On: transference, countertransference and projective identification

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In this essay, I define the psychoanalytic concept of transference and its development in the hundred plus years since Freud’s discovery. I illustrate it with a clinical example of a patient’s transference to me. I follow by using the same structure; define, historicise and illustrate, for the concepts of countertransference and projective identification. How countertransference is used differs by analytic school and I make a reference to the differences between Freudians, Kleinians and Independents. These foundational concepts do not belong to the consulting room only. I reference how they inform the psychosocial worlds, notably race, before concluding.

Transference is a process. Its key is ‘displacement’, displacing an unconscious idea, from the object to which it was once attached, and on to the analyst. For Freud, what was transferred was a window into unconscious assumptions, via feelings that properly belong elsewhere (Frosh, 2012). In his ‘Dora’ case study, Freud (1905) had defined transference as “new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and phantasies … aroused during the progress of the analysis”. Transference, then, is the “actualisation of unconscious wishes” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1967) and a form of the mother-infant dyad (Winnicott, 1960), an illusion where someone, not consciously recognised, represents something, which forms the basis for a repetition of a relationship with an important historic figure (Sandler, Dare and Holder, 1973). The impulses (Freud, 1937) have their source in the earliest object relations and come forth as a consequence of the compulsion to repeat. The analyst works to strengthen the analysand’s ego, so that there is less displacement and the gap between fantasy and reality becomes better understood.

Its discovery and its evolution began with the attachment formed by a patient of Freud’s colleague, Breuer, later anonymised as ‘Anna O’. (Freud, 1893). Freud’s original frustration with transference, that it was a resistance to the analysis, shifted to recognition that it made the therapeutic alliance about emotion (Freud, 1910, 1912, 1914). Freudians consider that treatment is about recognising how the analysand’s transference is informed by an attempt to gratify drives, designed to reduce unpleasure (Lemma, 2016). Freud’s initial focus, was on erotic and romantic transference. Therapy was effected by love, and early appreciation of what is now described as positive transference. The negative transference, (Klein, 1952) when an analysand brings forth hostile feelings from developmental relationships, was not really considered until Klein’s work. Kleinians believe hostility is linked to the death instinct, and that hatred and envy are innate. Klein also hypothesised that what might be transferred on to the analyst might be parts of the analysand’s self, such as the superego, rather than historic relationships. (Klein, 1952, 1957). Transference today is more a projection (Kleinian) model than a displacement (Freudian) one. Post-Kleinians, including Winnicott and Bion, look at the transference developmentally. Just as the mother receives the projections of the infant and moderates and mitigates, so that the infant can receive them back, so the analyst behaves for the patient. The analyst needs to remain alert and thoughtful, in a state of ‘reverie’ (Bion, 1962). All of the communications from the patient “contain something relevant to the transference situation”. (Segal, 1981)

To illustrate the concept, I share an experience from my personal clinical work: I have been working with a patient, ‘A’, who was largely raised by a disciplinarian stepfather, who appears to have had little affection for his stepson. His biological father left when he was three. In the transference, I am sometimes the stepfather: ‘A’ splits an eagerness to please me, to get it ‘right’, but also an anxiety that he will draw my ire. ‘A’’s childhood in his stepfather’s home was, as he recalls it, dominated by the demands to be useful, by completing a number of chores. At the outset of the therapy, he talked about decorating the NHS consulting room, if he had the right tools. I understood A’s inner world to be shabby and neglected, and his need to show he could be useful, and compliant. This is evidence of displacement, as are other times, when I sense I become A’s father, albeit idealised, as someone who was understanding and interested. What emerges then, is A’s infantile desire to be interpreted and loved. In my countertransference, I feel something parental and am reminded of the unconscious desire many therapists have to repair, something Klein (1952) highlights.

Countertransference like mine, is unresolved, unconscious elements within the analyst (Freud, 1910), evoking intense feelings. (Carpy, 1989) The analyst has an unconscious reaction, identifies the analysand’s role in bringing it about, and then examines the effect on both parties (Money-Kyrle, 1956). Freud had regarded it as an impediment that should be resolved by the analyst developing more ego strength in their own analysis. No analyst is “wholly free of infantile dependence” (Racker, 1948) and feelings and impulses are determined by the past, meaning that aspects of the Oedipal situation are repeated in every countertransference. Forty years after Freud’s anxieties about countertransference, Heimann (1950) redefined it as “an instrument of research” into the patient’s unconscious, because the analyst’s unconscious understands that of his patient. The analyst, is both an interpreter and an object of the impulses felt by the patient. Klein (1952), although prioritising the child’s phantasy life and unconscious phantasies, held similar views to Freud, claiming that only by analysing “the transference situation to its depths” could the past in both real and phantasy be understood.  However, it is the ‘post-Kleinians’ (Bion, 1959, Segal 1975, Rosenfeld, 1987) that have been at the forefront of countertransference’s development. Currently, it is usually defined as being both the analyst’s own transference and the analyst’s response to the analysand’s transference.

Despite the significance of Ferenczi and Alice Balint’s views, that the analyst’s own feelings should be shared with the analysand (Heimann, 1950), little was written about countertransference until the end of the 1940’s (Racker, 1948). In developing Klein (1946), Winnicott (1947), had been amongst the first to grasp its significance for working with psychotic patient populations when describing hatred towards the patient. This is relevant for our contemporary understanding of issues like racism, founded upon the “irrationality of the unconscious” (Timimi, 1996). It was Heimann, though, that encouraged a more constructive view of something she felt was created by the patient; the aforementioned instrument of research. Klein (1952), who prioritised the child’s phantasy life and unconscious phantasies, rarely used the term countertransference until writing about the infantile roots for both parties in seeking ‘reassurance’ (1957). Ten years after Heimann, writing that the analyst needed to ‘sustain’ and not ‘discharge’ feelings, the word countertransference was “in danger of losing its identity” according to Winnicott (1960). He was inclined to Freud’s view and defined countertransference as “neurotic features” disturbing the analysis and spoiling the analyst’s “professional attitude.” Independents and post-Kleinians have been at the forefront of subsequent development, making it a “fertile, intersubjective field” (White, 2006). Winnicott (1963) and Bion (1965) looked at it developmentally, and Ogden (1994) has made it more about intersubjectivity, with his concept of the ‘analytic third’. More contemporary views are that the analyst should allow themselves to participate in the enactment required by the patient’s projections, in order to become conscious of the phantasy and emotion (Rosenfeld, 1971, Joseph, 1989, Bollas, 1987,1992).

In my work with a woman, ‘B’, I often find myself struggling to concentrate. I wonder if she is making me mad (Winnicott, 1960). I find myself wanting the sessions to come to an end and notice her need for attention, but how I seem to be resisting giving it. Her mother was diagnosed as schizophrenic, after ‘B’ reached adulthood. Her father left pre-adolescence and had a second family, so she has half-brothers. Everything about her world and world view appears to be influenced by splits. Her maternal care and her parents’ divorce concretised her views, I believe, and pulled her back from a developing depressive position to paranoid schizoid (Klein, 1946). I experience her as happiest when complaining about her family, friends, colleagues, and employment. I, guilty with inattention, sense a whining child, starved of gratification. Racker (1953) would suggest the patient is emotionally blocking and I am succumbing to “pampering”, initiated by my guilt at my wandering attention. By pampering, I re-focus intently and become a good Object for ‘B’, as the father was before he left. Sometimes my countertransference is paternally protective, (Money-Kyrle, 1956), but I think I often act out the neglectful mother, creating a guilt, which is a consequence of my inability to be a necessary container for her anxieties (Bion, 1959, 1962). This acting out has made me sympathetic to the Joseph, Rosenfeld and Bollas approaches.

Projective Identification, (PI), pre-dates Heimann’s constructive view of countertransference but had already transformed the transference/countertransference dynamic from a displacement to a projection focus (Klein, 1946). PI is an unconscious, omnipotent phantasy best captured by the lay phrase ‘giving someone a piece of my mind’. It is not everything that makes up the countertransference, (Heimann, 1950), but invariably seems to be the dominant feature in a therapeutic relationship; most commonly manifested as a part of the patient’s self, projected into the object (Segal, 1964) and where the projector is psychically aligned with the person into whom it has been projected. This is done, with the aim not simply of expulsion, but of using the projection to control the therapist, (Segal, 1981) inducing feelings or thoughts or by provoking forms of enactment. The object is transformed by the projection (Feldman, 2009). The projector fantasises taking over the therapist and influencing the recipient so that they think and respond in a way that is congruent with the projection (Ogden, 1982). The therapist processes what is projected, so that it can be palatably returned and the projector can introject what had needed expelling.

PI has been taken up by many theoreticians, notably Bion (1959, 1970), who adapted it by identifying what was projected as ‘beta elements’ that the therapist made sense of thanks to utilising ‘alpha function’, and then being able to reproject them. He considered that PI was understood as ‘a three-dimensional space’, into which patients projected the parts of their personality that they had split off. Klein thought that this was ‘observable’ in psychotic and borderline patients and Bion agreed with her that the ‘degree of fragmentation’ and the distance to which split-off fragments were projected was a measure of the distance a patient had from contact with reality. In his studies of the containment process (1959,1962), he observed how a mother takes in and allows herself to be affected by her infant’s projection of distress. The mother/analyst has not only contained an experience but transformed it. For some, enactment opens analytical work to “deep unconscious identifications and primitive levels of functioning” which are beyond the reach of the intellect, (Tuckett, 1997) albeit recognising one’s own feelings can be difficult (Brenman-Pick, 1985)

One of my experiences of PI came from a patient, ‘C’, presenting as depressed and unable to develop relationships. ‘C’ earned his PhD at Oxford, where his father was a fellow, while his grandfather was a celebrated and distinguished medic. He now edited a well-known scientific magazine, but felt his achievements were inferior to his family history, and he was ‘phoney’. (Winnicott, 1960). In our early work, he let me know that he thought that psychotherapy was “pointless”. Anyone working in the NHS, was probably unable to develop a private practise. He projected feelings of inferiority into me, in order to rid them from himself (Rosenfeld, 1987) and to enable him to adopt the superior status he associated with his father and grandfather. I found myself identifying with the intellectual inferiority, responding by making theoretical and technical interventions in the sessions. I became the boy he had been, desperately trying to show my academic and intellectual accomplishments to a demanding father. I was compliant and beginning a “defensive collusive arrangement” (Feldman, 2009).  I had acted out something congruent with what had been projected into me, seeking attention and admiration. Once I became aware of what was happening, we were able to think about the competitive need for superiority. Eventually, he was able to introject the split off part and to accommodate it, recognising that he was still seeking parental love.

The concepts of transference, splitting and PI are fundamental to our psychosocial world. Klein (1952) asserted that transference operated throughout our lives influencing all relationships. Transference includes other significant figures beyond the parental couple, taking in the realm of the collective social unconscious. The social world contains multiple projected and introjected transference contents. External events, such as those affecting race or gender often catalyse a regression in psychic functioning activating defences. (Hamer, 2006) ‘D’, a Pakistani male patient of mine, projected his feelings of being unwelcome, on to outbursts against the Polish builders working on his apartment block, because of their use of their native tongue. He wanted to rid himself of being identified as an immigrant Other, and identify with my white, native born status. Reciprocal projective identifications can establish a preferred element of the self in the white. (Timimi, 1996). He may also have harboured suspicions of my unconscious and unexpressed attitudes to race. Racism might be transference in a regressed state (Hamer, 2006) characterised by splitting of the self, obscuring the ‘true self’ (Winnicott, 1960) to protect it from annihilation. Splitting is the psychoanalytic basis for racism (Timimi, 1996)

I have defined and illustrated the concepts of transference, countertransference and projective identification. In my work, I find I incline more to the Freudian displacement of past relationships, than to Kleinian split off parts of the self, but appreciate the contemporary use of enactment, intellectually and affectively. I like Racker’s (1948) observation that psychoanalysts choose their work based on “the object relations of infancy” and because of its reparative nature (Money-Kyrle, 1956), which seems rather Kleinian. Her assertion that transference operates all through our lives, influencing every relationship, is why I believe we need to apply what we can learn in the clinic to the world beyond; what the IPA’s podcast characterises as psychoanalysis “off the couch”. It requires a longer essay to do justice to the great psychosocial themes of race, ethnicity, religious marginalisation, sexual identity and fluidity, as well as social constructs around ‘normality’, disability and social class, but I have demonstrated the power of the unconscious, and how something once perceived as an impediment, is now a critical therapeutic tool.

References:

Balint, A & Balint, M. (1939) On transference and countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 20.  pp.225-230

Bion, W.R. (1959) Attacks on Linking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 40, pp. 308-15

Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from Experience. London: Heinemann.

Bion, W.R. (1965) Transformations: Change from Learning to Growth. London: Heinemann.

Bion, W.R. (1970) Attention and Interpretation New York: Basic Books

Bollas, C. (1987) The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. London: FAB

Bollas, C. (1992) Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience London: Karnac

Brenman Pick, I. (1985). Working Through in the Countertransference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 66, pp.157-166

Carpy, D.V., (1989). Tolerating the countertransference: A mutative process. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis70, pp. 227-241.

Feldman, M (1997) Projective identification: the analyst’s involvement International Journal of Psycho-Analysis78, pp.287-294.

Feldman, M. (2009). Doubt, Conviction and the Analytic Process: Selected Papers of Michael Feldman Hove, East Sussex. Routledge.

Freud, A (1937) The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

Freud, S (1893) The Psychotherapy of Hysteria. In: SE2 Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud pp. 253-305

Freud, S (1905) Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. In: SE7 Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud

Freud, S (1910) The future prospects of psychoanalytic therapy. In: SE11 Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud

Freud, S (1912) The Dynamics of Transference. In: SE12 Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud pp. 97-108.

Freud, S (1914) Remembering, Repeating and Working Through. In: SE12 Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud pp. 145-156

Frosh, S. (2012). A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hamer, F. (2006) Racism as a Transference State Psychoanalytic Quarterly 75(1) pp. 197-214

Heimann, P (1950) On Countertransference International Journal of Psychoanalysis 31.  pp. 81-84 

Hinshelwood, R. (1999) Countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 80.  pp. 797-818 

Joseph, B. (1985). Transference: The Total Situation. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 66.  pp.447-454

Joseph, B (1989) Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of Betty Joseph London: Routledge

Klein, M. (1946) Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 27 (3).

Klein, M (1952). The Origins of Transference. In Envy and Gratitude and Other Works London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

Klein, M (1957). Envy and Gratitude. In: Envy and Gratitude and Other Works London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J-B. (1967) The Language of Psychoanalysis London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

Lemma, A. (2016) Introduction to the Practice of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Money-Kyrle, R.E. (1956) Normal Counter-Transference and Some of its Deviations. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 37 (3) pp. 360-66

Ogden, T (1982) Projective Identification and Psychotherapeutic Technique New York: Jason Aronson

Ogden, T (1994) The analytic third: working with intersubjective clinical facts. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 75.  pp. 3-19

Racker, H. (1948) The Countertransference Neurosis. In: Transference and Countertransference. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Racker, H (1953) The Meanings and Uses of Countertransference. In: Transference and Countertransference. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Rosenfeld, (1971) Contribution to the psychopathology of psychotic states. In: E. Spillius (ed.) (1988) Melanie Klein Today: vol 1, Mainly Theory. London: Routledge.

Rosenfeld, H. (1987) Listening and Interpretation. Therapeutic and Anti-therapeutic Factors in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of psychotic, borderline and neurotic patients London: Tavistock Publications.

Sandler, J., Dare, C., and Holder, A. (1973) The Patient and the Analyst London: Maresfield Library

Segal, H. (1964) Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein New York: Basic Books.

Segal, H (1981) The Work of Hanna Segal New York: Jason Aronson

Timimi, S (1996) Race and Colour in Internal and External Reality. British Journal of Psychotherapy 13(2) pp. 183-192

Tuckett, D (1997) Mutual Enactment in the psychoanalytic situation. In: The Perverse Transference and Other Matters: Essays in Honor of R. Horacio Etchegoyen.

Winnicott, D.W (1947) Hate in the countertransference In: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis London: Hogarth Press Ltd

Winnicott, D. W. (1960) Countertransference. In: The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

Winnicott, D.W (1963) Psychotherapy of Character Disorders. In: The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment London: Hogarth Press Ltd.

White, J. (2006) Motivational echoes: Transference and countertransference in contemporary theory. In: Generation – Preoccupations & Conflicts in Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Hove: Routledge

Pygmalion – Henry and Eliza, the analytic couple

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On September 6th, running through October, the Old Vic is hosting performances of Shaw’s brilliant play ‘Pygmalion’. A play studying language and class, written in 1912. It will star Patsy Ferrans and Bertie Carvel. Ferrans is already established as one of the brightest stars of her generation, with huge recognition for her 2022 Blanche du Bois in “Streetcar”. I saw her, also at The Old Vic, in 2021, when she played ‘Her’ in ‘Camp Siegfried’, and it was a remarkable performance. I am very excited about what she will bring to Miss Doolittle.

Carvel, may be best known for playing Tony Blair in The Crown, but has also shown his versatility in playing Rupert Murdoch in James Graham’s play ‘Ink’. For me, his outstanding stage performance to date was in “The 47th”, when he played a wickedly funny, deranged President Trump.  Trump and Blanche as Henry and Eliza is quite an invitation!

Pygmalion has always been one of my favourite plays. It may be because of the many hours I spent watching my nan working in her florist shop in Canning Town. I knew that my grandad often woke very early to get to Covent Garden to buy stock for the shop and somehow that gives me a sense of connection when the play opens. We see Eliza and Henry, in their different ways, sheltering from the elements in the portico of St.Paul’s, nearby what was the fruit and veg market in those days.

It is possible that this version of the play will work hard to illustrate and exemplify what has become known as the ‘Pygmalion Effect’, which is the way people tend to perform up to the level that others expect of them. It explains why our relationships can be self-fulfilling prophecies. Once you set expectations for somebody, that person will tend to live up to that expectation; for good or ill.

I hope it explores what I see as the psychoanalytic lens for the play. In my reading, and in the productions which I have seen, Shaw allows us to understand the protagonists as two people with unresolved Oedipus Complexes. We get insight to the narcissistic wound carried by Eliza, and the whole play is an example of transference, with Henry as analyst to Eliza’s analysand. I shall develop these ideas, and I also note that Shaw and Freud shared a view of the world based on that of the outsider.

One was an Irishman in English society and the other an often-excluded Jew, in Vienna. Both saw themselves as ‘men of science’ with Freud especially keen to establish psychoanalysis as a science. Freud was brilliant in considering the hostilities acted upon those who were ‘othered’, and in Eliza, Shaw creates a character ostracised merely for the circumstances of her birth. Shaw uses Pickering and Higgins to place people, in London to within two streets, and in India to regions, thanks to dialect, pronunciation and enunciation, and asks us to think about how this contributes to othering, to creating a ‘them and us’.

As Shaw completed Pygmalion, Freud was writing his Papers on Technique and about to complete Totem and Taboo. His body of work, likely very well known to Shaw, had already seen Studies on Hysteria, The Interpretation of Dreams, The psychopathology of everyday life, from which one might attach some of Shaw’s Pygmalion thinking, as well as Three Essays on Sexuality and Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious.

Shaw had infamously attacked Pavlov, but conceded that he was “well-meaning, intelligent and devoted to science” – something one might argue as applicable to Freud. I like the fact that Shaw and Freud were both born in 1856. I can find no record of their meeting, but it seems highly unlikely that such erudite, well-educated men, with a fascination for philosophy, politics and ideas, would not have been aware of one another. Indeed, the coincidences stretch to the fact that Pygmalion is first performed in Vienna (Hofburg Theatre) in October 1913. Otherwise, the play was first produced in 1914 (London and NY).

In the directions to Act 2, Shaw gives great specificity to Higgins’s appearance and demeanour. Freud, at this time was determined to, and perhaps struggling a little, to establish psychoanalysis as a science. It is a dozen years since the groundbreaking The Interpretation of Dreams. Shaw describes Higgins as “of the energetic scientific type, heartily, even violently interested in everything that can be studied as a scientific subject, and careless about himself and other people, including their feelings”. The final part of this is the antithesis of a psychoanalyst, but we know from the work on dreams that fantasies are often represented by direct opposites.

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To the play: What do I mean by the unresolved Oedipus Complexes? It is the attachment of the child to the parent of the opposite sex – in early infancy, a need ‘to possess’ the object, that remains unresolved. The infantile sexual impulses get repressed and often a fear of displeasing the object leads to aggressive or envious feelings. Hanna Segal described it as “the central conflict in the human psyche”, so it is hardly surprising that a dramatist as great as Shaw found it. Freud himself noted how whenever he discovered something, that the poets and philosophers had got there first.

Segal noted how Melanie Klein saw the father, both real, and phantasies about the father, as central to the child’s life from birth. This is why Shaw’s dramatization of the moment when Eliza has been bathed and cleaned by Henry’s housekeeper, and meets her father, who fails to recognise her, as critical to understanding her vulnerability and her wish to both please Henry, her substitute father, but also to hate him, in what psychoanalysts recognise as transference.

Her neglect, from her parents, is her narcissistic wound. I like the idea of Doolittle ‘blind’ to his own daughter because it plays with, and inverts, our understanding of the Oedipus story. Oedipus, we know, tragically comes to understand how he has usurped his father, in his mother’s bed, and puts his own eyes out.

Early in the scene, the issue of Eliza’s payment comes up. Freud (1912) had views on payment expressed in On Beginning the Treatment, which apart from “a medium for self-preservation and for obtaining power” had “powerful sexual factors in the value set upon it”. Eliza proffers a shilling, “take it or leave it” and Higgins, who Pickering expects to be insulted, rapidly appreciates that it is a generous offer. He defines it by its percentage of her income, “it works out as fully equivalent to sixty or seventy guineas from a millionaire…it’s the biggest offer I ever had”.

Money and sex is important in the play because of Shaw’s focus on morality and on hypocrisy. Eliza reminds us, almost ad nauseum, “I’m a good girl, I am”. What sex does to people, especially those damaged by infantile experiences, is emphasised by Eliza’s attempt to repress her sexual drive. Taken to the guest bathroom she finds a ‘looking glass’ for the first time and she feels a need to cover it up, so unused is she to seeing her own body naked. Later, Henry gives a nod to Freud’s understanding of the unconscious and to repression, “do any of us know what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?”

His own Oedipus resolution is far from achieved and visiting his mother, in Act three, to tell her he has “picked up a girl”, he tells us, “Oh I can’t be bothered with young women. My idea of a loveable woman is somebody as like you as possible”. As the scene progresses we get a nudge that Mrs. Higgins is more familiar with the psychoanalytic world than her apparently worldly son, when she responds to his comment that Eliza is to stick to two conversational subjects, health and the weather with “Safe! To talk about our health! About our insides! Perhaps about our outsides…”

And so, the possibility of inner worlds, her’s, Henry’s and Eliza’s is hinted at, as is the realisation of the sometimes conflicting demands of the conscious and the unconscious. She adds later to both Henry and Pickering, “don’t you realise that when Eliza walked into Wimpole Street, something walked in with her”.

After the successful outcome of Higgins’s bet/experiment, Eliza senses that he might now drop her and discard her, as her father had done many times, and it ignites the ‘murderous rage’ deep in her unconscious, which surges into the room as she throws his slippers; “I wanted to smash your face. I’d like to kill you, you murderous brute”, before wailing like any neglected infant, “what’s to become of me?”

The second psychoanalytic feature the play addresses is the narcissistic wound, specifically Eliza’s. A narcissistic wound is a form of abandonment – Freud maintained that “losses in love” and “losses associated with failure” often leave behind injury to an individual’s self-regard. We learn from her, “I ain’t got no mother. Her that turned me out was my sixth stepmother”, a perfect complement to the father who failed to recognise her. Eliza, confronted by an awareness of a lack of something, in this case maternal love, is like an analysand clinging on to their neuroses, “if only I’d known what a dreadful thing it is to be clean I’d never have come. I didn’t know when I was well off…”

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It comes together with ‘orality’ – the focusing of sexual energy and feeling on the mouth – so perfectly captured in the musical film adaptation of the play, ‘My Fair Lady’, when Higgins (Rex Harrison) is placing marbles into his powerless (Audrey Hepburn) student’s mouth. The play begins with something coming out of the mouth, and this is about what gets taken in. It is no great stretch to consider the pleasure for Eliza of what she expresses in giving out, and what she appreciates in her taking in.

Later, at the peak of her achievement, winning the bet and having satisfied Henry’s ego, she notes that “I sold flowers. I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of me, I am not fit to sell anything else”. As she has told us repeatedly, she’s a good girl. She is.

Lastly, the play is set up as an illustration of the psychoanalytic concept of transference. Freud understood that transference existed outside the clinic, but that it changed shape in the clinic and acquired an intensity uncommon in more social and conscious settings.

What is transference? – Jean Arundale, in Transference and Countertransference wrote it was “broadly conceptualised as manifestations of conscious and unconscious aspects of object relationships and psychic structures within the analytic process”.

Freud had observed it initially in the work between his colleague, Breuer, and the patient who came to be known as Anna O, who famously described her therapy as “the talking cure”. Her feelings for Breuer, which he found too disturbing to tolerate, were Freud’s first insight to the concept of transference. In his 1938 paper The Technique of Psychoanalysis, he was even clearer. Transference was a “factor of undreamt-of importance”.

Freud came to understand, after initially seeing it as an obstacle to be overcome, that transference, the emotional quality of a patient’s feelings towards an analyst transferred from more developmental relationships, could be used as a tool. Indeed, it provided him with the material for understanding the way patients invariably repeat past relationships, especially maladaptive relationships.

Shaw may not have been thinking directly about Freud, but in Eliza, we see the ambivalence of her feelings to her alcoholic and rejecting father emerge in her wish to both have Higgins, but also to be able to push him away. It was Klein, some thirty years later, (1946), who developed the idea of transference as a re-enactment, as an expression of unconscious phantasy, in need of interpretation.

Klein understood how the analyst can be both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and that integrating the two feelings in one person, just as the baby does with the mother, was the most profound of feelings and that the ‘negative transference’ was especially valuable. Later still, Winnicott developed what was happening to the analyst, in my case the Higgins figure, as countertransference.

Higgins, is bemused by his feelings for Eliza – in the final act he stormily says that he “can do without anybody”, thanks to his “own spark of divine fire”, yet “I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance. I like them, rather”. When she points out that he has her voice on his recording discs and that he has photographs of her, he laments that he cannot turn her soul on.

This is consistent with Sandler’s (1976) later work on countertransference and the ‘role responsiveness’ of the analyst, who has been pulled into a role, a way of being, that he does not recognize as being characteristic of himself. Freud wrote in Dynamics of Transference (S.E 12) “it is a perfectly normal and intelligible thing that the libidinal cathexis which is held ready in anticipation, should be directed as well to the figure of the doctor (analyst)”. The transference which exceeds anything “which could be justified on sensible or rational grounds” is a consequence of both conscious and unconscious material.

He states that whilst transference is most intense in an analytical couple, it exists outside of analysis and paradoxically is regarded as the “vehicle of cure and the condition of success”, ie when we transfer our earliest sexual attractions (parental) to a new love object outside the family.  The “characteristics of transference are therefore to be attributed not to psychoanalysis but to neurosis itself”. The ego has “remained in possession of infantile imagos”.

“Originally (the baby) we knew only sexual objects; and psychoanalysis shows us that people who in our real life are merely admired or respected may still be sexual objects for our unconscious” – this is what Pickering represents for Eliza.

Freud concludes his dynamics paper by referring to the struggle between doctor and patient, “between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out exclusively in the phenomena of transference. It is on that field that the victory must be won” and we sense that Eliza is seeking her mother about whom we know little, but also something of a repair to the lost love that an alcoholic father provided? She transfers her ambivalence of her father, wary affection matched with scorn and contempt, to Higgins.

The fact that transference is so tied to infantile sexuality is why Freud wrote of ‘transference love’ and today there is wide usage of the term ‘erotic transference’. Rosenberg (2011) might be describing Higgins’s drawing room in her paper Sexuality and the analytic couple, “The care invested in the setting, the quality of listening, the reliability of the analyst – all these elements enhance a process that simultaneously mobilizes and erodes repression in the analysand, and contribute to the emergence of sexual feelings”.

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She also mentions how the analyst, (or Higgins) fears marking the transference with their “own sexual feelings and fantasies”. She anticipates this – Pygmalion as erotic transference interpretation – when writing, “unrecognized sexuality gives way to enactments, as, for example, the emergence of an unconsciously collusive alliance in the repudiation of an analysand’s sexual partner, or vicarious and blinding gratification derived by the analyst from the achievements of a successful analysand.”

Shaw provides this with Henry’s contempt for Eliza’s beau: “Marry Freddy, what a preposterous idea” and with his rejoicing when she wins his bet, but especially when she deceives his former protégé, the outrageous fraud, Nepommuck.

In his paper, Transference Love, Freud asserts that the patient’s attraction to the doctor is “an inescapable fate” and switches between ‘Transference Love’ and the term erotic transference; “love consists of new editions of old traits…it repeats infantile reactions”. Shaw had an answer for that in a few pages that he wrote to summarise, after the end of the play, letting us know that Eliza does marry Freddy, and they have a florist shop that adds some greengrocery. She treats Higgins scornfully, like a wounded child. The reaction of the infant unable to integrate their Object.

We can only truly love something or someone we may also hate. As Shaw understood, “She knows that Higgins does not need her, just as her father did not need her”; she was “no more to him than them slippers”.

Freud’s (1910) view was that countertransference was inimical to the analytic treatment. It should be repressed. In Pygmalion, Higgins has repressed his sexual drive, but Eliza wakens it. Towards the end of the play he notes how she has become indispensable, and he is acting out his need. Shaw, in my interpretation, pre-empted plenty of psychoanalytic literature of the past hundred years through Henry and Eliza.

As David Mann (1999) writes in his introduction to Erotic Transference and Countertransference, “As psychoanalytic thinking has been able to contemplate the deep layers of relationship between analyst and analysand so the question of unconscious eroticism has needed to be addressed by more and more authors as the century progresses. This brings analytic thinking back full circle to its origins in contemplation of the erotic”, by which he means Freud’s understanding of what happened between his mentor Breuer and his patient, Anna O.

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Henry may wish to deny his sexual attraction to Eliza, but from the outset we are reminded of Eliza’s own repression of her sexuality. She sees it as something to resist, because of her sense of morals, later derided by her father as “middle class morality”, and confirmed when he tells Pickering that he was never married to Eliza’s mother. For Eliza, who may have unconsciously absorbed her mother’s shame, it is important to protest her own good behaviour and innocence, “I’m a good girl, I am”.

Nonetheless as Henry and Eliza discover and as Mann writes, “the erotic connects people at deeply unconscious levels, driving them into relationships at least at the level of fantasy”. He goes on to add, “the closer people become the greater the activation of erotic material in the unconscious”. Poor Henry, poor Eliza! Who knows what Ferran and Carvel will find in these timeless characters, but it should be memorable.

On Transference and Countertransference

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“It is only by analysing the transference situation to its depth that we are able to discover the past both in its realistic and phantastic aspects”. (Klein, 1952). In this essay, I shall attempt to define the psychoanalytic terms transference and countertransference. I shall begin with definitions and Freud’s discovery of transference, and go on to explain how the idea of transference and its utility in the analytic process has changed with time. Change came with later psychoanalysts, but the most profound impact may have been that of Melanie Klein, and so I consider her work, and the impact of theories based on projection and projective identification. I then attempt to review what transference is when it is in the clinic, referencing several post-Freudian analysts. Before discussing what countertransference is, I consider the term negative transference, in order to distinguish it from countertransference. I go on to think about transference in the analytic session, how it works, and also to reference the importance of erotic transference. I consider if transference is used outside the clinic given that psychoanalysis is not just a form of therapy. Lastly, I make a few short conclusions.

How does one define transference, which I regard as fundamental to the analytic process? Laplanche and Pontalis (1967) give one of the best definitions, in my opinion: “A process of actualisation of unconscious wishes. Transference uses specific objects and operates in the framework of a specific relationship established with these objects. Its context par excellence is the analytic situation. In the transference, infantile prototypes re-emerge and are experienced with a strong sensation of immediacy.” Transference, whilst unconscious can be brought into consciousness and enacted. Many analysts believe that how the analysand reacts to the frame i.e. the fixed timing and location of the session, is a form of transference. Lateness is interpreted as a punishing anger, and early arrival as something revealing anxiety. Transference might come into a session as (attempted) manipulation or as a provocation. Frosh (2012, p.192) cites Spillius et al (2011) in considering how transference became central to psychoanalysis from its early beginnings. It now seems to be much more about externalising unconscious fantasy, informed by the past and developed in the relationship in the analytic sessions, whereas Freud held that it was a displacement of an unconscious idea from a person in the analysand’s past, on to the analyst in the room. Having originally thought transference interfered with the work of analysis, he came to see value in the analysand’s feelings, believing that they had value as a means of understanding a neurosis. In his 1914 paper “Remembering, repeating and working-through” he explored how primitive emotions could have free expression and become useful for self-exploration.

The origin or discovery of transference is attributed to Freud. However, in 1917, in letters to first Sandor Ferenczi, and then to Karl Abraham, he draws their attentions to the work of Georg Groddeck, with whom he had just started corresponding and who may be regarded as the first ‘wild analyst’. Groddeck eventually stayed outside of the psychoanalytical organisations, but was famous for his work on somatic and psychosomatic illnesses. Groddeck had emphasised the importance of transference, particularly negative transference, which I explore later in this essay, which had impressed Freud. Freud originally thought of transference as an obstruction and that it inhibited a patient from free associating. Transference was discovered by Freud, when thinking of the difficulties that caused Breuer to stop seeing his patient, known as ‘Anna O’. Breuer was worried by the unconscious emotional charge in the room, as it was erotic. It complicated the work. It was a little later that Freud himself came to understand its efficacy, as a tool for ‘working through’. The analysand brings buried feelings and thoughts from past relationships and ‘transfers’ them to the analyst.

Freud identified its more positive influence (1905, p.116) as part of what became known as the ‘Dora case’. He wrote of “new editions of the impulses and phantasies” which was about how feelings were transferred into the room when they properly belonged elsewhere. Freud came to see himself as the recipient of ‘transferred feelings’; things that were unresolved from past relationships and a window into the unconscious of the analysand. Although ‘Dora’ ended her therapy with him, and he came to see it as a ‘failed case’, it is one of the landmark moments in the development of psychoanalysis. He thought if analysands could be helped to identify what was being transferred, especially how patterns of past maladaptive relationships tended to repeat, then they could be helped to moderate the impacts. Freud went on to note that it was the most difficult, as well as the most important, part of analytic technique. In 1914, he was writing that the analytic setting was a playground where the repetitions could take place and in his 1915 paper, “Observations on transference love” he noted “there can be no doubt that the outbreak of a passionate demand for love is largely the work of resistance”.

A little after Freud, Strachey (1934) wrote about transference interpretation. Its weight and significance is conveyed by “that which the analyst most feared and most wished to avoid”. One of the reasons for the fears, are what is happening to the analyst. Money-Kyrle (1956) noted that “the analyst’s experience of the patient’s projections may be linked with the analyst’s own internal reactions to the material.” I develop this below when discussing projective identification and countertransference, which Money-Kyrle (ibid. p.361) called a “delicate receiving apparatus”. It was Fairbairn (1958) who best summarised the centrality of working with transference as part of the treatment: “psychoanalytic treatment resolves itself into a struggle on the part of the patient to press-gang his relationship with the analyst into a closed system of the inner world through the agency of transference” (my italics). The transference is of little use without acknowledgement, and more significantly, interpretation. Strachey understood it as a lengthy process, “modification of the patient’s super-ego is brought about in a series of innumerable small steps by the agency of mutative interpretations, which are effected by the analyst in virtue of his position as object of the patient’s id-impulses and as auxiliary super-ego.”

Around the time that Strachey was writing, Melanie Klein was developing her ideas and in 1946 produced the seminal paper on projective identification. She wrote, “projective identification involves projection in that it is an identifying of the object with split-off parts of the self. Projective identification has given an added dimension to what we understand by transference, in that transference need not now be regarded simply as a repetition of the past.”. Transference, from a clinical point of view was evolving. Sandler (1987) felt it gave an ‘added dimension’ to transference “in that transference need not now be regarded as a repetition of the past”. Arundale and Bellman (2011) wrote that the projection of “early infantile states of mind” are akin, clinically, to transference and countertransference in having both ‘communicative’ and ‘evacuative’ functions. Feldman (2009) described Klein’s formulation of projective identification as “an unconscious phantasy in which the patient expelled what were usually disturbing contents into another object”. He goes on to describe how the object is then transformed in the patient’s mind because it now contains the expelled material. He added that it was not just a “method of evacuation” but provides other comforts for the patient such as believing that they can possess or control the object. “The patient’s phantasies, expressed by gross or subtle, verbal or non-verbal means, may come to influence the analyst’s state of mind”. 

The modern and Kleinian work of analysis is to contain the projections, work them through until they can be handed back, ‘introjected into’ the analysand, in a tolerable form. Klein saw transference as feelings being remembered and used. Steiner (1993) described it thus “We have come to use countertransference to refer to the totality of the analyst’s reactions in his relationship with the patient. The recognition of the importance of projective identification in creating these reactions led naturally to the idea that counter-transference is an important source of information about the state of the mind of the patient.” However, he warns “self-deception and unconscious collusion with the patient to evade reality makes counter-transference unreliable without additional corroboration”. Brenman-Pick (1985) reminds us that “constant projecting by the patient into the analyst is the essence of analysis”. Feldman (2009) describes projective identification as using an ‘omnipotent phantasy’ to defend primitive anxieties. He also highlights Bion’s work on containment to note “the mother’s responses to normal or pathological varieties of projective identification, emphasised the mother’s crucial function of taking in and allowing herself to be affected by the infant’s projection of severe anxiety or distress”.

The analyst also has his or her own transference. One thing the analyst has to be aware of, and be able to analyse, is the possibility of an analysand working through an enactment, sometimes called an ‘actualisation’. This is when something unconscious affects the participants and the responses cannot be contained and become part of the behavioural responses. Often these can lead to damaging and inappropriate responses known as ‘boundary transgressions’. The analyst needs to isolate the analysand’s responses and to understand when they might be acting out something informed by past relationships. If done well and appropriately, it becomes something to discuss, to ‘work through’ and can be explored as part of the therapy. Auchincloss and Samberg (2014) describe it thus: “Enactment is a co-constructed verbal and/or behavioural experience during a psychoanalytic treatment in which a patient’s expression of a transference fantasy evokes a countertransference “action” in the analyst. Enactments are “symbolic interactions” … in that they carry unconscious meanings for both patient and analyst, unconsciously initiated by the patient and evoking unconscious compliance in the analyst.” What is happening is exemplified by Brenman-Pick (1985), describing the clinical temptation to be a maternal figure, “we may act out by becoming excessively sympathetic to the patient”.

In the clinic, it is often this relationship, with the primary carer, that is transferred, and the analyst that needs to do the maternal containing, usually because it had been absent in the past, through reasons of a mother being overwhelmed and neglectful. Brenman-Pick (1985) described a state of mind which sought another state of mind “just as a mouth seeks a breast as an inborn potential.” The analysand may make assumptions about the analyst’s personal life and therefore thoughts, even though she has no information on which to base such assumptions. The analyst uses these fantasies rather than dismiss them. Winnicott (1947) goes so far as to describe ‘exploiting’ the transference. An analyst might note how the analysand is prone to assume something about them especially if it feels judgmental. This may be because of a past where judgment, particularly if it was from a parent, has been common. An analyst can illustrate that the analysand is responding as if she was attacked, and yet there was no attack from what is likely to have been an open ended, perhaps ambiguous comment. It might manifest as a need to impress, perhaps by listing achievements, which might reveal an insecurity about not being respected, by a teacher or an employer. It might be a hastiness to agree with an interpretation, which is little more than speculation, but is transferred from avoiding conflict in other relationships, often a spouse.

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Arundale (2011) reflects on Feldman’s work in this area and writes “As he understands it, the historical objects from the patient’s past are alive in the present moment as internal objects, so that they are available as transference objects”, she goes on to add that when the transference relationship is understood and properly experienced it allows the past to become clearer and for internal objects to be modified. She credits Strachey (1934) with creating a template for psychic change for future generations of analytic schools by identifying “mutative transference interpretation”. In the work, the relationship with the analyst is a foundation; a template for how future relationships might be formed to break the patterns of the past. Ultimately the aim is to reach a Bion moment of significance, when the analysand can be introduced to his or herself. Frosh (2012, p.190) puts it very concisely “…the reality of the analyst’s behaviour. Why should the analyst’s silence be interpreted as hostile judgment rather than supportive listening? The answer here is ‘because of the transference’”. Sandler (1976) considered the manipulative element of the dyadic relationship and wrote that “in the transference…the patient attempts to prod the analyst into behaving in a particular way and unconsciously scans and adapts to his perception of the analyst’s reaction”. He writes about the analysand resisting the impulse to be aware of any “infantile relationship” that he/she might be trying to impose. Separately Sandler (1990 p. 869) wrote about how an analysand might try “to impose on the situation a role relationship with the analyst”, which is the enactment described above.

What to do with all this transferential material, though? Roth (2001) observes that the transference has different levels of interpretation in the clinic. At one level, it links what is happening in the clinic with the analysand’s past, but moves to a level linking events in the analysand’s life outside the clinic and on to interpreting unconscious phantasies about the analyst and the analysis. The deepest level is to “enact phantasy configurations”. Roth opens her paper referencing another analyst’s material about a dream, but what is being considered is transference. She goes on to use other clinical examples of her own, to consider the multiple ways a transference can be interpreted and what the clinician needs to be aware of. How to separate layers of material and how to identify working with transference on the countertransference. I write about countertransference in more detail below. Roth notes how she is reviewing “complex transference manifestations” as she attempts to maintain the analysand’s trust and interest, but to get her to understand the links between what she is saying and what it means, and how it is being brought into the clinic. She guides us through her work deeper, by transference interpretation level, past an aggressive projective identification to a level four enactment which is a kind of seduction scene. Her conclusions summarise the importance of transference, which I regard as the foundation of the analytic work; “our sense of conviction about our patient’s internal world comes ultimately from our understanding of the here-and-now transference relationship between us”.

What happens when the analysand is transferring something from a difficult past relationship, or needs to project aggressive, hostile and unwanted, intolerable feelings into the analyst? This is the realm of negative transference; hostile feelings that the analyst’s presence elicits in the analysand. Analysts often have to start their work by demonstrating a caring side to become a ‘good object’, so that there is trust. This is the ‘therapeutic alliance’, but most often the effective work is done when the analyst becomes the ‘bad object’, and can show the analysand that the clinic is a non-judgmental space, and that difficult feelings can be contained and worked through. Understanding a phenomenon such as negative transference and more importantly, appreciating its utility, was largely the work of Melanie Klein, who had developed the ‘good breast/bad breast’ understanding of infantile love and hate, and she noted that the analyst was often split by the analysand into a good figure and a bad one, often in the same session. The demand of the analyst is to contain the anger, to ‘work through it’ and to behave as the nurturing mother of early infancy, and once again, to not judge the person from whom the hostility has come. The gentlest of questions, the most ambiguous of references, the calmest of silences can all be interpreted as hostile by an analysand with a negative transference. In Klein’s 1952 paper she wrote “we can fully appreciate the interconnection between positive and negative transferences only if we explore the early interplay between love and hate, and the vicious circle of aggression, anxieties, feelings of guilt and increased aggression, as well as the various aspects of objects towards whom these conflicting emotions and anxieties are directed.” And “I became convinced that the analysis of the negative transference, which had received relatively little attention in psycho-analytic technique, is a precondition for analysing the deeper layers of the mind.”

There is something in the word ‘counter’ that suggests resistance and even an aggressive return, as in ‘counterpunch’. Negative connotations perhaps, so is it related to negative transference? No. Countertransference has more than one definition, but is not negative transference. It might be a psychic response to it, though. Laplanche and Pontilis (1973, p.92) define “the whole of the analyst’s unconscious reactions to the individual analysand – especially to the analysand’s own transference”. Also, “some authors take the counter-transference to include everything in the analyst’s personality liable to affect the treatment, while others restrict it to those unconscious processes which are brought about in the analyst by the transference of the analysand.” This is difficult because if, as in some definitions, it is to be used as a tool in the analytic work, how can we deploy something that is unconscious? Nonetheless, prominent post-Freudians such as Winnicott (1947) thought it played a central role in the analytic work. He described it as “the analyst’s love and hate in reaction to the actual personality and behaviour of the patient”. For Freud, it was the analyst’s transference, how she had been affected by what the analysand had brought to the session. He regarded it as the neurotic response of the analyst, not a good thing, and something to be resolved by more analysis for the analyst. Sandler (1976) notes that Freud saw it as impeding understanding, because it clouded the mind, which was the tool needed to do the work; an interference with the work of interpretation.

More lately, with a Kleinian influence, it has come to mean the specific response of an analyst to the analysand’s transference. It is about taking in the analysand’s projections and being able to contain them. The analyst, in this way, comes to feel what the analysand is feeling and her ability to absorb and reflect helps the analysand when the projections are passed back and reintrojected. The analysand starts to feel things are more manageable and to be able to master integration, shifting from paranoid-schizoid positions to a depressive one. The working out of transference and countertransference go on together as a relational event – the feelings in the analysand become the data to analyse, upon which interpretations and reflections can be based. The analysand will be looking for signs that what she has projected into the analyst is being contained and perhaps cared for, or alternatively what is happening, if it is causing some panic or discomfort. In this understanding of countertransference there is a view that it signals to the analyst what is happening in the analysand’s unconscious life; rather different to the Freudian sense that it was exclusively an issue for the analyst. So, it is both the analyst’s own transference and her response to the analysand’s transference. Not only does an analyst feel her own countertransference but must then productively and subsequently analyse it.

Heiman (1950) was the first analyst to consider the positive influence of countertransference, “an instrument of research into the patient’s unconscious” – she describes it as the “patient’s creation” and that it is a part of the patient’s persona. Therefore, the analyst can use it as a guide to understanding the transference the analysand offers. She noted that the analyst has to sustain the feelings stirred within her, and not to let them go as the analysand does, but to “subordinate them to the analytic task” functioning as a “mirror reflection” to the analysand. Her definition was “all feelings which the analyst experiences towards his patient”. Her paper was the first to suggest that countertransference was ubiquitous. All feelings and everywhere makes it a complicated tool to use. To what extent is one dealing with the analysand’s material and to what extent might it be more about the analyst’s own past? Being able to engage, and yet analyse the situation with detachment, is a critical skill. Heimann wrote that the analyst “has to perceive the manifest and latent meaning of his patient’s words, the allusions and implications, the links to former sessions, the references to childhood situations behind the descriptions of current relationships”. She best summarised it as “in the comparison of feelings roused in himself with his patient’s associations and behaviour, the analyst possesses a most valuable means of checking whether he has understood or failed to understand his patient.” 

The post-Heimann approach continues to evolve and become more nuanced. Roth (2018) takes Heimann’s mid-twentieth century view as countertransference being something pathological, and something for the analyst to own for her own self-analysis, and shows how it moved into being accepted as a tool to help with an analysand’s development. How to utilise it has been subtly different in the techniques of many analysts and he cites Balint, Fairbairn, Tower and Winnicott. Nonetheless he emphasises Heimann’s view of it as a creation brought to her. What it meant was a shift from conventional analysis requiring the neutrality of the analyst, sometimes called ‘the blank screen’, to the analyst being actively involved in a process; a more dynamic therapeutic alliance, properly open to projection and introjection. To clarify this, he cites Money-Kyrle (1956) “as the patient speaks the analyst will, as it were, become introspectively identified with him and having understood him inside will re-project and interpret”. In Segal’s 1997 paper, “The use and abuse of countertransference”, however, there is a warning to emphasise the need of proper understanding. As Segal suggested, whilst it can be “the best of servants” it can also function as the worst of masters. One example might be ‘enactment’ – against which Freud had warned – as I highlighted above. Roys (2011, p.163) describes how the analyst shifts position back and forth between concordant (a sense of sharing the analysand’s experience) and complementary (when the transference has affected the analyst so that something is felt towards the analysand).

Freud’s early encounters with transference were noteworthy because of the erotic elements. Having explored the erotic transference as resistance, he wrote, “of the first kind (of resistance) are the patient’s endeavour to assure herself of her irresistibility, to destroy the doctor’s authority by bringing him down to the level of a lover”. What he understood was the need to work with it, having initially seen it as nuisance. “To urge the patient to suppress, renounce or sublimate her instincts the moment she has admitted her erotic transference would be, not an analytic way of dealing with them, but a senseless one”. He thought it would be bringing repressed material into the conscious realm, but then ensuring it was repressed once more by a fearful patient, who would “feel only the humiliation, and she will not fail to take her revenge for it”. For clarity’s sake, “analytic technique requires of the physician that he should deny to the patient who is craving for love the satisfaction she demands”. He added that the patient would have “what all patients strive for in analysis – she would have succeeded in acting out”, which is probably the first reference to what I refer to above as ‘enactment’. Freud’s patients were, of course, predominantly women and usually treated for hysteria, hence the slightly unbalanced gendered views; modern clinical work is consistent with transference from male, female and non-binary individuals. As he noted, though, ‘transference-love’ must be worked through in the therapy “and traced back to its unconscious origins”. An analyst must be able to demonstrate distance from the transference love as Mann (1999, p.7) observed, “the erotic connects people at deeply unconscious levels, driving them into relationships at least at the level of fantasy”. He thought that closeness activates erotic material in the unconscious, but also that the greater the activation of erotic material in the unconscious, the closer the bond two people develop.

Before concluding this essay, it is important to ask, ‘does transference exist outside the clinic?’ Klein (1952) was clear, “in some form or other transference operates throughout life and influences all human relations”. I think it is helpful to imagine walking into a room of strangers at a party or a conference. Does one want to be seen and not heard, or to be acknowledged, heard and visible? What is happening? We are seeing around us a number of people as hostile, or as potential allies. This is informed by our past relationships and some form of transference is underway. Sandler, Dare and Holder (1973) observed that it enters all relationships and these (e.g. choice of spouse/employer) are often determined by some characteristic of the other person who (consciously or unconsciously) represents some attribute of an important figure of the past. It seems highly probable that it goes on at all times in our lives. Psychoanalyst and historian Daniel Pick, suggests it is a form of transference that political leaders exploit to facilitate what the psychologists understand as ‘group processes’. Generations after generations this seems to be a constant, as we note today with the tragic manipulation of the Russian people.

This essay has discussed the psychoanalytic terms, transference and countertransference. It has described their origination and their development. It has asserted that they are fundamental to the work of psychoanalysis in the clinic, but also that they are ubiquitous and exist outside the clinic. It has considered how such an important concept continues to evolve as the theoretical baton gets handed on to each new post-Freudian generation, but has focused on what Melanie Klein and Object Relations Theory brought to developing Freud’s discovery, and how Paula Heimann was the critical developer of countertransference by seeing it as an important tool for the clinician. In conclusion, I suggest that psychoanalysis is only effective when the pillars of the clinical work, that are transference and countertransference, are properly understood and deployed.

References

Arundale, J. and Bellman, D.B. eds., 2018. Transference and countertransference: A unifying focus of psychoanalysis. Routledge.

Pick, I.B., 1985. Working through in the countertransference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis66, pp.157-166.

Britton, R. and Steiner, J., 1994. Interpretation: Selected fact or overvalued idea? International Journal of Psycho-Analysis75, pp.1069-1078.

Carpy, D.V., 1989. Tolerating the countertransference: A mutative process. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis70, pp.287-294.

Etchegoyen, L., 2010. The analyst’s response to the effects of the transference: On Lacan and Bion. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis91(2), pp.399-401.

Fairbairn, W.R.D., 1958. On the nature and aims of psycho-analytical treatment. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis39, pp.374-385.

Feldman, M., 2009. Doubt, Conviction and the Analytic Process. Routledge

Freud, S. (1917) Letter from Sigmund Freud to Karl Abraham, November 11, 1917. The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham 1907-1925 52:361-362 

Freud, S. (1917) Letter from Sigmund Freud to Sándor Ferenczi, June 3, 1917. The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914-1919 26:211-212 

Freud, S., 1958. Remembering, repeating and working-through (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis II). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works (pp. 145-156).

Freud, S., 1953. Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (1905 [1901]). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901-1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works (pp. 1-122).

Freud, S., 1955. Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X (1909): Two Case Histories (‘Little Hans’ and the ‘Rat Man’) (pp. 151-318).

Freud, S., 1958. Observations on transference-love (Further recommendations on the technique of psycho-analysis III). In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works (pp. 157-171).

Frosh, S., 2012. A brief introduction to psychoanalytic theory. Red Globe Press

Heimann, P., 1950. On counter-transference. International journal of psycho-analysis31, pp.81-84.

Heimann, P., 1960. Counter-transference. Part II. British Journal of Medical Psychology.

Katz-Bearnot, S.P., 2014. Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, edited by Elizabeth L. Auchincloss, MD, and Eslee Samberg, MD, Yale University Press, New. Psychodynamic Psychiatry42(4), pp.700-702

Klein, M., 1952. The origins of transference. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis33, pp.433-438.

Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J., 1967. The language of psychoanalysis. London: Karnac.

Money-Kyrle, R.E., 1956. Normal counter-transference and some of its deviations. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis37, pp.360-366.

Roth, P (2001) Mapping the landscape International Journal of psychoanalysis 82 p.533-43

Roys, P., 2018. Two impulses to end an analysis: exploring the transference and countertransference. In Transference and Countertransference (pp. 157-179). Routledge.

Sandler, J., 1976. Countertransference and role-responsiveness. International Review of psycho-analysis3, pp.43-47.

Sandler, J. (1987) The Concept of projective Identification London: Routledge

Sandler, J., Dare, C., Holder, A. and Dreher, A.U., 2018. The patient and the analyst: The basis of the psychoanalytic process. Routledge.

Segal, H., 1977. Countertransference. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy6, pp.31-37.

Spillius, E.B., Milton, J., Garvey, P., Couve, C. and Steiner, D., 2011. The new dictionary of Kleinian thought. Routledge.

Steiner, J., 1994. Patient‐centered and analyst‐centered interpretations: Some implications of containment and countertransference. Psychoanalytic inquiry14(3), pp.406-422.

Strachey, J., 1934. The nature of the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. Classics in psychoanalytic technique, pp.361-378.

Winnicott, D.W., 1994. Hate in the counter-transference. The Journal of psychotherapy practice and research3(4), p.348.

On: Freud’s repression

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In this essay, I shall describe repression and repression theory as an example of a fundamental concept in Freud’s work. For Freud, little was of greater import, it is the “cornerstone of our understanding of the neuroses”. In his Autobiographical Study, he called it “a novelty” and was clear that with his discovery, “nothing like it had ever before been recognized in mental life”. Once I have described and defined it, I aim to evaluate it, although historic evaluation including Freud’s own, about it being “a cornerstone”, not just of the understanding of neuroses, but of the psychoanalytic field, sets the bar high.  From the outset, this concept is problematical, insofar as it is loosely defined, not least by Freud himself. In generic form, it is a psychic defence. This raises questions about what is being defended, how the defence works and what happens to repressed material. These are addressed below. Furthermore, Freud came to see repression as being two distinct things. Unhelpfully, what he called ‘repression proper’ turns out to be a derivative, whereas repression in what might be called its pure form, is described as ‘primal repression’.  This essay restricts itself to Freud and his concept, but it is helpful to think of the term signifier, when thinking of the primal repressed, which was a word attached to it by French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, later in the twentieth century. Billig (1999) described repression as a “willed forgetting” and explained that we have a need to forget our secrets, but also the fact of having forgotten them. The forgetting of the forgotten is successful repression.

I shall start with an attempt to define repression; what it is we must forget we have forgotten.  It is when we cannot recall a memory from the past.  We say it is repressed. But what does that mean? In the original, the German word verdrangung, described what was happening.  The best translations of this seem to be ‘to push away’; ‘to thrust aside’. What is being thrust aside? Beliefs that cannot become conscious, because the content is so shocking, or painful, (such as a murderous rage towards one’s father) that something obstructs them ie thrusts aside and makes repressed. Freud’s terminology translated as an instinctual impulse, as that which is thrust aside. It is the impulse which passes into a state of repression. Freud explains that such a horror would inspire a fight or flight response, but given that “the ego cannot escape from itself”, it cannot fly.

In his short paper on Repression, first published in Zeitschrift, Freud grapples with why should something need repressing. If what is being repressed is the satisfaction of a need, a drive, that is inconsistent with the view that satisfying a need generates pleasure. Therefore, for this psychic mechanism to happen, it must be responding to the risk of unpleasure, in the case of a murderous rage, perhaps the subsequent guilt attached to parricide. Having the impulse met, the need satisfied is pleasurable, but it is the coexistence of unpleasures such as shame and the condemnation of society that causes the repression. None of this ever reaches the conscious level of the mind, but is fought out by the impulse and the defence. Freud explains that the force of the feelings of unpleasure overwhelm the pleasure of satisfying the unconscious impulse. It is at this point that he addresses the question of what happens to the repressed impulse. Freud understood that it is kept “at a distance” from conscious activity, but that it continues to exist.

This brings him to the theorising of two types, or components of repression. Primal repression is the first phase, much as described above – the impulse is denied entry to the conscious. He notes that what happens next, repression proper, is when psychic derivatives of the initial impulse attach themselves and make a renewed attempt to become conscious. These derivatives are also repressed, which is why Freud describes recession proper as an “after pressure”. Unlike primal repression the material that needs to be defended in repression proper, has once been available to the conscious but has been defended against. An early trauma is an example – too difficult and painful to tolerate, but available nonetheless. To remind his readers that repressed impulses continue to exist, he writes that repression only exists to act as a bar to one psychical system, namely the conscious. He suggests, moreover, that the repressed impulse “proliferates in the dark”. The “censorship of the conscious” is weakened by how far the derivative is from the initial primal repression, and sufficient distance can allow it access to the conscious, at which point they manifest as neurotic symptoms. Lastly, repression is not uniform. He highlights this to emphasise that a repression is not a permanent event, and for repression to succeed it needs a pressure, because it has to be able to resist the upward pressure of the unconscious, to which the impulse has returned, but not disappeared. He writes of these forces as “repressive cathexes”, which relax during periods of sleep and contribute to the formation of dreams as a renewed attempt of the unconscious impulse to break through.

Freud was not the discoverer of the unconscious; he himself notes the many artists and philosophers who had an understanding that it might exist, but the theory of repression is his unique work. In his paper, “The Ego and the Id”, Freud noted that we obtain our concept of the unconscious, “from the theory of repression”. Whilst an awareness of the probability of the unconscious had been acknowledged, he thinks the theory of repression allows it to be conceptualised. Herein lies its significance. He thinks the ego itself is the mechanism of repression and in his later years he asserted that the work of the analytical treatment was to strengthen the ego in its battle with id. This is a curio, because one might interpret it as an invitation for more repression. Was he advocating that, consciously or unconsciously?

If it can be satisfactorily defined, we might get around to asking, is it a necessary process? Does it have any sort of protective function? Also, does it always work? The strength of one’s defences is not consistent. At times of weakness it allows unconscious material to intrude, hence parapraxes. More familiarly, our defence is weak when we sleep. Dreams, the things that when interpreted are the “royal road to the unconscious”, are the best example, alongside symptoms. For Freud, this is the return of the repressed and is linked to the repetition compulsion. Freud notes that repression is a mechanism originating in the ego, and also that it is unconscious. He had come to understand that ego is not exclusively conscious. Achieving that understanding was a consequence of the work on repression, giving weight to its significance to the development of psychoanalysis. We accept that the return of the repressed is an inevitability, because we have not overcome it.

What might we think about the nature of repression at a societal level? This is important because we come to ask if repression is important. It seems to be something that protects us from feelings of guilt and shame, which might be too debilitating to carry on living. In this way, it might be thought of as a kind of uber-defence. Either way, the significance of his theory is its impact on futures, individually and collectively. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” he explores what the analyst can achieve working with something the analysand cannot remember: “The patient cannot remember the whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be the essential part of it”. It is in this essay that Freud writes about a repetition compulsion. “He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience…” For me, it is this quality of the theory of repression, that it begot more ideas, that highlights its enormous worth. That something so radical could be taken up by future generations of analysts gives weight in any evaluation of repression.

In applying his discovery to treatments, specifically for neuroses, Freud started by believing that repressing material generated anxieties. An anxiety was the consequence of a repression because the energy associated with the unconscious drive had not been released – no pleasure. Patients were aware that something needed to be resolved, but not really what that was. Hence an anxiety. However, many years later he revised his thinking. In his revised view, anxiety begets repression, not being a consequence of it. An idea in the unconscious that is threatening to the integrity of the ego becomes the thing that the ego acts to repress. The anxiety came first; the defence, repression, was the response.

By evaluating repression, one is attempting to determine its significance, and to consider its strengths and also its limitations. How does one evaluate a “cornerstone”? Cohen and Kinston (1984) took the view that when Freud said that repression takes place only after a “sharp cleavage” between conscious and unconscious activity, and that in some papers he seemed to exclude some ages such as the pre-pubertal; that he might have wished to exclude some conditions, and they speculate those to be psychoses. It allows them to develop what they claim are long-standing theoretical inconsistencies, mostly linked with Freud’s views that primal repression was linked to trauma. They review the literature on borderline, psychotic and narcissistic patients in examining whether the theory of repression is inapplicable. Even if there is some merit to their argument, I am not convinced it truly damages the “cornerstone” or threatens to bring the structure down. In another criticism, they explore the use of cathexes and suggest that this is a convenient “economic metaphor” Freud used when he wanted or needed to avoid detailed definitions. They summarise that Freud allowed for ambiguity or for further research by using both a ‘cathexis hypothesis’ which mapped to his topographical model of the mind and concurrently working with a form hypothesis, which blends elements of both the topographical and the structural models of the mind. When one is dealing with something as dynamic as the unconscious, I take the view that it is wise to not be absolutist, and to leave room for fresh thinking. One final criticism the authors level is to take issue with the lack of “clearly stated hypotheses” regarding the formation and the “mechanism of primal repression”. This seems more justifiable, but Freud himself understood it, and it was his willingness to consider the impact of “environment” that allowed him to wrestle free from an impulse being realised as a potential source of unpleasure, not pleasure, and hence the cathexis for repression overwhelmed the cathexis to break into consciousness.

Blum (2003) has more to say on the significance of repression, especially in the dyadic analytical relationship because for him repression is indissolubly linked with transference. “Transference is a return of the repressed, with repressed memories embedded within a fundamental unconscious fantasy constellation.” It seems to me that this is critical in evaluating repression. Not only has it given psychoanalysis the theoretical foundation it required, and allowed us to explore unconscious, but it has been a productive tool in treatment. Blum’s essay is a response to an article penned by Peter Fonagy, who had disregarded the link between transference and repression. The enduring debates about Freud’s work are testament to its significance. Amongst Freud’s best-known and regarded psychoanalytic successors is Bion, who in his “Attention and Interpretation” also considered the analytical situation and the “experience of remembering a dream”. He thought memory should only be associated with a “conscious attempt to recall” and echoed Freud on the significance of repression proper making its renewed assaults on consciousness, often in dreams, when reminding us that “dream-like memory is the memory of psychic reality and is the stuff of analysis” (my emphasis).

This essay has described repression, one of Freud’s fundamental concepts, generally as a psychic defence, and more specifically, in explaining the way that primal repression forms and is repressed, and repression proper, which is sometimes repressed, and is an “after-pressure”. In the second half of this essay I have considered the significance of Freud’s great discovery, and his own view that it was first, a “cornerstone”, in the understanding of neuroses, and more boldly a “cornerstone” for psychoanalysis itself. In evaluating the discovery, I have reviewed papers that regard the definition and mechanism of primal repression as ambiguous and I have considered the significance of how the theory of repression has enhanced treatment, especially with regard to working with transference. I conclude that repression is fundamental to modern clinical technique and to the history, concepts and theoretical bases for psychoanalysis. Truly a cornerstone.

References

Billig, M. (2000) Freud’s Different Versions of forgetting “Signorelli”.  Int. J. Psychoanal., (81)(3):483-498

Billig, M. (1999). Freudian repression: Conversation creating the unconscious. Cambridge University Press.

Bion, W. R. (Ed.). (2013). Attention and interpretation: A scientific approach to insight in psycho-analysis and groups (Vol. 4). Routledge.

Blum, H. (2003) Repression, transference and reconstruction International Journal of Psychoanalysis (84) (3) pp. 497-503

Cohen, J.  & Kingston, W. (1984) Repression Theory: A New Look at the Cornerstone International Journal of Psychoanalysis (65) pp. 411-22

Freud, S. (1995). The Freud Reader. (Ed. P. Gay) United Kingdom: Vintage.

Frosh, S. (2012). A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.