Countertransference and Participant Observation

The study of countertransference experience as potentially useful data logically follows from participant observation as a psychoanalytic model. It is inherent in a model in which the physical science base is relativity theory and the principle of uncertainty. Harry Stack Sullivan (see Perry, 1982), not formally analytically trained and largely a self-educated intellectual, reflected the prevailing culture of his time and place. Chicago, during and post-World War I, was apparently the setting for Sullivan's possible schizophrenic break as well as for his personal and conceptual rejuvenation. He was a farm boy from the East and was exposed for the first time to a middle-American, urban, immigrant city. In contrast with the longstanding traditions and values in Freud's conservative, turn-of-the-century Vienna, Chicago appeared disorganized, without tradition, and in total flux.

For Freud, embedded in his time and place science was hard science and the researcher sought absolute and indisputable truth. He believed that he studied from objective distance, controlled most of the variables, and if operating properly was not affected by his own person or his own biases. To think otherwise would undermine the validity of the findings and raise the specter of anarchy. Grey (1979) refers to Freud's research approach as reflecting the principle of isolates: “The most reliable way to acquire information about a phenomenon is to examine it in vacuo, in a test tube in its purist and most simple form” (p. 473).

Sullivan, on the other hand, in a new and developing society (and new to himself), resonated toward the theories of relativity and uncertainty and toward field theory, all of which throw into question the notion of absolute truth in the basic sciences, much less the social sciences. The scientist as personal researcher interacts with the data under study. Everything is contextual. What one sees is at least somewhat dependent on who one is and where and when