Countertransference

DR. KLIGERMAN:

Dr. Newman offers an essay full of rich and provocative clinical ideas that bear directly on some of the most basic issues in psychoanalytic therapy. He advances some novel ideas and raises a host of fruitful and intriguing questions, which are in themselves hallmarks of a valuable paper. As I perceive his thesis, it runs roughly as follows: In many persons an unfortunate selfobject derailment with the original caretakers leads to a traumatic walling off of the primary needs, claims, and aspirations, and to the secondary development of an adaptive defensive style, in which the child learns to live with a faulty object in a way that maintains some cohesiveness and fends off disintegration anxiety or hopeless despair, but fails to address the deeper needs and the existing damage of the self. In later life, the child/patient maintains this style in the form of a false self which, however, presents itself as manifest character. He both adapts and defends. In his personal relations, he finds objects who behave in a complementary fashion to this outer layer, or evokes unconscious complementary responses in people who ordinarily might have behaved differently. When such patients enter analysis, the analyst can easily fall into an unconscious complementary countertransference posture, which, if not corrected, leads to a stalemate or negative therapeutic reaction. This state of affairs is then all too frequently attributed to the patient's unanalyzability. On the other hand, when the complementary countertransference is understood and the therapeutic relationship is felicitously handled, instead of a pathological regression resulting, the false self or split-off part is gradually modified, and the patient enters into a fruitful therapeutic regression toward the primary archaic selfobject transference.

So far, the sequence does not seem entirely unfamiliar to us. One might say it represents the pregenital counterpart of the traditional concept of defens