientistic models imply, that its messy and that both common sense and our deepest selves must be kept in play. Searles is the man whose delightfully-told tales can help us achieve this without entangling us in sectarian wrangles. Now I want to say something about 'vicissitudes' and then sketch the history of ideas of transference and countertransference.

Here are some of the definitions of 'vicissitudes' in the big Oxford English Dictionary: An example from says, 'Take compassion of the fleeting inconstancy and vicissitude of the dangers with which we poor mortals are surrounded' p. The dictionary conveys, then, threatening change and contrast. My impression is that the concepts of transference and countertransference have undergone fundamental changes since the classical texts. In the beginning there was a stolidity or permanence to transference, while countertransference was basically a nuisance, something to be got rid of, evidence for an incomplete analysis, something that limited how far one could go with a patient.

There was a change, however, in the post-World War Two period. Donald Winnicott , Margaret Little and Paula Heimann wrote articles drawing attention to what can be learned from the countertransference. Their view was that something was put into the analyst by the patient and that it should be attended to as important material, access to which came up from the analyst's unconscious. Hate was Winnicott's example. These essays caused quite a stir. In particular, Annie Reich objected that engaging with this sort of stuff smacked of id psychology, not the proper place to be working, which was the ego presumably draining the Zuider Zee.

We find here the association between countertransference and concentration on primitive, pre-verbal material which characterises my understanding of the importance of the issue. There was a growing emphasis on countertransference, but the approach was cautious. For example, when Heimann took up the issue again a decade later, her concluding point was that close attention to what the patient put into one would decrease the incidence of countertransference, a very odd idea to a current eye Heimann, , p.

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In the meantime, Roger Money-Kyrle had written a paper of fundamental importance in which he stressed the normality and importance of countertransference and made the point that when one interprets it mistakenly as a result of one's own unresolved problems, it's not a simple matter to put right. Before one can fix it, the patient has moved on, grasped the lack of rapport and is now relating to a damaged object, a situation that calls for some real effort to re-establish intimate communication.

I think of this period in the history of the idea of countertransference as an intermediate one, in which opinion had shifted, somewhat cautiously, from getting rid of countertransference to attending carefully to it, but still, as I understand the literature, in a rather negative vein. The third phase brings us up to the present. It has a number of features, but the main one is an almost complete reversal of relative significance between the transference and the countertransference.

Putting the matter bluntly, transference is still the arena of the relationship between patient and analyst which must be interpreted and worked through, but by far the greatest emphasis on how we know what the transference is comes from monitoring and working from the countertransference. There is also a move from transference onto whole objects to relating to part-objects. Irma Brenman Pick captures this wonderfully.

First, countertransference is ubiquitous: Second, 'the patient does not just project into an analyst, but instead patients are quite skilled in projecting into particular aspects of the analyst And above all, he projects into the analyst's guilt, or into the analyst's internal objects.

Thus, patients touch off in the analyst deep issues and anxieties related to the need to be loved and the fear of catastrophic consequences in the face of defects, i. In conclusion, she says, 'Of course in these situations the patient massively projects parts of the self and internal objects into the analyst; such patients also arouse in the analyst feelings of being helpless and at the mercy of vengeful exploitive behaviour whilst the patient indulges in imperviousness to the analyst's needs.

The task of experiencing and bearing these feelings whilst at the same time not becoming alienated from those parts of the patient that are genuinely defective and in need of support is a considerable one' p. So far, I have sketched three phases in the history of the concepts of transference and countertransference.

Let's call the first 'objectivist': Countertransference is a relatively infrequent contaminant, a failure of objectivity due to the therapist's insufficiently analysed subjectivity. The second phase - of Winnicott, Little, Heimann, with Money-Kyrle somewhere between this group and the later one - can be dubbed 'projectivist'. The patient projects into the therapist, there is something to be learned and one's own - now inevitable - vulnerabilities must be dealt with. In the projectivist phase the transference is still centre stage.

The third phase takes us to a situation in which projection into the therapist is 'the essence' of analysis, and part-object relations and relentless searching out of the most subjective and damaged parts of the therapist is the rule. Bearing this and thinking under fire constitute the task. I call this phase 'dialectical', because it is well and truly the domain of vicissitudes, and the relationship is more than interactive; it is mutually constitutive at many levels.

All of which brings us to Bion's notion of 'container and contained' Bion, , pp. Both of these boil down to rather mystical ways of urging us to dwell in the countertransference. He says, 'The only point of importance in any session is the unknown.

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Nothing must be allowed to distract from intuiting that' Bion, , pp. The disciplines he proposes are designed to remove intellectualist, cognitive levels of attention and reflection, to open up access to unconscious processes: One becomes a container, taking in and bearing toxicity; holding it and detoxifying experiences and returning them in due course in an an acceptable form as food for thought for the patient.

He quotes a letter from Freud to Lou Andreas-Salome: That letter brings to mind a parable from Racker which is my last point of historical exegesis before I bring Searles to centre stage in my story.

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This is another way of conveying the idea of 'free-floating attention' which was common to Freud's and Bion's notions of the analytic attitude. Like Freud's letter, it, touches on the senses. One day an old Chinese sage lost his pearls. Next he sent his ears to search for the pearls, but his ears did not find them either. Then he sent his hands to search for the pearls, but neither did his hands find them.

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And so he sent all of his senses to search for his pearls but none found them. Finally he sent his not-search to look for his pearls.

The Power of Countertransference

And his not-search found them' Racker, , p. The first thing I want to say about Searles is that in he wrote a wonderful paper entitled 'Concerning Transference and Countertransference' Searles He submitted it to two prestigious journals, both of which rejected it. Indeed, he tells us that he has had many such experiences - Langs and Searles, , p.

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Langs and Searles, ; Searles, Countertransference Issues at Termination. Most famously, he argues that therapists and patients seek to drive one another crazy and that this struggle is one of the main elements in successful psychotherapy with schizophrenics Searles, , p. In my opinion, the issues about the inner and outer worlds explored in this difficult book are of central importance to human survival, a thesis which Karl Figlio is developing with respect to the Green Movement. He tries again in innumerable passages in later writings and, in particular, in a fine essay on 'Unconscious Processes in Relation to the Environmental Crisis' Searles, , ch. It is also a central feature of much recent interesting work of writers in the Independent Group, for example Nina Coltart, Neville Symington, Gregorio Kohon all in Kohon, , Christopher Bollas , chs. Constructing the Interpersonal Analysis.

In it he argued 'that transference phenomena constitute projections, and that all projective manifestations - including transference reactions - have some real basis in the analyst's behavior and represent, therefore, distortions of degree only. The latter of these two suggestions implies a degree of emotional participation by the analyst which is not adequately described by the classical view of him as manifesting sympathetic interest, and nothing else, toward the patient.

It has been the writer's experience that the analyst actually does feel, and manifest in various ways, a great variety of emotions during the analytic hour' Searles, , p. He proceeds to celebrate this 'richness of emotional participation' by the analyst.

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He 'believes that the analyst's emotions need to become the subject of as precise and thorough investigations, in regard to their positive value in therapy, as are those of the patient himself' p. He argues that 'our aim should be to remain maximally aware of our changing feelings during the analytic hour, not only because these feelings will be communicated behavioristically to the patient - via variations, no matter how subtle, in our tone, posture, and so on - but also because our feelings are our most sensitive indicators of what is going on in the interpersonal situation' p.

He refers to Fenichel and French as adumbrating his view and Rioch to the effect that 'There is no such thing as an impersonal analyst, nor is the idea of the analyst's acting as a mirror anything more than the "neatest trick of the week"' p. Note that the year - - falls within the same period when Winnicott, Little and Heimann were moving some way toward Searles' position. Note also that he couldn't get the paper published. It finally appeared in the context of the dialogue with Langs.

I think this is because of the scientistic orthodoxy of Freudianism in America, dominated by immigrants from the Continent who sought to represent psychoanalysis in terms of forces, energies, structures, topographies and other expressions of a model based on analogies and metaphors drawn from physiology and physics and a view of the analyst as a scientific subject, with the patient as an observed object. To become a psychoanalyst in America until very recently one had to go to medical school and become a doctor. I know; I embarked on that path in that period, and I can assure you that psychoanalysis was taught in major centres in utterly scientistic terms, with authority for its concepts and validity sought from physics, physiology and biology.

All of this was worked out with great care and elaborate schemata in the highly-respected writings of Heinz Hartmann , Ernst Kris and Rudolph Lowenstein and set out in systematic form by David Rapaport and Merton Gill in a succinct paper in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 'The Points of View and Assumptions of Metapsychology' , which Rapaport developed at length in a longer version which appeared as a monograph in the series Psychological Issues and also in a prestigious multi-volume work, edited by Sigmund Koch and entitled Psychology: A Study of a Science.

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Rapaport's title was The Structure of Psychoanalytic Theory: A Systematizing Attempt Rapaport, , There are five points of view: The longer version also included gestalt, organismic and psychosocial points of view. I have sketched this approach, not because I want to commend it to you, but in order to give you some idea of what Searles was - and, to a considerable extent, remains - up against.

Since the beginning of psychoanalysis there have been two broad tendencies, both strongly represented in Freud's own formation and writings. The first was the scientistic. I say 'scientistic', rather than 'scientific', because the language of a putative science of mind has always had to be drawn by analogy from disciplines in the natural sciences. The reasons for this lie deep in the heritage of Cartesian mind-body dualism, whereby mind was defined negatively, as that which does not have the attributes of body, which were extension, figure and motion.

Mind, according to Descartes was, a thinking substance, whose essence was volition. Whenever people have tried to formulate a scientific language for the mind, they have employed mental entities in spatial and physical terms which are, strictly speaking, inappropriate, such as structures, energies, forces. Ideas are described as impacting on one another like the billiard balls of a corpuscular physics, thus giving rise to the notion of the association of ideas, beloved of psychologists from Locke and Hartley and Condillac to Freud and still part of the common psychological language of our own time See Young, , , forthcoming, ch.

He published papers in neuroanatomy and physiology; his first book was entitled On Aphasia , while his first comprehensive sketch of a general psychology was cast in physicalist terms and entitled 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' It was written in a conceptual language which Rapaport found congenial.

It would be misleading and unscholarly to say that Freud turned his back on this way of thinking. Indeed, the whole framework of ideas of the theoretical chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams , ch. We can still see vestiges of this way of thinking in the brain-shaped diagram which turns up in The Ego and the Id S. Moreover, his great metapsychological essays - especially the one entitled 'The Unconscious' - are in this tradition, as was his lifelong belief that cerebral physiology would one day fill in the material or bodily parallel to his psychological accounts Young, But the parallel mental story became increasingly important, and he came to believe that it was right to remain strictly on psychological terrain and to postulate a psychophysical parallelism.