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Ted has been teacher, colleague, and friend to me throughout my professional life. There was something about Ted's person that resonated with me. I felt his presence when I began training at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where I did my internship and clinical fellowship, and again as I was going through training at NYPSI. Once I graduated, I had the good fortune of being invited to a study group with Ted, Charlie Brenner, and many other senior analysts. I was most impressed with his ways of thinking, his humanity, which came across vividly in his work and in his responses to others. He had an openness and dedication to finding ways to reach each individual patient. I especially admired his emphasis on turning to the evidence from the patient, and his focus on really helping his patients with what was central to them, not having to stick to analytic rules. He was courageous in his willingness to present his careful analytic work when his focus on countertransference was not considered appropriate at the time, with much backlash from others. In terms of Ted's importance to psychoanalysis, starting in the 70ʹs, he focused in on an area of psychoanalysis that was quite undeveloped at the time – the analyst's use of his self, except for a few strong voices from the Kleinians (Heiman, 1950, Racker, 1953), though of course many others later. Ted could see the limitation of focusing only on the transference, omitting countertransference. He focused on "what's happening between us" before any concept of the "analytic third" or "co construction" had been born. So much focus was on the intrapsychic – the only focus of a "true" analyst, at a time when the interpersonal was viewed as "nonanalytic." He brought his analytic lens, studying the analytic data in the countertransference, to the benefit of the psychoanalytic community, a focus quite different from relational analysis and interpersonal analysis. His influence on my own work was powerful. The shared background of training in a place with many gifted and talented people, who all were seriously involved in trying to learn analysis and apply the work to patients, but with an openness to new ideas, to valuing the data from the patient above loyalty to a particular theory, the lens on one's own feelings, thoughts, fantasies, attitudes to facilitate the most full understanding of the patient, all have enriched my understanding and appreciation of the analytic process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author views every symptom, conflict, defense, or unconscious fantasy as a result, in part, of an adaptation. For example, cumulative traumas from childhood aren't just traumatic, but become part of an individual unconscious fantasy while potentially contributing to a way of living that can lead to certain satisfactions along with crippling inhibitions. Analyzing adaptations, along with the other components that bring patients to our offices, is necessary because of a paradigm change in the goals of psychoanalysis from reconstruction to building more complex representations from simple representations. Further, the analyst's appreciation for forces that lead to adaptations helps reduce intense super-ego pressures. Clinical examples are presented to demonstrate the author's perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A psychotherapeutic relationship that can legitimately be referred to as psychoanalysis has expanded considerably since the tempering of the Freudian and ego-psychological hegemonic definitions originally imported to America by European analysts fleeing the Nazis and lasting until the middle 1980s. To some extent, pragmatic considerations have gradually supplanted older metapsychological, though the latter still carry all too much weight in the way analytic practice is conceptualized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classical psychoanalytic tradition reinforced the idea that the patient use free association and the analyst was similarly limited to a rule of free-floating attention (listening) leading to interpretation of unconscious trends. The central aim of technique was to ensure that transference of the past onto the analyst would occur in a context that could permit interpretations of the transference. This article examines ways in which therapists use psychoanalytic theory to distance themselves from the relational aspect of the therapeutic dyad. The use of the therapists’ use of a professional self as a protective and distancing in the course of an analysis or therapy tends to derail the development of a successful therapeutic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is generally wide acceptance that transference develops in child and adolescent psychoanalytic treatments. The interpretation of the transference is an important aspect of analytic technique, leading to both insight and clinical improvement. This article uses vignettes to demonstrate how interpretation of a child’s dreams may help the analyst and the young patient understand the patient’s feelings about the analyst, and may ultimately provide the patient with transformative insights regarding the important people in his life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Dreams create unique opportunities and challenges for the child and adolescent psychoanalyst. The psychoanalytic axiom that dreams are the “royal road to the unconscious” (Freud, 1900, p. 608) can exert an unhelpful pressure to understand and interpret dreams prematurely, especially in work with children and adolescents. It may be useful for the analyst who works with children and adolescents to think about dream imagery kaleidoscopically, allowing his own images of the dreamer’s images to float in mind and to move in and out of consciousness in response to other verbalizations, play, behaviors, and shifting countertransferences. I encourage an open-ended process to dream work that tolerates uncertainty and ongoing questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This posthumous publication consists of three parts written at different times by Takeo Doi. The second part was written in 1964 as his presentation at the first congress of the World Association of Social Psychiatry. The first part was added when the second part was introduced to the Japanese readers in 1969. The third part was written about Freud’sObservations on Transference-Love(Contemporary Freud) in 1993. Upon Doi’s return to Japan in 1956 after a disappointing experience in the United States, where it was recommended that he return to Japan by Dr. Reider, Takeo Doi investigated himself personally and culturally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In basic psychoanalytic theory of technique, interpretation and insight reveal the latent content beneath the manifest appearance of symptoms, character pathology, and disturbed irrational behavior. The understanding of the neutrality and objectivity of the analyst, however, has been modified with new formulations of interpersonal, intersubjective influence and dyadic unconscious communication. Transference is often regarded as coconstructed in the present in a transference-countertransference field, emphasizing the analytic relationship and experience as a two-person analytic process. Nevertheless, the analyst is capable of good enough objectivity and neutrality for analytic work. Countertransference interpretation expands insight into the patient, as well as the analyst. Interpretation is not only resisted, but is reinterpreted by the analytic dyad with gradual partial insight and integration. The infantile unconscious, genetic interpretation, and reconstruction are often devalued in some object relations frameworks. A clinical vignette illustrates the continued importance of the past in the present without neglect of current determinants and perspectives. While integrating newer considerations of the two-person analytic field, interpretation and insight into the dynamic unconscious are here regarded as thesine qua nonof psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from concepts that Winnicott developed and that are unexpectedly near to postmodern concepts, I attempt to map some features of the complex territory that lies between analyst and patient from the viewpoint of the relationship that exists between subjectivity and objectivity. In the first section, I give a personal reading of Winnicottian model, emphasizing the idea that the subject’s unconscious acts upon and transforms the object’s (thereby putting in motion further unconscious processes within the object). Then I highlight the presence, in the transference, of various levels of communication and of a paradoxical multidimensionality that upsets the traditional space-time categories and also upsets the analyst’s mental stance. In the third section, I present a new form of countertransference (pervasive), through which the patient’s unconscious creates a sensory environment of proto-emotions and atmospheres, of states and rhythms, that have permeated it and that, due to their intensity and nature, arrived there without symbolization. Finally, I attempt to demonstrate how the patient can undergo psychic change only if the analyst has, himself, inhabited an analogous process of transformation in response to the disturbances arising within the analytical relationship. Theclinical-theoretical stanceemerging from these reflections sees the relation to the other, to oneself, and to the world as made possible by subjective creation always taking place in the unconscious. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on views of author in response to writer Gail Reed's work. He appreciated and thanked Reed for giving her time on his ideas of psychoanalysis and connecting it with work of psychoanalyst André Green. It also discusses observations and the statement of Steven Goldberg, Senior Investigator at Biomedical Research Center, Baltimore, Maryland regarding transference.

The article describes the author's views regarding the impact of Psychoanalyst Antonino Ferro's writing and clinical teaching on analysts at many centers. He states that Ferro's work has moved away from traditional notions of transference toward conceptualization of interpersonal psychoanalysis in which terms such as transference and countertransference are inadequate to convey his meaning. It also include two clinical reports to explain Ferro's approach and author's response to it.

This issue began in an interchange with Anna Ornstein. Heather's patients become equal partners in exploring the meaning of dreams, both the patient's and Heather's own. Henry tracks the details of the patient-analyst/therapist relationship that tend to pass under the radar of buzzwords citing the relational aspect of therapeutic action. [Extracted from the article]