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Several recent conferences around the New York City area have explored issues relevant to modern psychoanalysis. The use and misuse of countertransference was the subject of a conference sponsored by the Advanced Institute for Analytic Psychotherapy. Panelists who offered their views included Peter Giovacchini, Susan Issacs Elmhirst, Harold Searles, W.W. Meisner, and Vamik Volkan.
Several of the comments addressed the issue of the meaning of “transfer” of feelings—from patient to analyst or analyst to patient. The possibility of this mechanism being literal was suggested in a case history presentation by Giovacchini. He related the story of a patient who suffered from hay fever so severe that he found it necessary to leave the city every summer. After three years of analysis, Giovacchini realized the patient had not taken his habitual annual leave at any point in the analysis. Curious, he asked the patient why. The patient did not know why his hay fever disappeared, but thereafter Giovacchini found himself suffering from a dust allergy. It would seem, then, that the analyst's literal assumption of the patient's symptomology had occurred.
Searles, too, referred to the analyst's need to experience the feelings of the patient. In commenting on symbiotic strivings in the patient, he suggested that in order for individuation to occur, the analyst must come to experience these symbiotic feelings as belonging more to himself than to the patient. If the analyst is