Attention to the Analyst's Subjectivity: From Kohut to Now… How Are We Doing?

Heinz Kohut's discussion of the analyst's reactions to idealizing and mirroring transferences emphasizes the importance of attention to how the analyst copes with narcissistic tensions motivated by “current stress or… long term vulnerabilities.” His concern is for how the analyst's blindness to his or her own subjective processes might “interfere with the establishment or… maintenance” of selfobject transferences. What are the current theoretical elaborations of Kohut's concern for attention and management of the analyst's “countertransference symptoms” (which we now speak of as the analyst's subjectivity)? Central to post-Kohutian theorizing is a two-person field of interaction, which includes the analyst's subjectivity. Theoretical emphases have been (a) to create models for how the analyst might organize his or her sense of this interaction to best provide an empathic responsiveness to the analysand, and (b) to sharpen a view of the analytic processes that characterize moments and phases of analytic engagement.

Contemporary theories, elegant and pragmatic, emphasize particular aspects of how the interaction might be organized and understood to benefit