Psycho-Analytic Technique and the Analyst's Unconscious Masochism1

Psycho-analytic cure consists in establishing a unity within the psychic structure of the patient. Most of what is ego alien must be relinquished or reintegrated in the ego. For this unity to be achieved the analyst must, in the countertransference, achieve a kind of unity especially with what the patient rejects or splits off from himself. The analyst is able to do this to the degree to which he has mastered his own ego defences, and insofar as he is able to recognize what there is or was of himself in the patient.

Every object-imago is psychologically a projected part of the subject. The psycho-analytic process in one sense consists, for both patient and analyst, in restoring the unity broken by this division of one into two or more. To be cured is to have the integrity and mastery of one's personality restored; and to cure is to integrate the patient's psyche by integrating one's own, re-establishing the equation non-ego (you) = ego. To understand is to overcome the division into two, and to identify oneself is, in this aspect, to restore an already pre-existing identity. To understand, to unite with another, and hence also to love, prove to be basically one and the same. Therefore, understanding is equivalent to positive countertransference, taking this term in its widest sense to mean love and union. The disturbances of positive countertransference, its ‘negative’ aspects, are thus disturbances of the union and equivalent to disturbances of understanding. Hence the continual analytic utilization and solution of every manifestation of negative countertransference and the re-establishment of positive countertransference are decisive factors for the favourable development of the psychoanalytic process. To the degree to which negative countertransference is a response to a negative transference, the negative countertransference must be resolved if the negative tranference