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Dr Fanny Blanck Cereijido, the moderator, began by stating that this panel sprang from theoretical and clinical questions surrounding how to handle the problem of prejudice within the psychoanalytic session. Departing from the conception that the psychoanalytic cure includes the psychoanalyst in a dialectic analyst-analyzand process to which both are committed, the effect of the analyst is recognized in the transference of the analyzand, who responds to his own history and also to the way in which he is awaited and heard.
The discourse of the patient that was presented provoked a strong countertransferential impact in the analyst. The patient is the granddaughter of Nazis and has filicide fantasies about the baby she is carrying. The analyst is Jewish and has a history of a family that disappeared in the lagers and a father who spent years of imprisonment in Soviet Russia.
All the panel participants worked with the above clinical material. The different geographical origins and non-homogenic frames of reference created the possibility of different psychoanalytic focuses among the panelists.
The impossibility of thinking without the pre-existing baggage of criteria and values colors and modulates the analytic relationship and the countertransference. Prejudice appears necessarily in the minds of both analyst and analyzand through family beliefs, sense of belonging, theoretical positions, and therapeutic objectives. Conscious or unconscious prejudices towards someone who presents different beliefs, particularly in situations that are meaningful to the analyst, can become a countertransferential obstacle. Rather than denying his/her feelings of rejection of certain beliefs and attitudes of the patient, the analyst should but make them conscious and work with them.
Eizirik suggests that the analyst maintains the necessary neutrality and abstinence while sustaining a position that is empathic, yet with a possible distance from the patient's material and transference and from