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"The dream as a picture of the process" gives an overview of the work that has been done during the psychoanalytic process. The dream is going to play a crucial role in the therapy or in the analysis. Its lucidity and transparency are characteristic. Although the patient doesn't stress the importance of the dream during the session, he/she remembers them clearly and also later in the analysis or after termination, he/she doesn't forget this central dream. This kind of dream has a special impact on the analyst. Although this type of dream may occur during every analytic process, it emerges frequently during psychotherapies with traumatized people or with people who suffer unresolved mourning. The author uses clinical material from his own work. The thawing of a frozen inner world is illuminated by a dream and linked to a shift in the countertransference. The second dream illustrates the mechanisation of an analysis. The last case demonstrates how changes in the process are portrayed by elaborations of the first analytic dream. In one of the dreams there is a visual representation of the unconscious comprehension of the analytic process. The other dream is a picture of the expansion of the inner space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of psychoanalysis places the analyst on strong pressures - the analyst works alone in the consulting room in a medium of isolation, he has to be permanently open to what is coming from the patient, he is emotionally affected by his patients and he has the responsibility to keep and maintain professional boundaries of this relationship. Hate in countertransference could generate a particular conflict in the analyst - conflict between his need to repair, to help his patient, and the hate he feels toward the patient. There is another side of psychoanalysis as a profession, in addition to the clinical practice -the psychoanalytic institutions. Intolerance to diversity, dogmatism and the proneness to schism can be seen as institutional symptoms. Some authors offer explanations from different perspectives - political, sociological, and even religious. The author suggests that in order to understand conflicts in psychoanalytic institutions one must take into account the anonymous psychoanalytic patient who maintains the psychoanalysis as a profession, and argue that hate in countertransference could be seen as one of the sources of conflict between colleagues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychoanalytical theories define transference and countertransference as expressions of unconscious exchange between patient and therapist. The countertransference is the therapist's answer to patient's unconscious requests. Ferenczi and, later, Lacan, change part of the meaning of countertransference, shifting the center of gravity from patient to therapist (Lacan even reverses it): the transference is the patient's answer to the analyst's countertransference). The ethnopsychiatry approaches the countertransference and transference according to the therapist's theory and the patient's internal frame (its attachments from the group of cultural belonging). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a certified fact that the therapeutic meeting psychoanalyst-patient during the preliminary interview engages the protagonists in an explicitly convergent intercession, an agreement in the conscious register for a joint effort that aims to cure suffering and ameliorate self-knowledge. This facet of the relation defines the therapeutic alliance. However, what happens in parallel, in the subsurface of the meeting implies, likewise from the beginning, the more cryptic register of the unconscious, subtly looms in both the patient's precocious transferential movements and in the therapist's countertransference response. The paper, centered mainly on the latter aspect, sets to give a possible answer to such inquiries as how much, in what way and if they could be traced so early in the cure, and especially, to what extent are or could be considered (in) the key of the future analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper starts from the perspective of H. Racker on the countertransference. The paper is proposing to make the links between his concepts of analytic function and subjective experience, with the concepts of analytic space and analytic time. The author describes a phenomenon of the analysts' internal space and time dilatation, as well as that of the creation of subjective time, as a consequence of the dreaming activity during the session. The balance between countertransference forces is linked to the analysts' capacity of waiting, to the assessment of the quantitative factor, and to the narcissistic dimension of the analyst's transference. The paper is referring here to the concept of "respect", for the characters and the scenes (Ferro) and for the process Winnicott). The author makes a comparison between two clinical vignettes of Beckett, by D. Anzieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of countertransference has known a troubled history within the bound of psychoanalysis and was borrowed, more or less successfully and more or less adequately, by multiple psychotherapeutic currents, some placed entirely outside the spectrum of psychoanalysis. The author will try to approach countertransference from a psychoanalytical perspective, more specifically the way countertransference and regression (both of the patient and analyst) manifest themselves, as well as the adjustments necessary between the two, considering that without a good capacity for regression the analyst may miss the "unconscious to unconscious" meeting point - that, on the one hand; on the other, a regression too emphasized or too long of the analyst may jeopardise the treatment, by activating the unconscious defence mechanisms, both in the therapist and the patient, leading to the consolidation of resistance. This specific manifestation and adjustment make the profession of psychoanalyst "an impossible profession" (Freud, Green), considering that self-analysis is one of the (incomplete and insufficient) solutions at the therapist's disposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author is trying to clarify, through different psychoanalytical theories (A. Freud, P. Heimann, H. Deutsch, M. Little, C. York, H. Rosenfeld etc.) and also through his own clinical practice with addictive patients how the analytic treatment of these patients does not succeed if one insists on a rigid adherence to the classical method. This means that many parameters have to be introduced in the analysis and that the analyst must play a more active role, i.e. those aspects of psychoanalytical technique that can (arguably) be modified to meet the needs of particular classes of patients. The so called parameters are really not very different from the technique which Anna Freud called "developmental help". The author underlines the countertransferential difficulties encountered in the treatment of the addict, that are not very different from many that we find in the treatment of adolescents. In both cases the analyst is bombarded from every corner with an intensity both in quality and quantity, which, unless well prepared for in advance, one is very much in danger of succumbing to. The relevance of the empathy and the therapist's personal values, opinions and attitudes to the addict and the alcoholic need to be acknowledged. This is one of the occasions when the benefits from a personal psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic experience are clearly seen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author tries to illustrate, from a historical point of view, how Freud's urgent desire to take a distance from his initial practice in hypnosis to be able to establish a new psychoanalytical theory and practice, more scientific and out of all kind of suggestive influences, has blocked him to give an adequate value to the countertransference aspects involved in the analyst-analysand relation. Only in his latter writings, "Constructions in analysis", he approaches this issue, even if in an implicit way, underlying the personal countertransference elements existent in the working of the construction of the analyst. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical research on the treatment process has long time - for good reasons - avoided to even try to measure countertransference, although this dimension of the psychoanalytic work has gained in momentum over the last decades. Our paper reports on various efforts of how to approach such a methodology for measuring such an elusive concept. The distinction between habitual patterns of countertransference and situational affective reactions seems most likely a helpful way to approach the topic. Recent empirical research and measures on countertransference will be presented and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My contribution debates the relationship between the rule of abstinence and countertransference, existing much more implicitly than explicitly in the specialized studies. I discern three moments: exclusion of countertransference by the demand of abstinence as a rule; restraining the abstinence rule to neurotic disorders and emphasizing the importance of noticing and expressing countertransference for the psychotic pathology and borderline; exclusion of the rule of abstinence and the assertion, as a substitute, of the "optimal gratification" principle, which promotes the expression of countertransference, a valid principle for the neurotic disorders too. By pointing out the one-sided extreme points of view, I put forward: "the principle of the optimal facilitation of the analysis" as an alternative to overcome one-sided attitudes inside a balanced synthesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countertransference is one of the most important tools of the analytic work. In this paper, I will try to show how countertransference has been considered in different ways according to the importance paid to the analyst's subjectivity. One important problem concerns the therapeutic value of the elaboration of countertransference. My hypothesis is that this necessary process is not enough to promote the therapeutic progress. I think that the analysis of countertransference is essential in order to keep the analytic process open but it is not a true therapeutic tool per se. The analyst should constantly and eagerly integrate the patient's world with every element (memories, reconstructions, considerations on life experiences, including his own) that can be useful in widening the patient's emotional life. The analytic relationship depends on the analyst's capacity to create and maintain in his mind a place for the patient (for his history, his difficulties and his tacit request for mental and emotive development) and on the patient's disposition to consider the analyst as a transformative object that is indispensable for his growth. The analytic process continues and progresses as long as this relationship remains alive. In this perspective, the analysis of countertransference plays a moderate and self-controlled role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]