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This study explored the contributors that influenced the marital conflict between a Korean husband and a Japanese wife. The study found three triggering events and latent contributors in personal, familial, social and cultural levels. Although the three events triggered marital conflicts, the latent contributors were fundamentally maintaining and aggravating the couple's relationship. As a result, this study suggests that when family therapists counsel interracially married Asian couples, it is necessary to address cultural differences in families of origin, communication methods, and transference along with the cultural disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this case commentary, I offered my musings related to what I imagined thinking about if I encountered Colette in psychotherapy, highlighting potential interpersonal dynamics that could infuse the treatment relationship. I explored several clinical issues, including themes of race, repetition of abuse, enactments, working with trauma, and other unconscious dynamics at play in the treatment of traumatized patients. These thoughts were provided from the perspective of a young, White therapist who practices from a relational position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The clinician's experiences of race outside of the treatment room contribute to the formation of a racialized self, which influences clinical work with all clients notwithstanding race. Multiracial individuals at times must balance their external physical presentation-and the corresponding race-related categories that others place on them-with their own internally constructed racial identifications. The mechanisms of identification and disidentification can provide safety for the multiracial individual. How can clinicians effectively acknowledge their own identifications and disidentifications as lenses for seeing the multiracial person's racialized self and selves so as to more effectively work with the multiracial? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experience of teaching a graduate seminar on aging led us to adapt and augment our teaching perspectives and approaches to help students gain insight into their own limitations in working with older adults. Role-play exercises helped students bring their own family of origin, personal experiences, biases, and beliefs about older adults into bold relief. New-found insights from these lived experiences included better understanding and appreciation for transference and countertransference issues, which are often overlooked or given short shrift in our training and work with older adults. Long considered not suitable for serious clinical work, older adults are increasingly asking for more than just life-sustaining case management, yet many clinicians feel limited in their abilities when they accidentally or unintentionally encounter older adults or adjunctive elder family members in their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Lacanian perspective privileges speech as the motor of cure in the treatment of this borderline patient. In assuming such an ethical position, the clinician fostered a symbolic transference marked by an outburst of rage that signified a rupture of her entanglement with her mother. In this way, the clinician's promotion of 'full speech' breached the patient's defensive need for 'invisibility' and led her to produce a socially useful project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The college experience represents a major life transition from adolescence to adulthood, which is often fraught with challenges in relationships, identity formation, and communal belonging. Steady generational changes in self and relational identity have led to younger generations that increasingly embody a more interpersonal and less individualistic conception of the human person, with less rigid norms and greater openness to diversity. These characteristics make college students an appropriate target population for interpersonal psychotherapies based on mutuality of process. Relational therapy is a particularly fitting treatment modality for college students, as it focuses on these very qualities. This article reviews the current literature on relational theory in psychological and social work practice, describing its principal tenets and concepts, and applying this theory to clinical work with college students to reveal applications for constructive practice with this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lubavitch Chassidim are one of several ultra-orthodox groups within Judaism. Their central focus is on their leader or Rebbe, who is seen as not only the possessor of all wisdom but also having supernatural powers. In working therapeutically with Lubavitch, one needs to distinguish if the beliefs of the individual are unique to them or reflect the belief system of the community. If the former, then it obviously needs to be analyzed. If the latter, then it is seen as an identification with the group and reflective of the need for group cohesion and often a regulator of self-esteem. The following article demonstrates these factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transferences from patients' everyday lives, or extra-therapeutic transferences, provide rich material in psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice, but the literature has mainly ignored this topic, reserving the term transference for the therapy relationship. While references to the therapy relationship may also be present or emerge from this material, at times explicit interpretations of extra therapeutic transferences are appropriate, without reference to the therapy relationship. Through an extensive literature review and case illustrations from the author's practice, this paper suggests that the concept of extra-therapeutic transference should be revisited and integrated with a broader understanding of transference, to bring theory more in line with actual practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Erik H. Erikson’s case of a theological student on the borderline of psychosis. The case, presented in a lecture published in Insight and Responsibility (, pp. 47–80), was important to Erikson for two important reasons: It enabled him to gain confidence in his capacity to help young adults and convinced him that he was not being disloyal to Freud by focusing on patients’ religious experiences. His presentation of the case focuses on an enigmatic dream image that caused the patient to believe that he was losing his mind but that, when interpreted, led to a breakthrough in his therapy and eventual recovery of his mental health. The springboard for his study of Martin Luther, this case illustrates the three primary religious images that Erikson identifies in Young Man Luther (): the maternal matrix, the paternal voice, and the pure self. It also illustrates how the timely appearance of a new person in one’s life may have enormous therapeutic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emmanuel Levinas proposed a philosophical critique that worked to unsettle and decenter generalizing, totalizing, and thematizing attempts to define the self. However, on the other hand, Levinas provides the space for the formation of a configuration of the self that has been conditioned by ethical relation and even points to some of the ingredients for (or shape of) such a self. Throughout Levinas’ work, the concept of hineni (“Here I am”) is used to illustrate the moral event that best characterizes the “psyche.” In the following paper, we consider how to apply the notion of hineni to modern psychological constructs of the human self. In the first section, we flesh out the characteristics of a self lived as hineni. We argue that such a self is “shaped” or oriented morally toward the outside and is radically exposed to the Other (not merely a bearer of moral consciousness or moral attributes). It is a remembering of the preoriginal and primordial ethical relation. In the second section, we use the psychoanalytic concept of transference to illustrate how the moral shape of the self can be forgotten, and how the self enters a state of “mineness” wherein the Other is reduced to one’s own history (Levinas ). In this state of forgetfulness, we argue that a “concreteness of egoism” (Levinas ) is maintained and a self lived toward the outside remains untenable. Transference, we argue, is an impoverished relation and a forgetting of and violence to the Other. Its proper use, however, in the therapeutic alliance allows for the possibility of a remembering of the Other and a calling beyond oneself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews Pamela Cooper-White's book as an extraordinarily well developed, nuanced, and empirically grounded reflection on the significance of transference and countertransference dynamics in ministry; it also points to several ways in which the book's thesis could be more fully developed theologically and more broadly applied in ministry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The understanding of transference and countertransference has changed a great deal since Freud introduced the terms. A case example indicates one way the patient's and clinician's past experiences and expectations interact to create a here and now relationship that is highly influenced by transference/countertransference. The understanding of both terms as aspects of a mutually constituted interaction has practice implications for the treatment of adult survivors of abuse who have a somatoform disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the usefulness of attachment theory in working with adults in psychotherapy. There are four classifications of attachment status in adults: secure attachment, and three types of insecure attachment: dismissing, preoccupied, and disorganized. These categories do not conform to standard diagnostic entities. I discuss examples of the three insecure attachment categories and the likely transference and countertransference configurations that may occur in each category. These categories provide an additional way for therapists to understand and to respond to the needs of their clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On November 6, 2002, Dr. James Fosshage delivered the following talk at a Clinical Training Conference held at the Blanton-Peale Institute. The Clinical Training Conference at Blanton-Peale provides experiential and conceptual resources to support the therapist-in-training in the context of his/her professional identity. The training conference is attended by candidates of all phases of the Psychoanalytic Program, the Pastoral Psychotherapy Program, and the Marriage and Family Program, as well as faculty members, administrators, staff, and interns of the institute. The residents were asked to review three articles written by Dr. Fosshage in preparation for his presentation: “Toward Reconceptualising Transference: Theoretical and Clinical Considerations,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (1994) 75 (2): 265–280; “Countertransference as the Analyst's Experience of the Analysand: Influence of Listening Perspectives,” Psychoanalytic Psychology (1995) 12 (3): 375–391; and “Listening/Experiencing Perspectives and the Quest for a Facilitating Responsiveness,” Conversations in Self Psychology: Progress in Self Psychology , (1997) 13: 33–55. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture in its various forms now serves as a primary carrier of globalization and modern values, and constitutes an important arena of contestation for national, religious, and ethnic identity. Although reactions in Europe, Japan, and other societies where modern values prevail, tend to be symbolic, in areas of the developing world, especially in Muslim countries where traditional values and radically different notions of identity and society predominate, reactions tend to be very intense and redirected at external targets through forms of transference and scapegoating. Ultimately, this is not so much a clash between civilizations as a clash within civilizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A social-cognitive model of transference -- defined as the activation and application of a mental representation of a significant other to a new person -- has been verified experimentally in terms of relevant inferences and memory about the new person (e.g., Andersen & Cole, 1990; Andersen, Glassman, Chen, & Cole, 1995). The model suggests that transference should persist and increase over time, indicating that the phenomenon is not fleeting or self-correcting, and is therefore of clinical importance. In two within-subject experiments, participants learned about four fictional people, one of whom resembled their own significant other. Theythen completed a recognition-memory test. In Study 1, the test was administered both immediately after learning about the new people, and again 2 to 3 weeks afterward . As predicted, greater confidence in having learned representation-consistent attributes that had not been presented in the learning task occurred in the significant-other condition relative to the control conditions -- both immediately and after the delay, with the effect increasing over time. The potential artifact of the first memory test vis-a-vis the second was ruled out in Study 2, which showed the persistence effect using a test administered only once , 2 to 3 weeks after the learning task. Persistence and exacerbation in the effect have theoretical and clinical implications, as does the general notion that transference occurs in everyday social perception on the basis of significant-other representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on supervision discusses processes occurring in the supervisor-supervisee relationship that are similar to, and have parallels in, a parent-child relationship. This slipping from the one type of relationship into the other can interfere with the process of supervision. This shift to the supervisee feeling like a child and the supervisor like a parent is liable to be the natural outcome of transference and counter-transference. The aim of this paper is to examine the pseudo-parental role of the supervisor, in order to make supervisors more aware of, and alert to, the possibility that their supervision of young workers may slip into a parent-child mode, to identify critical points where parental feelings may intrude on supervision, and to suggest a useful support model that can help prevent this intrusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daydreams, long recognized as containers of unarticulated, unrecognized and/or unconscious material, can be subtle but powerful tools for introducing clients to the process of exploring internal experience. They offer a crucial, relatively non-threatening path to self-understanding for individuals who come into therapy without the capacity for introspection, tolerance of affect, and sense of agency that are requisite for the process of psychodynamic psychotherapy. In part because they are often available to conscious awareness, they are an amazingly useful medium through which to help many of these clients gain access to their internal world. They encourage the development of the capacity to symbolize, to play, and eventually to embrace the "potential space" of internal experience that makes it possible to have a rich and fulfilling life in the "external" world. In this article, the author introduces the use of daydreams in psychodynamic psychotherapy, focusing specifically on three specific areas: resistance, somatization, and transference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the manner in which psychological treatment, with its attentiveness to the vicissitudes of the unfolding selfobject transference, gradually enabled a patient to contain and articulate painful affect states. The patient's passionate relationship with food, strikingly illustrated in the clinical material, including her dreams, endowed eating with the functions of an idealized selfobject. Over the course of treatment, she seemed to traverse a psychic bridge that took her from an isolated reliance on food through a more focal awareness of her body and her feelings, to an investment in, and capacity for, deepened relationships with other people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sibling dimensions of transference and countertransference have been neglected in favor of a parent-child transference model. This preference for the parent-child model reflected the paternalistic, positivist assumptions of traditional psychoanalysis. Developments of collaborative and postmodern psychoanalytic therapies make the sibling transference more recognizable and understandable. This paper emphasizes the positive sibling transference; possible directions for further exploration of the sibling transference dynamic are indicated. Clinical illustrations are given from child and family therapies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]