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The relationship between one's home and its internal representation is a complex one. Imbued with memories of desire, loss, fear and anxiety, these often emerge in the analytic space and wait for interpretation and understanding. The analysts' ability to use their countertransference and explore the patient's underlying feelings often reveals the impact of culture and surround on the patient's contemporary experience of space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I write of an 11-year odyssey with a patient who despite our best efforts, remained mired in emotional deadness, anomie, and depersonalization. The journey led me to question my core assumptions about co-creating an effective therapeutic alliance as well as my competence as an experienced psychotherapist-psychologist, well-trained in empirically validated treatments. What I realized was a failed treatment, that led me to pursue psychoanalytic training. In the process, I grew to understand that our parallel traumatic life histories, and my inadvertent and unconscious reluctance to acknowledge my own countertransference, kept me from joining with him in the intersubjective experience of profound grief – that which, in retrospect, I believe would have made all the difference in his treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

A review of a clinical report by Harold Searles, attending to Searles' ways of working with psychotic patients, his influences and those he influenced, as well as contemporary thinkers (Laplanche), who speak as Searles did, of the power of the other in the construction of psychic life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Embodiment represents a new theoretical development and innovative research perspective within cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, emphasizing the role that the body has in shaping the mind. However, the idea of mind and body being interconnected is an old one and has long roots within psychoanalysis, e.g., in character analytic tradition emphasizing the "how" of relating and talking as expressed in nonverbal behavior and body language. The article explores how the patient's embodied, structuralized bearing and bodily appearance reveal relational messages. Through a case presentation, I illustrate how embodied affects and ways-of-being are actualized in the transference and can be captured through the embodied emotional response of the analyst. I argue that the concept of relational scenario emerges as fruitful for observing transference-countertransference dynamics. [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]

The creation of safety in a relationship is a prerequisite for the risk-taking required for developmental progress and therapeutic change. Psychoanalysts typically speak of safety in the analytic relationship in terms of verbal exploration of sources of the patient's anxiety, and the analyst's role in maintaining the frame. Yet it is clear that safety is not the same as the absence of threat, but is instead based on psychological safety as well as physical safety. Psychological safety – or safety with another person – requires the developmental capacity making social connections. The fields of infant research and neurodevelopment – particularly the work of Beatrice Beebe and Stephen Porges – have contributed significantly to this critical aspect of analytic work through their explications of stress regulation. Disorders of self-regulation – i.e. impairments in the capacity to manage stress and experience safety – are central to the neurodevelopmental disorder of autism. In addition, language and symbolization are typically compromised in individuals on the autism spectrum. Therefore, therapists working with individuals on the autistic spectrum must explore alternatives to language and symbols for creating a safe environment. These alternative methods of communication are what I call the "music and dance" of therapeutic action. In this article I will first discuss some relevant contributions from research in infancy and neurodevelopment. I will then use a clinical illustration of analytic work with a child on the autistic spectrum to demonstrate nonverbal and largely implicit bodily means of mutual regulation with a patient. This example not only applies to the treatment of autism, but also provides more general insights into methods of creating safety in the analytic dyad. [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]

The author approaches his commentary on these original and interesting articles from the perspective of Bion's psychoanalytic theory. Two of the pillars of Bion's thought were surely the concepts of transformations and waking dream thought which enable the alphabetizing of sensorial stimuli in real time and narrative deconstruction and de-concretization, toward an expansion of the oneiric dimension of the psychoanalytic work. The author's observations are made from within the structure called the analytic field in which the session appears as a dream of minds where the figures that come to life during the session are not treated as historically real characters or internal objects but as characters which express the emotions shared by analyst and patient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussion of the work of Alison Howard whose diagnosis of coronavirus, made public, became a complex part of the transference and countertransference. Clinical work under these difficult conditions was discussed in terms of contemporary clinical theory stressing the potency and necessity of change in the analyst, the work of Ogden and Levenson, in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Let me close this issue by returning to where I began, with the slouching beast in Yeats's "The Second Coming", one of the "beings who inhabit Yeats's apocalyptic poems that await their 'hour,'" a beast that "foretells a monstrous birth" (Vendler, [10], p. 139, 170). How, I wonder, would such a monstrous birth and the nightmare and catastrophe Yeats's poem describes apply to our becoming our analyst self? Jung continues: The analyst would have to "clearly understand that psychic infections ... are in fact the predestined concomitants of ... [the work]" (Jung, [6], para. That's the most challenging question I find we must continue to ponder when we look at the association of Yeats's poem and its slouching beast with the emergence of our analyst self. [Extracted from the article]

Through the theoretical lens of self psychology and complexity theory, the author illuminates how it happened that writing, and the professional opportunities that emerged because she was an analytic writer, became the royal road to the creation of her sense of being, mostly, a competent analyst after analytic training that left her feeling insecure and inadequate. Then, she describes recent work with a patient, Tom, to open a window into her consulting room and illuminate herself as an analyst at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the inception of the course in 2007, we have met for a Saturday class and barbeque at Allen Siegel's home in Winnetka. What follows is first a statement by Allen about how he teaches the class, and then we include a sampling of the students' questions to Allen and their accounts of Allen's responses. The setting of Allen's home enabled our conversation as a class to feel more open and comfortable, a feeling that was propagated by Allen's deep sense of empathy and invigorated by his passionate responses to everyone in the class. I During the class, I asked Allen whether there is always a transference involved in each psychotherapy, because I can clearly see how the transference is developed in the vignettes from "John's" case (in Allen's book) but cannot really find it in "Winston's" case. i. [Extracted from the article]

A case vignette involving contemporary communications technology—an iPhone, a computer, digital photos, and Skype—suggests that unconscious communications are not only repetitions of the patient's ongoing experience and dynamics, but may also be prospective, expressing emerging emotional and psychological potentials that were previously unavailable to the patient. These communications may also provide direction for the treatment via the analyst's countertransference fantasies and responses. It is also suggested that these bidirectional communications are shared between patient and analyst through an unconscious field akin to what Jung posited as a collective unconscious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unconscious communication, like transference-countertransference, is ubiquitous in life and in the psychoanalytic process. Regardless of a clinician's theoretical perspective, and despite differences in clinical technique, Freud's advice to turn our unconscious to the patient's unconscious "like a receptive organ" has guided generations of analysts toward deeper exploration of the countertransference in the intersubjective analytic field (Freud, 1912a, p. 115). In this clinical article, the recognition and use of unconscious communication, from the ordinary to the more extraordinary or uncanny, is described at moments of separation as harbinger of loss and, ultimately, termination. Such moments hold potential for a depth of emotional resonance with and accessibility to our patient's psychic realities that may otherwise be unavailable due to our systemic defense against a shared existential anxiety that all things come to an end. The emergence of unconscious communication via the analyst's reverie and dreams are considered an opening of potential space where ending can be conceived as a bearable thought—a transitional organizing experience for the dyad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I contend that free association, far from being outdated, is a most central feature of the method of psychoanalysis, as it operates an essential reopening of the process of translation/repression. Free association sinks its roots in a Helmholtzian model of the mind and is, therefore, also congruent with modern neuroscience. Through the notion of surprise, logical and practical connections can be established between free association, seduction, trauma, and transference. A well-conceived concept of free association is, therefore, an indispensable tool for the practice of psychoanalysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing attention is appropriately afforded to the importance of practicing group psychotherapy in an evidence-based fashion. Pressures with regard to accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness make this an imperative in contemporary psychotherapy. This article illustrates and operationalizes factors that contribute to enhanced group psychotherapist effectiveness; identifies approaches that maximize therapeutic opportunities within the client-therapist relationship in the here and now of the group therapy setting; and illustrates the principles of therapeutic metacommunication within the therapeutic relationship and explores therapist use of self and judicious therapist transparency. An evidence-informed approach guides these articulations and the article illustrates these principles with a clinical vignette and discussion [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The desire to help others is a common motivation for becoming a therapist, and boundary crossings are an expectable part of psychotherapeutic work. However, progression to boundary violation is rare. The concept of analtruistic boundary violationis presented and illustrated with detailed clinical material drawn from the analysis of Mrs. A,1a generally ethical therapist, whose violation of the therapist/patient boundary with her patient, M, began as an altruistically motivated enactment and boundary crossing. In Mrs. A’s case, and arguably in all similar altruistic boundary violations, a specific fit existed between patient and therapist. The intense need to rescue this particular patient was fueled by Mrs. A’s history of early physical and abandonment trauma, which increased her vulnerability to overidentification with her traumatized patient. The stress of relocation to another city and closing her practice further magnified her susceptibility. The complex clinical, professional, ethical, and legal issues inherent in consulting on such a case are discussed. I describe my countertransference and my parallel enactment, an initial crossing of the boundary between the roles of supervisor and therapist. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the process of psychoanalytic couple therapy from an attachment perspective. A brief and selective history of the transference interpretation sets the scene for considering applications to couple psychoanalysis, where there are multiple transference sites, and some implications of attachment theory where the unconscious is viewed not only in dynamic terms, but also as nonconscious information processing systems. Attention is drawn to the potential for working with the nonverbal communication of affective states which, through affectively charged repetitive sequences over time, impacts on procedural knowledge. Implicit intersubjective interactions, often expressed through behavior, make up the temporal region described as beingbeforeinterpretation, whose impact may well gobeyondverbal interpretation in terms of its mutative effects. This distinction is also used to distinguish interpretations that understand present behavior as a repetition of the past (in this sense ofgoing before) from those that focus on its function in trying to achieve an aspired to future (going beyond). In both cases, couple psychotherapists work in the space between intersubjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Freud developed many of his theories and technique while attempting to help hysterical patients. This article approaches hysteria not just as a syndrome consisting of a group of signs and symptoms, but primarily as an inner world configuration that fuels object relations patterns. The internal world hysterical profile informs the transference/countertransference experience and the therapeutic process. I attempt to describe some of the technical problems psychoanalysts have to deal with while working with these patients. Hysterical object relations do not necessarily manifest themselves as somatic symptoms—epileptic-like, paralysis, blindness, etc.—even in patients that show the relational hysterical patterns. These object relations modes can appear in any analysis irrespective of the primary diagnostic conceptualization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 article examines clinical and theoretical aspects of insight as a therapeutic tool in the analysis of dreams of children and adolescents. Suggestions are offered for creative ways of engaging the child’s interest in dreamwork. Although some analysts have thought that little can be accomplished by working with dreams in the analysis of children, I demonstrate that gaining access to unconscious conflicts, working in the context of transference, and deepening the material through the use of insight has a salutary effect on the child or adolescent patient. [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]

After integrating and elaborating on the corresponding definitions of interpretation in major standing psychoanalytic dictionaries, I highlight the differences between the interpretative process and its objectives for patients with neurotic personality organization and those with severe personality disorders. To illustrate the interpretative process within the Transference Focused Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for patients with borderline personality organization, the clinical vignette, depicting the interpretation of projective mechanisms as part of interpretation of primitive object relations activated in transference, is presented verbatim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

In this work, we briefly describe present-day, postmodern evolution of the family and the attention centers that both the government and the private sector have established when this fails. The birth of child psychoanalysis and its application in one of those centers, forging roots for further psychoanalytic development, is briefly described. The importance of countertransference and analyst supervision for those treating traumatized patients left without a family is discussed, as is an institution that altruistically rescues these children; the function of a psychoanalyst and his/her avatars is shown by way of three clinical cases when a strong countertransference obviously occurred in him/her. Finally, reflections are made about the importance of handling countertransference with the analyst’s supervisor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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.

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses topics within the issue including writing by three prominent authors whose works are influenced by ideas of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, analytic pragmatism, conflict theory and contemporary views of 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.

The article discusses R. Karush and A. Schmukler's dreams from their patients that connect the analytic process, transference and insight and how they worked with them. It cites the example of 7 year old Tanya which shows how dream can illuminate the transference and Schmulker's description of how the dream of monsters of 7 year old Jim prompted him to wonder about his role in injuries and accidents. It notes how they demonstrate in their articles how dreams facilitate the process of knowing.

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]