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In this latest volume of the Relational Perspectives Series (following Stephen Mitchell's Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity). San Francisco psychologist Peter Carnochan has produced a work of graceful expression and extraordinary ambition. His subject is the clinical use of countertransference, and his effort to place this subject into a clarifying context takes him into moral theory, epistemology, and the academic study of emotion. In each of these challenging areas, he offers an original point of view. He thus sets himself the task of synthesizing, and often going beyond, the work of a remarkable array of writers, including major thinkers in Western philosophy.
The “ground” he seeks is a foundation for resolving the debate over the role of the analyst's affect and its expression. As he puts it, “What is new in this work … is the attempt to systematically ground our understanding of the countertransference in a wider theoretical context” (p. 391). He hopes that his work “will bring order to what has often been a confusing debate” (p. 391). In this sense, the book is preparatory—it is groundwork, so to speak. However, he delves deeply into technique as well.
What are the elements of history, epistemology, and morality that Carnochan wants us to be aware of as we work toward a theory of countertransference? One main element is Freud's positivism, at the center of which Carnochan finds the idea that objective knowledge of another's mind is possible and the road to this knowledge requires rationality and the suppression of emotion. If analysis works by getting the facts right and then overcoming the patient's resistance to accepting the facts, the chief obstacle is affect, construed here as irrational feeling undermining dispassionate