Teaching Countertransference

Martyr in Greek means “witness”

We have been cautioned against teaching psychoanalysis ever since Freud (1937) listed psychoanalysis and education among the impossible professions. More recently, Meltzer (1991) said it is possible to learn psychoanalysis, but it cannot be taught. In spite of such warnings, psychoanalytic education continues to exist; this paper explores how that most individual part of psychoanalytic technique, countertransference, may be taught. Every didactic activity carries a risk, and I may be accused of making too formal what might be the most intimate part of psychoanalytic technique, one where a tension between intuition, sensitivity, and intellectual rigour reaches its peak However, the difficulty of teaching the unteachable is not unique to psychoanalysis. The art critic John Ruskin (1857) believed that “the excellence of an artist, as such, depends wholly on refinement of perception, and that it is this, mainly, which a master or a school can teach.” Ruskin continued that, while “powers of perception distinguish school from school,” all schools have the common purpose of encouraging “great art,” and “all great art is delicate.” Sharpness of perception and delicacy of performance in psychoanalytic technique are very complex issues. Not only are they woven into the conscious/unconscious divide, they also relate to issues of the analyst's neutrality or emotional involvement and cannot be separated from the boundaries allowed by the theories embraced by each psychoanalyst. For this reason, a brief review of the history of the concept is necessary