You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Any child analyst or psychotherapist could not help but notice a book that promises to be devoted to countertransference. Anastasopoulos and Tsiantis suggest that children and adolescents provoke and intensify countertransference feelings because of their proximity to primary process material, developmental immaturity, and tendency toward preverbal communication (p. 17). From Freud's earliest understanding, the countertransference has ascended the ladder of importance in analytic theory For some, the countertransference is all; for others, like Francois Ladame, contributing a chapter called “The Transference Mirage and the Pitfalls of Countertransference,” the analyst's reaction is far less important than the exact understanding of the words of the patient. But for most clinicians what is most challenging is working within the transference and by extension the countertransference. There appeared a need to redress the relative lack of writing on countertransference in the child literature the editors hope that their collection will “prove useful to clinicians and students” (p xxii)
This volume does make a contribution to the literature on countertransference, but a limited one. The freewheeling editorial approach allows for a personal, intimate style that can be a refreshing. The panel of distinguished and experienced contributors represent the European analytic schools such as Bion and neo-Kleinian. There is real flair in the language and ideas that describe abundant clinical material For instance, Godfrind writes, “But the parents put my back up when I meet them, by their restrictive, petty bourgeois conformity” (p. 108).
But the liveliness of this idiosyncrasy is dragged down by the weight of obscure writing found in the same paragraph: “Her essentially neurotic structure allows an ‘interpretative’ psychotherapy centred mainly on the conflictual nature of her epistemophilic drives in an oedipal context” (p 108)
The reader must also struggle with terms that offer a ra