Some thoughts on  Transference




Note: These excursions in thought are for those of us who enjoy thinking about the structure and dynamics of psychology.  The questions at the end of the primary reading are designed to verify that you have read the primary reading  for  Continuing Education Credits. There will be no questions asked regarding these additional readings that will apply to gaining Continuing Education Credits.
 


Thoughts Concerning the London School



Around the time that Jung was writing his final, 1951 paper on psychotherapy and his 1961 autobiography, a group of Jungian analysts in London, chiefly under the tutelage of Michael Fordham, were also beginning to differentiate Jungian concepts of countertransference (Sedgwich, 1994). Their work, according to Sedgwich, was at one time considered controversial vis-à-vis "classical" Jungian theory, but continues to this day. Sedgwich states that these analysts were the first to recognize the lack of a Jungian developmental theory, and to work out the details of Jung’s general outline of countertransference. The next excerpt focuses on Fordham’s contribution to Jungian thought.

Fordham's writing on countertransference spans four decades, starting with an article in which he expresses astonishment at how little has been written on clinical aspects of transference (Fordham, 1957, p. 111). To fill this gap, he begins by framing a way of working in which the analyst frees himself of a persona based stance in favor of a position where the analyst responds to the patient with "suitable or adapted therapeutic reactions" (p. 112). While questioning the reality of any distinct demarcation between the personal and collective unconscious, he nevertheless feels that the therapeutic interaction is based on the "therapeutic content" (and archetypal similarity to the patient) of the analyst's psyche.


Fordham's language, developmental and object relations emphasis, and other writings all suggest that the basis of the "adapted response" is more specifically a quasi-maternal one. The general flavor of the described interactions and the "good breast-bad breast," Kleinian motifs that inform them are linked with countertransference positions in which the analyst is "mother," usually the personal mother.

Fordham defines countertransference broadly as "almost any unconscious behavior of the analyst;" he at first hesitates about its centrality but then does suggest that "all analysis is countertransference-based" (Fordham, 1957, p. 137) in this broad sense and the aforementioned good mothering sense. As in the Kleinian model on which it is based, projective/introjective processes play a key role in the analyst's feeling states and understandings thereof. These unconscious communications give rise to a differentiation of two kinds of countertransference responses by Fordham.

The first type is what he calls "countertransference illusion" and it bears resemblance to classic psychoanalytic (and Jungian "clean hands") definitions of countertransference. Analysis per se halts in this scenario, as the reactivation in the analyst of past, unresolved unconscious situations replaces the therapeutic situation with the patient (Fordham, 1957, p. 138). Fordham sympathetically suggests that this kind of neurotic countertransference is not invariably a disaster, provided the analyst can at least realize, if not integrate, the projection.

The second kind of countertransference is one Fordham calls "syntonic," meaning that the analyst (by virtue of being in a state of "primitive identity" with the patient) introjects and experiences aspects of the patient's unconscious. That is, the sometimes alien feelings or roles introspectively sensed by the analyst can be understood as the patient's psyche impacting the analyst directly. Out of a differentiated understanding of such introjects can eventually come conscious interpretations to the patient. (Sedgwich, 1994, pp. 16-17)


One can see from Sedgwick’s description how Fordham borrowed from Neo-Freudian language in the attempt to formulate a theoretical foundation for the experience of the interactive field that transcends the limitations of traditional metaphysics. Like Thomas Ogden, the journey "into" the interactive field will be a journey "into" that which is one’s "own-most." This will be put in essentially Cartesian terms. However, Jung  finds something "magical" about the field that is inconsistent with traditional metaphysics.
 


Thoughts Concerning the Berlin School

In Sedgwich’s account of the Berlin school, he wrote that Dieckmann's presentation in 1971 to the Fifth International Jungian Congress marks the first in-depth reporting of the analyst's inner experience in analysis. Dieckmann, initially notes that the "full implications" of the dialectical relationship espoused by Jung have not yet been realized. Instead, even amongst Jungians, the focus of attention has been on patient rather than analyst (Sedgwich, 1994).

As a corrective, Dieckmann and three other German analysts participated in a research project in which they recorded (and processed in a collegial group) their own associations to particular patient material. Their own associative content fell into four categories: 1) associations to the patient and in-session themes, 2) the analyst's own history and problems, 3) purely emotional reactions, and 4) physical responses.

The results, other than the above categorization, indicated to Dieckmann that there was a remarkably close "psychological connection between the analyst's chains of association and the patient's" (Dieckmann, 1974, p. 73). Phenomenologically, this took the form of the patient's often saying almost exactly what was on the analyst's minds. Dieckmann goes on to give vivid examples showing either parallel or compensatory chains of mutual association, the first really self-revealing case examples since Jung's own (Jung, 1937, p. 332).

Of interest technically is the Berlin group's emphasis on the initial difficulty but gradual ease of following one's own associations. Dieckmann adds most importantly that, even though countertransference-based interpretations were not given, the entire process seemed to be "guided" for both participants (Dieckmann, 1974, p. 75). Thus, interpretation seems to take a back seat to experience - if the analyst can get it right, so to speak, then it gets right in the patient without its being said. This silent but parallel tracking process "sounds mystical," says Dieckmann (p. 78), and in a way it is. He sees it as an ESP-analogous or Self-based phenomenon which is fundamentally synchronistic. Therefore, a cause and effect format, even such as projective identification, cannot account fully for countertransference/ transference interactions. (Sedgwich, 1994, p.22)

 The difficulties associated with talking about what is going on with the experience of transference/countertransference phenomenologically leads to the evokation of what amounts to a metaphysical "bridge" or a metaphysical "third." In this case, the metaphysical "third" is synchronicity. A Thesis unfolds -- we align ourselves to the "subjective," or we align ourselves to the "objective," or we invent some "third" and align ourselves with that.
  Dieckmann concludes by citing four levels of the process. The first is projective, that is, illusory in the usual sense. The second is objective and, similar to Jung's "objective level" of interpretation, this level invites the analyst to particularly attend to his dreams about the patient. The third is the antithetical type of analytic interaction' where oppositional or complementary poles and roles are constellated. Finally, there is the archetypal situation, which, to be effective, requires that the archetype be "brought to life in the form of countertransference" - only then will it be facilitating to the patient (Dieckmann, 1976, p. 35). (Sedgwich, 1994, p.22) The struggle to maintain the language of traditional metaphysics stands out. The process of transference and countertransference is being defined as either "projective" (i.e., from the subject), "objective," "antithetical" (a recognition of reciprocality), or "archetypal" (the quintessential banner heading of Platonic metaphysics).
  Nathan Schwartz-Salant's extensive work during the 1980s follows naturally upon Jacoby's. Both are influenced by and make Jungian syntheses of Kohut's work. Schwartz-Salant, however, in his book on narcissism (1982) presents a more detailed clinical picture when elucidating the effects of mirror and idealizing merger transferences on the analyst. He makes extremely precise differentiations about how to work with them, based on his vision of the archetypal processes involved. (Sedgwich, 1994, p.31) Schwartz-Salant acknowledged the setting here when he pointed out that "Psychoanalysts, especially the school of object relations, work out of the concept of psychic structure as introjects of the experience of personal interactions." (Schwartz-Salant, 1982, pp. 27-28) The object here is then an "inner" object representation of an intellectualist nature, about which much has been disputed. Williams and Kirkpatrick, for instance, in their introduction to Sartre’s famous work, The Transcendence of the Ego. An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, wrote in 1957 that "Representational theories of knowledge violate our sense of life. When we see a mountain, or imagine one, it is a mountain we are seeing or imagining, not our idea of a mountain" (Sartre, 1956, p. 22). To Object Relations, however, the object is strictly this sort of intrapsychic event in which objects are defined as inner experiences, and "Since the process [of projective identification] remains intrapsychic," recalling once again the words of psychoanalyst W.W. Meissner (1987), "it would presumably be more accurate to speak here of projection into the object representation." (p.44) But whether intellectualist representation or objectivist "fact," the notion that one can somehow place either of these readings of an "object" directly into me such that I experience this content as being mine, is both theoretically and methodologically messy in a Cartesian world, exemplified by the problematics identified by Mario Jacoby who asked, ". . . . is it projection or perception" (Jacoby, 1984, p. 41)

Nathan Schwartz-Salant resurrects the notion of "Subtle-Body" from the inability to locate the source of the interactive field in either subject or object, and create the explicit "third" as a bridge between the two. Like Jung, Schwartz-Salant reverts to alchemical imagery. While much of Schwartz-Salant's work takes form in his first book, in subsequent works he crystallizes his ideas on the nature of countertransference and the analytic interaction. To a great extent, he takes Jung's alchemical metaphor, uses it directly, and extends it. Others tend to modify Jung's diagrams from "The Psychology of the Transference"; Schwartz-Salant takes the Rosarium images and utilizes them in explicating his theory of "imaginal" spaces, "subtle body" concepts and "inner couples" as applied to the transference/countertransference process. Perhaps Schwartz-Salant’s attempt to "get at" the process by means of traditionally metaphysical language has as its drawback all the baggage the traditional language of metaphysics brings with it.  Accordingly, Schwartz-Salant posits a "shared imaginal realm," based on quasi-concrete energy fields (Schwartz-Salant, 1986). But his link to the imaginal is a wonderful attempt to skirt this. The subtle body is, then,  not a physical space, but a felt, aura-like "field" that is mutually imagined. This is something like active imagination, except that two people are involved. Schwartz-Salant notes that it is neither here nor there, in nor out, but is "other:" it is "in between" (remenisient of Buber's Between). The two participants but not really in any place per se, more in an "imaginal world" (Schwartz-Salant, 1989). See link: In
 

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Michael Staples