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This book brings fresh and searching reflection to the vast and complicated realm of countertransference. Grounded in Bion's analyst-as-container model and informed by current relational thinking, Shah's book investigates countertransference's potential to obstruct, all the while affirming its vital role in furthering analytic process. From contemporary perspectives, metabolizing patients’ unbearable states of being demands the even more challenging work of metabolizing our own. As such, Shah identifies subjective traps analysts commonly fall into when pulled to dull and distance. Each of the book's eight chapters delineates a countertransferential pitfall.
The opening chapter, “Arrogance,” (pp. 1-22) begins by acknowledging elitist aspects of the field's history: Non-physicians were barred from the sanctum of psychoanalysis, relegated to the secondary practice of psychotherapy, as psychoanalysis cleverly affixed itself to medicine. Additionally, Freud's secret society was for devout colleagues only, excluded were those holding other points of view. Shah extends his analysis of the field's arrogance inward to the countertransference of the all-knowing doctor. By adopting a superior and omniscient stance, psychoanalysts insulate themselves from the daunting uncertainty and overwhelm of intimately knowing others’ minds. Arrogance defends against the failure of fumbling, the discomfort of unconscious communication and stirring; what gets compromised, however, is true analytic contact—the ability to unguardedly be with patients’ psychic pain.
Shah's chapter, “Racism,” (pp. 23-41) explores the emergence of racist states of mind in analysis. He offers the example of a patient voicing a stereotype of Shah's own ethnicity, the awkwardness and danger of her reveal, his struggle to not shut down or shut her down. Shah associates to a memory of racialized trauma, his feelings of exclusion, shame, and rage. Shah then associates his patient's racist fantasy of “dirtiness” to her o