Davide Lopez

 

English version of two papers published in "gli argonauti", XIV, 1-9; 85-101, 1992

The perspective
of the persona
on the countertransference


Whereas on the meaning of transference there is clearness of views and substantial agreement, at international level, among psychoanalysts, freudians and new-freudians, kleinians and bionians, lacanians and kohutians, the same can't be said about the countertransference. Everybody agrees on the concept that transference is the reedition, more or less dramatized, of past's fundamental relationships. The accent, the emphasis, among the analysts and among the different clinical and theoretical trends to which they belong, may vary as to the contents and the preeminences of the libidinal-emotional levels of the transference. However, to be true, even in regard to the transference it is essential a discrimination, that just recently begins to appear and gather consents and polemics.
There has recently been a heated debate in the British Psycho-Analytical Society around a paper of Harold Stewart. This analyst, towards whom I feel empathy, has held the view that even extra-analytical transference's interpretations are necessary and promoting the therapeutic action of psycho-analysis. Thus, he has extended the concept of transference, including in it those intercourses, external to the analytical relationship, where we can equally see the transference of essential relations of the past.
I personally consider the position of Stewart very sound; and I invite the psycho-analysts to answer this question: what could be the difference from the point of view of the nature and significance of the transference, if the instinctual drives and the emotions of the past are transferred to the analyst or to another person? What is relevant, it is just the nature and the significance of the tr
ansferred relationship!
How important could the transference be, if it is, only and indiscriminately, an artificial creation of psycho-analysis?
In this last instance, the critics would be right in stating that psychoanalysis is a totally artificial construction, that is, in short, an artefact! From Grecian times it has been understood that transference has universal meaning and potentiality. Freud himself, who has repeatedly insisted on the essentiality of the transference, as product of the analytical relation, recognized that transference shows itself even in those love's relations that reach depth.
I was, certainly, pleased that a courageous psycho-analyst has presented a paper on the indispensableness of extra-analytical transference's interpretations, facing polemics and disputes, that since long time did not take place in the British Psycho-Analytical Society. But, from another point of view, since the time of my analytical training in England, it was for me a completely clear and irreversible concept, essential part of my clinical and theoretical tools, that the transference shows itself, indiscriminately, in the analytical relationship and in the intense emotional intercourses of the reality, and that it has to be interpreted just where it appears.
In spite of his merits, we owe Strachey at least two serious handicaps, that have caused clinical and theoretical slackness: the accentuation, not to say the scientist and positivistic, deformation of the writings of Freud. For those who know German, the freudian style is less scientific, more akin to the language of the human sciences, and certainly more charged of emotional nuances, than the way Strachey has tried to hand it down to posterity. Besides, he has gathered the attention and the interest of nearly all the analysts on transference's centrality in the analytical relationship, to the detriment of the natural development of it in the extra-analytical relationships, as in the analytical one. I don't wish to dwell on the deformation of the natural evolution of the analytical relationship, caused by who sultrily insis s on the necessity to reduce every interpretation to the relation with the analyst. At length, I have spoken of it in Italian books and pages.
I rather wish to linger over this problem: what is the substantial difference between the transference towards the analyst and that towards the love object? The answer seems obvious: the analyst differs from the love object, as he is able to interpret the twofold transference's manifestations. The clinical-theoretical training and the libidinal-emotional position of the analyst in analysis favours and permits, not only the dramatization of the transference, but above all the comprehension and the transformation of it. The considerable resistance of some analyst to accept such an easy differentiation is
probably due to the anxiety of losing a privileged position. To a careful analysis this anxiety turns out groundless. It is certainly very strange, contradictory and paradoxical, that just those psycho-analysts that cling to the concept of a rigorous setting, simultaneously, clutch at a compulsive position of emotional privilege, rather than choose the really privileged position of the empathic awareness. Such a discrimination and differentiation of clinical-theoretical positions regarding the displacement of the transference does not notch, however, the universal comprehension and agreement of its meaning.
Let me, now, dwell upon the problem of the countertransference. I shall avoid to consider sistematically the history and the literature on countertransference. I was rather surprised to read in a recent paper of Samuel Stein (International Journal of Psycho-analysis, vol. 72, part 2, 1991) that this Australian psycho-analyst, a psychiatrist and a colleague of mine in London's Friern Hospital in 1954, and in that time a senior student of the British Psycho-Analytical Institute, assign to Paula Heimann the motherhood of the concept of countertransference.
I think that every analyst knows that, starting from 1910 in The future Prospects of psycho-analytical Therapy, Freud has mentioned the countertransference, and more extensively has written on it in Recommendations to Physicians practising Psycho-analysis (1912) and in On beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-analysis) (1913). Naturally, in that epoch the meaning of countertransference, expecially as Freud was concerned, was identified, nearly entirely, with the reactions of .the male analyst to the erotic-emotional transference of the female patients. In those papers Freud invites the psycho-analysts to adopt a balanced behaviour between repression of interest, inattention and insensitiveness to the transference of the patient, on one side, and involvement and fulfilment of it from the other.
Paula Heimann has undoubtedly had the great merit to enlarge the concept to include all the emotions and feelings of the psycho-analyst towards the patient; the two papers of her (1950 and 1960) are really enlightening. Her clinical-theoretical position can be better explained by what she wrote in 1950 paper: "The emotions roused in the analyst will be of value to his patient, if used as one more source of insight into the patient's unconscious conflicts and defences;... ". I remember Paula Heimann as a very intelligent woman, highly cultured, very artistically minded and, above all, courteous. I owe to Winnicott and to her my acceptance, as student of the British Institute of PsychoAnalysis. Her defection from the kleinians in the second half of the fifties was much talked about, and she was welcomed with, open arms in the middle group. I remember also that, as soon as she stopped speaking in the Wednesday's scientific meetings, immediately Hanna Segal went to the platform to sustain the kleinian point of view, so as to make vivacious the debate. Naturally, the Heimann's papers on countertransference, I think, are the result, not only of her lasting experience with patients, but also of the enormous tension that she must have sustained in her personal analysis with Mrs. Klein, and in the relations with her analyst and the colleagues of the kleinian group afterwards. Faced with the "rigorous" scientific attitude of Melanie Klein, for whom had little meaning to speak of countertransference's feelings of the analyst, just because the analytical relationship was reduced for her to the play of the projective and introjective identifichtions of the patients, Heimann pointed out and asserted the omitted area of the psycho-analyst's emotions.
Her theoretical position and her emotional inclinations were certainly courageous in those days, but at the same time cautious and well balanced. She declares her preoccupation to have given rise with her 1950's paper to an outcry among psycho-analysts, and she is afraid of having been misunderstood and identified with the technic defended by Ferenczi, where the pupil of Freud claims the urgency to reveal and to show to the patients the libidinal-emotional feelings and involvements of the analyst. Heimann rightly maintains that such a technic results in throwing on the patient a further dangerous burden, that makes more painful and difficult his emancipation. To the degree to which the analyst is able to contain instincts and emotions, he can utilize them to further deepen the analysis and to enhance the awareness of the patient.
It seems to me that the major difficulty that we find in meeting the countertransference's problems is due not only, as somebody has maintained, I think Racker, to the fact that the analysis of the countertransference implies a review of the personal analysis and of the positions of superiority of the psycho-analyst, but also, and above all, to the generalized absence in psycho-analysis of the concept of the persona. This concept "for long time keeps itself in its concealing", to recall a typical expression of Heidegger. The psycho-analysts understand the persona, as something different from what I understand. Polanyi, who perhaps more than others has neared the deep meaning of the persona in his very interesting bo Personal knowledge (Towards a postcritical philosophy), does not envisage the leap of libidinal-emotional level that the model of the persona implies in comparison with the humanism. Especially in Anglo-American culture, the persona is immediately identified with the individual. The highest level of understanding reaches the representation of the unique and unrepeatable meaning of the individual. The identification of the persona
with the individual means, nevertheless, absorbing with the uniqueness and unrepeatableness also the idiosyncratic, transient, episodic, ephemeral, sides that belong to the concept of the individual.
The historical-characterological defence of the individual, strictly connected with the Reformation, as it emphasizes the positive rights of the individual, is forced also to accept the idiosyncrasies and the stupidities, the cavils and the whims, of it. This obnubilation of conceptual differences, this loss of discrimination, whose result is an ineludible overlap of meanings between what is sound and sacred of the individual, and what is atypical, insignificant, monomaniacal, dangerous and decadent, is in my opinion the reason that explains the conceptual obscurity related to the countertransference.
The ambivalent position of Winnicott towards madness, where it seems that the limits of it border on geniality, is due to the absence in him of the concept of persona. His vigorous defence of the sacred rights of freedom of the individual and his idiosyncrasy, that I myself share, towards everything that is institutionalized, conventional and devitalized, and that tastes mouldy, stale and "as if', has pushed him towards a defence of the originality, that conceptually he has not been able to differentiate from madness. This defence is felt by Winnicott, at deep level, as dangerous, and I perceive in his writings a diffuse, preconscious, reparative, movement that gleams through in his insistence on the importance of socialization, on his clinging to reality.
The concept of the persona is for me resolutive; and when I have found myself to sink in libidinal-emotional conflicts, and in difficult clinical-theoretical problems, suddenly the model of the persona appeared in my mind to offer me the solution and to enlighten the path.
I then question: if we reduce the persona to the individual, how is it possible to discriminate what is personal from what is personalistic, namely idiosyncratic? And this, I think, is the reason why many analysts, preconsciously or consciously, consider the manifestations of themselves as personae in a rather undesiderable, negative, light. What is personal is immediately identified with what belongs to the private life of the individual, together with idiosyncrasies, perversions and follies (everybody has a right to his private paranoia, used to say Freud). From this double register, from this ambivalence of feelings related to the vindication of the sacred rights of the individual, derives, simultaneously, the overestimation and the underestimation of the individual, but also the inevitable banishment of what belongs to the personal structure of the analyst and of his personal behavior. This explaination gives account of the diffuse attitude, coloured of negativeness, towards the countertransference. And when, instead, there is a vindication of the countertransference, here we find that this vindication is strictly connected with whimsical and exorbitant attitudes, as we can see in the continuous provoking, but dangerous, insistence of Searles on the incestuous, criminal, homicidal, wishes of the psycho-analyst, or in some disconcerting statement of Winnicott.
These considerations, I think, clarify the deep motivations of the scrupulous clinging of the psycho-analyst to the rigorousness, scientificity and objectivity, namely to the reductive identification of himself with the professional man and the scientist. And so it has been perpetrated the progressive dishumanization of the model of the psycho-analyst, clasped at that scientific objectivism that Polanyi has ridiculed, in all the sciences in which it appears, in his book.
From the beginning, the countertransference has taken on a negative colouring, to the degree to which it interfered with the concept of the clean and clear mirror, which should reflect, objectively and scientifically, the transference's manifestations of the patient. What is personal must be eliminated and, if it appears, must be, soon and accurately, subjected to washing and disinfection, namely to selfanalysis, as if we deal with the most contagious illness. And to secure the definitive warranty against the dangerous countertransference's infection, we can observe the care that the kleinians, expecially Grinberg, have lavished at sterilizing the analytical relationship from the countertransference's personal feelings of the analyst. For Grinberg, the countertransference is, above all, the product, the creation, of the patient. But there is a hidden aspect, not seen by Grinberg: if we push the model of the projective counteridentification to the extreme consequences, we can't avoid the conclusion that the psycho-analyst must be a subject particularly sensitive to hypnosis or, at least, to hystero-mimetic identifications. As we know, the analyst in Grinberg's views identifies himself, unconsciously but healthily, with the projective identifications of internal objects, but also with the projected emotional self-states of the patient. Such phenomenon is so old, as it is the world, and it consists in the potentiality that human beings have, through the universal psycho-physical constitution, to perceive the modalities of feeling and thinking of the other beings.
The projective counteridentification is, therefore, a fundamental capability, highly developed, of the psycho-analyst. The preconscious of the analyst functions, empathically, both towards the external world and his inner one, and it is in close connection with what the patient is and does, and with what he wants to let us feel and do. If we want to connote this capability with the definition - projective counteridentification -, let us call it so, on condition that we deepen the meaning of it.
The projective counteridentification, as a function of the psychoanalyst, has an active and passive aspect. It is essentially a preconscious capability, refined with years, and therefore it is not only the passive result of the psychopathology of the patient. It is a highly empathic function that, if absorbed in the area of the awareness of the analyst, is essential to his work. But, even here, it is necessary a fundamental discrimination, regarding the modality of function of this capability. It is necessary to take into consideration the capacity to be present and the quickness of the analyst's awareness to acknowledge the phenomenon of the projective counteridentification. And, here, it is still essential the freudian concept of signal, or of anxiety as signal. An analyst that functions as a persona can feel the depressive identification with his patient, but seldom he will become really depressed, to the degree to which his permeability is elastic, but it is also highly selective. Differing from Bion, I maintain that the analyst is certainly a container but he is also a filter. The relation of the consciousness with the preconscious is in the mature analyst free and fluent, just because there is a filter, highly selective, that allows the usage of the "pathos of the distance" (Nietzsche), so essential to the construction of all human relations, especially those with the patients. The analyst-persona will, immediately, avoid the extreme swings from identification to disidentification, will not fall in a hypnotic state and in a hystero-mimetic identification.
As a result of this analysis, we can reach the conclusion: when the concept of projective counteridentification is unduly idealized, it can become highly defensive. We can express the meaning of this defence as follows: it is far better to ascribe to the patient the responsibility of the countertransference, so as to save the sanity of the psycho-analyst, rather than to accept his libidinal-emotional participation in the analytical interaction.
From another point of view, as to draw attention to the paradoxical position of Grinberg, it is interesting to show that the conception of Searles is exactly poles a pait. I think I can epitomize Searles' conception as such: the psycho-analyst's unconscious is more than often responsible for determining the projective counteridentification of the patient, and even his acting out. If Searles goes too far as a second Christ, to take on himself the libidinal-emotional countertransference's responsibility, Grinberg in his turn distinguishes himself for an excess of de-responsibility. Against the loss of sound defences from one side, and against the erection of an exaggerated defensive system from the other, the position of Paula Heimann acquires all its equilibratory meaning.
Let us resume the reflection on the persona. The persona is not reducible to unicity and unrepeatibility. Truly, it is this, but it is also totality, coincidence of singularity and universality, of temporality and eternity; the persona is an individual, who is representative of the gender. The persona is the satisfactory solution of the antinomies, contraddictions and paradoxes of the history, just because it is a melodious recomposition of all the libidinal-emotional splits, included the divine and the human. I don't want to dwell further on the definition of the persona, because I have at length spoken of it in books and papers.
I shall try, now, to utilize the persona's model to clarify the countertransference. How could the persona renounce to be himself or herself, namely a realized and mature individual, synthesis of singularity and universality, discretion and continuity, temporality and eternity, and reduce herself or himself to an individual, where the totality is arbitrarily compressed and coerced in the partiality, so as to become, just a professional man, a psycho-analyst-scientist? To be a psycho-analyst is the specialization of the persona, it is its specific social functioning.
The psycho-analyst-persona enters from the beginning into the analytical relationship with all his meaning and essential being, with his libidinal-emotional, mental and formal potentialities. His more conspicuous task is that of leading another individual to become a persona. Every manifestation of egoistic and narcissistic tendencies, every irruption of idiosyncrasies, of introjective and projective compulsions, of personalistic ideologies, disintegrates the persona's quality of the psycho-analyst, interferes heavily and dangerously with the interactions with the patient, and must therefore be considered manifestation of neurotic countertransference, that is of personal immaturity and obnubilation of its essential task and meaning of persona.
The persona's theory shows, therefore, that the word countertransference needs a qualification, a specifying determination. Everything the analyst says and does, when he manifests himself in a mature way in analysis, is personal, is exquisitely personal. And what else could it be? If it was not so, he would be a machine, a scientific observer, a smoked mameluke. And we can speak of neurotic countertransference, when the analytic relation deteriorates from the personal level to the personalistic one. And when all that the analyst says and does is no more personal, it becomes "ipso facto" idiosyncratic, subjective, personalistic, egoistic, narcissistic and neurotic, just because his word, his gesture, and his way of being, are no more personal, which means the analyst is no more present as a total being in the "hic et nunc" situation. His being and his manifestations have undergone a process of corruption and decay. The analyst has turned away, in space and time, from that relational tension, from that emotional breath, from that present awareness, that is characteristic of the persona.
Naturally, the relational tension in its more comprehensive meaning signifies that the analyst is able to contain instinctual drives, conflicts, ambivalence of emotions, and to change them in personal manifestations, functional to the preservation and intensification of himself or herself as a persona, and to the construction of the patient as such. After all, we can speak of a personalistic or neurotic countertransference, when the analyst reacts, whereas he should act or not act. To act or not to act means that the analyst is able to contain his own emotions and those of the patient, to preserve and develop the freedom of the interpersonal relationship. As we know, there are patients who can put to the test the preservation of the libidinalemotional persona's quality of the analyst, and they can cause neurotic or personalistic countertransference's reactions. As many analysts have shown, if such reactions appear and disturb the psychoanalyst's mind, they are not to be considered in themselves negative. In such emergencies, it is necessary that the analyst trusts his awareness: "To change the negative in positive", used to say Freud; "What does not kill, strengthens me", said Nietzsche. From a great conflictual relational tension, the persona becomes ever more herself. The persona enters in the analytical relationship, not as an extraordinary individual, or as a sterilized and dishumanized professional man and scientist, but as that alive being who uses his knowledge, his talent and his wisdom, and also his preconscious, namely his living computer, his rehabilitated, revived, reconquerred animal functions, his wild strength, his intuition and his empathy, his restored harmony among the different levels of his libidinal-emotional organization, but also his spontaneity, his candour, and even his failings and his stupidity. The persona knows that the truth is not objective, static, irreducible and alienated, is not Sphinx-verity, but personal and interpersonal truth.
It would be of little meaning in a paper of so general theoretical perspective to report entirely individual cases. The theoretical problems that I have underlined require rather a description of that exemplary, typical, situation that becomes evident in a crucial phase of the analytical treatment, when, for example, a woman that has previously had easy, degrading and promiscuous relations, or who lives a deep relationship, but of decisively sado-masochistic character, succeeds for the first time to reach in analysis a level of awareness, which makes her able to renounce to such previous relationship. Through the interpretations she starts to acquire self respect and to problematize her way of being and her erotical-sentimental and social relationships.
But the level's leap towards personal genitality takes place, just when she starts to perceive the meaning of the analyst, as a persona, and to confront the model of the persona with the various personages with whom she has, till now, lived her disintegrating relations. The relationship with the analyst, recognized as a persona, and not simply as a transference's object, becomes privileged, and it is just that level that allows the patient to disinvest those relationships, based on sadomasochistic double roles, where herself and the other don't exist as personae, but as simultaneous projections and introjections of symbiotic and schizoid roles. It is quite evident that in the symbiotic and schizoid roles relationships never could be reciprocity, but destructive and rejecting narcissism, reciprocal exploitation and emotional impossibility of being simultaneously together.
The transformation that happens in this phase is a real libidinalemotional overturn of perspectives, a true overturn of the patient on himself, or on herself; it is the result of the relational tension, namely of the analyst's capability to use his countertransference, as empathic resistance, against the patient's attempts of resignation and submission to the disease, of regression and loss of every auspicate hope of salvation, but also as resistance against the patient's efforts to displace and bring him down from his position of agent of his or her more real interests of health and maturity, as to involve him in the whirls of the illness.
The analyst is understood as a persona who is regulated by the awareness, available if the patient is available, free to choose and to privilege his own libidinal-emotional investments, irreducible and unconquerable in face of whatever erotic and affective seduction, where the seduction is nothing else than appropriative and omnipotent narcissism. The patient sees the analyst as a persona who knows how to hold out and to be steady, who is empathic and even emotionally sympathetic, when he moves towards the genuine suffering of the patient, and knows also how to humorize the situations (Viederman, 1991), when it is necessary to free the patient of his tendency to obsessivity and sultriness, and who is, above all, hiddenly and deeply, human. This is the model that the patient ends to choose and integrate; and the patient, in her turn, becomes inaccessible to those affective and social relationships, that would be reductive and disruptive of her so laboriously conquered persona's quality and meaning.
Similar considerations we can do for the analysis of the male heterosexual and homosexual patients. With regard to the last ones, the turning point appears when they change from promiscuous to a deep
relationship with a subject of the same sex, who represents a parental figure, where the relation may raise, sometimes, to a personal level. A relationship of this kind, that in some cases leads to the withdrawal of the erotical investments and to a true friendship, is often in time made impossible by the unavoidable inherent ambivalence of homosexuality, where the ambivalence is sustained by the impossibility of really true reciprocal complementarity, due to the gender's identity (Rubinstein). Usually, an homosexual relationship of this kind is the intermediate phase and the prelude to a further transformation of the homosexual and to the passage to the heterosexuality.
This last happy resolution is due to the integration and identification with the model of the persona represented by the analyst, and it is fairly typical of the psycho-analytical history of some homosexuals.
I have so described that libidinal-emotional psycho-analyst's countertransference's position that I have defined genital-personal. In the personal countertransference the analyst functions, simultaneously, as a global persona and as psycho-analyst, being available and participating constructively to the analytical relationship, even when he experiences feelings of irritation, annoyance, boredom, and even contempt, namely when he disidentifies with the way of being and behaving of the patient. I consider these emotions, too, expressions of sound and mature, in one word, personal countertransference.
To emphasize to what degree the genital-personal psycho-analyst's countertransference's position, his positive disposition and his constructive participation to the analytical relationship could be put to a hard test by the aggressive and involving transference of the patient, but also by the character's problems and the conflicts of the psycho-analyst, where there is the danger of losing the meaning and quality of personal countertransference and of deteriorating towards true neurotic or psychotic countertransference, I will refer a crucial phase of the analysis of a female patient.
The patient, to whom I have hinted in a previous paper - The empathic Resistance of the Psycho-Analyst -, and who has towards me a nearly steady positive disposition of therapeutic alliance and of optimal transferential involvement, where the dependance freely accepted is not submission, starts the session telling a dream. An acquaintance tells her that my birth's date is the same of that of the patient and that another psycho-analyst, known to both, is born in the same month of the patient, precisely, in the same day of her lover.
I tell her that there is a wish of fusional identity between me and her and between her lover and the other analyst. In this way she kills two birds with one stone. Following these words, the patient has a sudden reaction of rage, and accuses me to be biased and rigid, to impose my interpretations, to destroy the welfare feeling that the dream had given her, and finally, that I want to see competition and jealousy that she doesn't feel at all.
The unexpected irascible reaction and the determined refusal of an interpretation that I thought adequate and clarifying contents that had been partially accepted and worked through, recalled to my mind that situation that, following Wilhelm Reich, I consider a "typical basic character reaction". In fact, whereas the behaviour of this patient is nearly always receptive, at times, unexpectedly, when she is facing conflicts that touch on a tender spot, she reacts with impulses of rage and with an obstinate refusal of interpretations that are enough plain and self-evident. Mind you, this patient is gifted with considerable intelligence and with introspective capability, that sometimes border on obsessivity.
I notice in myself the rising of an irritation that gleams through the tone with which subsequent interpretations are formulated.
In the meantime, the patient is becoming more and more angry and challenging. Finally I tell her that her rage seems excessive to me, and if she doesn't like my interpretations she can certainly do without them, but that she can't nevertheless pretend that I should give her only interpretations to her liking, namely that I should function as a compliant mirror, limiting myself to confirm her self-analysis. Since every attempt to try to solve the conflict with interpretations that would appeal to her rational ego doesn't get any result, apart that of increasing her rage, I feel that the patient wants more and more involve me in an enervating sado-masochistic interaction, the model of which is well represented by the interminable polemics that mark the negative phase of the relation in a couple.
I therefore regain fairly rapidly the position of empathic neutrality, and since the session is ended, I tell her that we will better understand the conflict in the following one. The next day the patient arrives with partly accusing, partly self-defeating attitude, stating that, starting with her father and then with the men with whom she had had eroticaffective relations, relatively few, indeed, and finally with the previous analyst in an analysis of more than four years, they have all been disappointing. She adds also that the relation with me is not different from the previous ones. It is therefore better to resign, because she doesn't want to delude herself anymore, as not to be completely deceived. I tell her that she can't keep me responsible of her previous frustrations and deceptions.
This observation immediately provokes the same emotional reaction of rage and manifest wish to involve me in a sterile polemic, as in the previous session. If I insisted on the same interpretative line, I would lose my positive disposition and therefore the effectiveness and the usefulness of the interpretations would decrease. Evidently, my interpretations are interpreted by the patient, from one side as self-defensive, and from the other as a compliant precocious attempt to humorize, convince and bring her back to a positive and constructive disposition, that she from the time being hasn't any intention to have towards me and the analysis.
So, I go back with my mind to what has been a typical character reaction of mine, namely a sort of intollerance and irritability towards emotional aggressive reactions, expecially of women, when they lose the way of rationality and indulge with considerable complaisance in illogical, spiteful and childish reactions. Once I used to think that, when we attain deep, oedipal and pre-oedipal levels in the relation with a woman, we unavoidably bump, in periods of conflictual tension, against the hard clog of the basic incomprehension between man and woman, namely that nuclear situation that Nietzsche defined - deadly struggle between the sexes -. As years went by, I became persuaded that soon or later it comes out the woman's folly, which is concealed even in the most apparently rational and comprehensive among them.
I gradually ended by accepting the possibility that there are two types of logic (and, of course, of folly), a rational Aristotelic and Apollonian one, more typical of the man, and an emotional and Dionysiac one, more specific of the woman. With the passing of time I have, more and more, accepted and integrated the libidinal-emotional and Dionysiac aspects in the model of the persona. This recovered comprehension has allowed me to smile and relax in the session.
Therefore, after a quick historical re-examination of my countertransference, I resume a position of calm empathy and I tell her with a quiet tone that perhaps she has been irritated by the logic of my interventions, and that she wishes instead to provoke and involve me emotionally in a closer relation. The effect of these words is immediate. She tells me that it is probably so, and adds that in the previous session she didn't tell me that she saw my wife, whose sight made her jealous and envious, thinking of our life together, even in our profession, expecially when she saw her calling her own patient. Furthermore, she thought she was pregnant.
My preconscious feels waves of positive emotionality, coming from the patient. I tell her that, leaving aside a wish to obtain my love and my exclusive preference that we have analyzed, she can't accuse me of not having kept for most of the time an empathic comprehension of her problems: I haven't abandoned her, as the men of her past had done, starting with her father, and I am near to her, searching after new and more satisfactory solutions. Moreover, if past relations, to start with her mother, even before her father, failed, the relation with me, where the oedipal emotions, and not only oedipal, have been repeated and dramatized, is still alive, and here and now, all the relational potentialities are still at her disposal, to the degree to which she can, here and now, give up, and this depends from her and not only from me, her disillusioned and self-defeating behaviour, strictly connected to her need to possess people, as if they were her own objects. And I add that just the conflictual dramatization of the relation between her and me allows her to see that her construction as a persona does not depend by destiny, by a negative fortune, neither from any man, nor from the father, nor from the mother, but here and now only from us. Such consideration can free her from the feeling of the overwhelming of the past, and of its effect supposedly ruinous upon her. And so, whatever philosophers have said about it, psycho-analysis shows that the past can be undone. At the end of the session I feel that the patient, though hited, has recovered confidence in the analytical relationship.
I have tried to describe a short time crack of what I prefer to define personal countertransference's position of empathic availability of the psycho-analyst, rather than position of empathic neutrality. This crack could have led to a gross breaking off of the analytic functions, and to a relational conflictual involvement, but has, instead, through a selfanalysis of the countertransference, strengthened the capability of containment and comprehension of the transference's meaning of the conflictual problems of the patient. It has, in short, favoured awareness that is, always and simultaneously, open towards the emotional problems of the analyst, and those of the patient. The awareness, differing from consciousness, is always open towards two versants: the inner and the external one.
The positive meaning of the acting-in of the patient, namely of her attempt to provoke and break the position of the analyst's empathic availability, has been that of putting to a hard test the function and the quality of persona of the analyst, as to gain a greater emotional participation in the analytical relationship. This participation can, in the long run, increase the analyst's awareness and disponibility, and thus the potentialities of the analytical couple. The persona and the persona-persona relationship, through friction and increase of relational tension, reach and meet themselves at a higher maturational level.
The analyst, who is a persona on his or her own account, becomes dynamically so in the specific analytical relation with an individual patient, often and paradoxically, through the negative transference of the patient. This is probably the hidden meaning and concealed
purpose of the occasional and temporary conflicts in a couple*: to renew, again and again, the love relation between two personae.
But, beside these analytical relationships, where, as a reaction to the patient's transference neurosis or transference psychosis, the analyst may become involved with countertransference's feelings or manifestations, there are shaded areas of boundary between the countertransference feelings and behaviours that I have defined personal, identifiable with a permanent, empathic and constructive emotional disponibility of the analyst and the sliding down towards a way of feeling and behaving that is personalistic, namely idiosyncratic, rigid and compulsive.
All of us use the multeplicity of our personal qualities, capacities and potentialities in relationship with the patient. But one of these positive and constructive qualities, capacities and potentialities could be stimulated unilaterally and could try to prevail and dominate the totality of the persona. And this may escape to our awareness. So we would have the reduction of the persona, of her exquisitely individual and personal characteristics to an idiosyncratic, ideological, individualistic and personalistic way of being equivalent to a neurotic countertransference acting-out.
As Sandler has shown, very often the transference-countertransference relationship becomes established on the basis of the interaction between the roles that the patient wants to impose on the analyst, and the roles that the analyst personally prefers. Sandler thinks that the "ideal" solution for the analyst is a sound compromise. Indipendently from Sandler, I developped over the years the concept that I have
defined the play of the double roles.
I believe that the patient-analyst interaction is reducible to three possibilities:
1) the Sandler's compromise between the roles that the patient wants the analyst to play and the analyst's inclination to play the roles that he prefers;
2) the convergence (that should not be confused with Racker's concept of convergence), as syntonic convergence between the roles ,that the patient transfers or projects on the analyst and the positive inclination of the analyst to play just those roles; 3) the divergence between the transferred or projected roles of the patient and the negative inclination of the analyst to assume them upon himself. In other words the relational tension swings in the analyst between identification and disidentification.
I will present few quick examples.
* See also Kernberg: Aggression and Love in the Relationship of the Couple.
A psychiatrist, gifted with considerable intelligence and with a well organized personality on a familiar and social level, tries to project and identify me with a conventional role, as to share a normal and somewhat pedantic way of looking at life, a way that I would define wise, but rather devitalized and devoid of humor. I feel a slight annoyance for this projection, and attribution of a model that is not one to my liking. In a case like this, it is necessary to make a compromise. Little by little, this model that does not suit me and that I accept for sometimes becomes crumbled, without giving rise to a real crise, by interpretations, but also by some witty remarks.
As a consequence of my interventions, comes to light the nucleous of the patient character structure. He had been forced, since he was a little boy, to adapt to the model of a good, tidy, methodical, but above all patient and overunderstanding boy faced by a severely depressed and plaintive mother, who was, from time to time, capable of explosive rage and self-damaging fits. Since he was a child, he gave himself the task to help and cure his mother, compensating for a father who cared only little'!-of, her. The professional choice was certainly based on his need, born in his chilhood, to cure and save his mother. There was, however, a deep less evident layer in his character's defensive structuralization. His grandfather was an anticonformist and pleasure-loving man who dilapidated nearly entirely the considerable family estate. To be good meant, from one side to satisfy his need to be patient, honest, sober and overunderstanding with his mother, and from another, to avoid the danger of an identification with his grandfather. Another component was the need to offer to himself and to the mother an alternative model to that of his father. The deepening of the analysis of the patient's character structure has been prevalently due to the egodystony I felt towards the role that the patient projected on me, that has compelled me to avoid the extremes, either of the compliant acceptation of the role or of its refusal. In this case, I have made a sort of compromise.
The second patient, a psychologist undoubtely very clever, who has a prevailingly masochistic character structure, organized around what I have defined narcissistic-masochistic collusion, from the beginning of his analysis stimulated my tendency to use witty remarks that I considered equivalent to interpretations; rather, the interpretations were given in a humorous shape.
In time, I became aware that there was a reciprocally egosyntonic coming together, between the pressure of the patient to make me play this role, even perhaps to identify me with the ideal model of the humorist and my particular predilection for such a role and such a model. I became aware of the necessity to contain my tendency to play
the role that I preferred and that the patient wished that I played, to the point of provoking his frequent and unrestrainable bursts of laughter. By containing my tendency, I became more and more aware that the humorist role is just the one that the patient has adopted towards himself, as his privileged character defence (the basic character reaction of Wilhelm Reich), in face of all those situations that gave him anxiety, inadequacy and inferiority, but that could also cause him grief and rage. It was expecially his father who used humor, as his own character modality in face of the problems and difficulties of life and that he administered to the patient abundantly, partly sadically as a true leg-pull, but more often to mitigate the moments of discouragement and pain of the patient due to the ambivalent character of an epileptic mother and to sometimes difficult school situations. My countertransference tendency to humorize every situation as a manifestation of a personal aptitude of mine that met the projection upon me of a transference role and model, could deteriorate towards personalistic self-indulgent sadism that would prevent the comprehension of the patient, if the awareness did not intervene to modulate my tendency and to integrate it in the totality of the persona.
The third case is that of a psychologist, whose initial analytical problem was the need to be able to trust the person in relation with whom he could abandon himself, a person, namely, that knew how to welcome his need of dependance without letting him suffer traumata, frustrations and humiliations.
Shortly afterwards, I noticed that my positive and constructive disposition towards him showed itself as an accentuation of my personal interest for quotations taken from oriental sages, philosophers and psycho-analysts of the past. This countertransference modality had a sudden and rather unexpected beneficial result, so as to loosen the patient's resistance and to let himself go in the analytical relationship. I became aware that this countertransference tendency of mine, stimulated by the patient, could have become one-sided and narcissistically inflated, at the expense of the totality of my being as a persona and of a greater empathic sobriety. So I asked him if in the past there was a person with whom he shared a pleasurable interpersonal atmosphere. He remembered the pleasure that he felt listening to the tales with a moral shade, narrated by his grandfather, and he remembered also the feeling of acceptation he felt with him.
In this case, there has been agreement and syntony between a transference exigency of the patient and a countertransference "penchant", derived from one of my personal characteristics.
With a synthetical analysis of the three cases that I have presented, we could reach the conclusion that, in the first case there was the analyst's intollerance towards the role that the patient transferred upon and with which he tried to identify me. If however, the resistance of the analyst to be identified with the transferred role was not taken on by the domination of the awareness, it could have deteriorated and become idiosyncratic countertransference and could have lost the potentiality to become empathic resistance.
In the other two cases there was accordance between the roles transferred upon the analyst and my tendency to identify empathically with these roles, on the basis of a predilection for them. There has been, therefore, convergence. But, even in these two cases, if the convergence was accepted "sic et simpliciter" without the intervention of awareness, it could decay and become reciprocal compliance and idiosyncratic, narcissistic self-gratification of the analyst. In all the situations, therefore, awareness has intervened to control and contain, both the personalistic convergence and divergence of the analyst. Awareness has, hence, modified the countertransference's tendency towards spontaneism (unsound spontaneity). To these modifications we could give the name of "sound compromise" in Sandler's meaning, or choose another definition, as for example: modulation.
From another point of view, the three observed situations could, perhaps, be identifiable with three countertransference's possibilities: positive, negative and personal countertransference.
I have shown, once again, how the concept of the persona is clarifying and resolutive; awareness is the "forma mentis" of the persona.
I will now utilize the paper of Stein to develop and further clarify the problem of countertransference. In his paper of considerable interest, Stein formulates a clinical-theoretical consideration, that as far as I know has never been put so clearly in psycho-analytical writings. He maintains that the countertransference is much more due to the personal clinical-theoretical structure of the psycho-analyst, than to the emotions, based on internal object relations, which the patient could cause him. To exemplify his way of thinking, I will utilize his own words: "The clinical implications of this paper are clear. The idea that analysts have emotional reactions that are the direct and immediate result of patients' interventions, pure and unsullied by our personalities and theories, is refuted. Countertransference experiences need to be carefully checked against the form and the content of the patient material, the quality of the interaction between patient and analyst and all other information able, to decide whether or not the patient motivates the analyst's experience. If the patient does play this part, the analyst explores how the patient stimulates the countertransference and what this means. The analyst needs to be ever
vigilant that the utilized theory may influence the analyst's countertransference and affect clinical judgement" (cit. p. 333).
The paper of Stein is definitely critical, and even subtly ironical, towards the kleinian theorists, expecially towards the contributions of Bion and Grinberg. He is, however, also critical towards the opposite tendencies, those that emphasize the emotional reactions of the analyst, his complexes and conflicts. He points at what, for conscious or unconscious reasons, we don't usually think, namely, at the personal theoretical structure of the analyst and at the consequent clinical application of this structure, responsible for the countertransference. Utilizing a series of cases, among which that of the famous patient (D and his double analysis with Kohut, he shows the undoubtful influence on the patient of the analyst's reactions, due to his theoretical orientation. Certainly, the defence and ideological promulgation, even at unconscious level, of the analyst's theoretical position, must be taken in serious consideration in the psycho-analytic interactions. However, the theory, when is not ideologically and compulsively defended, is an essential part of the psycho-analyst persona. There would be, here, a far too large ground of discussion about what should be considered primary foundation, privileged factor, in the personality of the psycho-analyst: his emotions or his theories?
And again, in this debate, the concept of persona would be resolutive, since this concept privileges the totality, namely the inherent coherence between theories and emotions. The discussion, however, would remain open, to the degree to which some contending groups would consider valid, only, emotions and theories that to other groups would appear inadequate, wrong, or even unhealthy and unwholesome.
I believe that we live in an era, in which the task of the International Psycho-Analysis is that of investing its emotional and mental energies to reach a modulate synthesis that will not leave out of consideration the rigorousness of differentiated scientific positions, of those, whose formulations are greatly personalized, and of those who are committed and gathered, prevalently, around shared clinicaltheoretical formulations.
As far as I am concerned the criticism of Stein to those analysts who are unaware of their rigid and compulsive theoretical formulations, responsible for the prevailingly ideological countertransference, is partly valid and justified. It is, however, my convinction that, apart from the more or less acceptable definition of Grinberg's projective counteridentification, the capacity of perceiving, feeling and internalizing, the most subtle, shaded, projective identifications fall within the definition of empathy, which is a peculiar characteristic of the animal, and, even perhaps, of the vegetable kingdom. All of us, apart the relationship with the patients, if our preconscious antennae have not been coerced and crippled, feel the way the other people value and judge us, the way they love and hate us. But if we are not sufficiently present to ourselves, if we haven't developped our awareness, we would unavoidably end by feeling, automatically, hypnotically, hysterically, unrecognized, devaluated and put aside, or hypervaluated, idealized and exalted, so as to feel depressed or elated. All of us, if our wild nature is not atrophied, and if in time the conscious-preconscious relationship has been refined, will feel the negative or positive judgement, the love and the hate, the appreciation and the contempt, often silent and not declared, of our partners, and we will in turn enjoy or suffer, but we will not fracture and crush ourselves, we will not lose the unity and integrity of the persona. On the other side, we should not disregard the clinical-theoretical contributions of Searles, his researches on the projective conscious and unconscious activity of the psycho-analyst towards his patient, which could be responsible for what I permit myself to define: "the projective counteridentification of the patient", and for his acting-out. And it is just with our strengthened awareness, that we could define - free and fluent conscious-preconscious relationship -, that we perceive and understand that nuclear split in our patients that, when it becomes manifest in analysis, could be called "the play of double roles". My conception of the "double roles" is similar to that of Sandler. The simultaneity of projective and introjective double roles has not instead been taken in consideration from the kleinians, who have so much urged on unilateral, alternating and solipsistic projective and introjective activities.
But, if it is true that the analyst's projective counteridentification is, at least partially, the creation of the patient, and Stein should have been less critical towards the researches of Bion and Grinberg, just because they too can be utilized for a more extensive and deepened comprehension of countertransference, it is also true that the rather indiscriminate and uncritical formulation of the projective counteridentification's concept, would push the analyst to take a dangerous position of irresponsibility: the patient is psychotic, the analyst is sane; everything the analyst says and does, even the most over-elaborated, intellectualistically absurde, interpretation, if justified from the theory, is always right. This is a dangeroyus-4~athway, where the analyst meets solipsism and omnipotent irresponsibility. If the patient suffers, year after year, the torments of hell, as Stein has been able to see in a seminar's presentation of a case, it does not matter, as the analyst was convinced that the analysis was proceeding, conforming to the theory.
All the analyst's maturity, his libidinal-emotional health and his awareness, are engaged in discriminating what is projection, namely creation of the patient, and what is due to the analyst's own hypersensitivity and susceptibility, to his own emotional and ideological reactions. The projective counteridentification, provoked by the activity of the double roles of the patient, inscribed in his character's structure, could be exalted by the particular emotional and mental hypersensitivity of the analyst, and even by his ideology, as Stein has shown, or mitigated or even repressed by the insensitivity, smoothness and stiffness of the character structure of the analyst, by his absence of empathy.
The analytical intercourse, sometimes, could be a meeting between two monsters, between who has decided, on principle, that everything the other says and does is manifestation of madness, and he who tries to show, stubbornly, cost what it may, cost even the sanity, that he has always been right. But more than often, it is the intercourse between a persona, who wants to lead the other, amid every kind of difficulties and perils, to live and think as a persona, and another who, in spite of conscious and unconscious resistances, ambiguities and conflicts, preconsciously, yearns for becoming a persona.


References
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