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What psychoanalyst hasn’t had a person who has been in analysis for many years come into the office one day and announce that she had just read an article or had a conversation or seen
a movie that had changed her life? The person will have experienced, outside of session, an emotionally significant feeling that the analyst had tried but failed to get at in treatment. This has happened to me many times, and while I am always a little annoyed that I am not getting credit, I am also relieved that a long-standing resistance has at last been resolved. I have talked about the phenomenon with many colleagues who have had similar experiences. In this paper I will discuss how I was instrumental in helping resolve a resistance for someone in treatment with another psychoanalyst, and some implications for this phenomenon of extra-analytic resistance resolution. This article will touch on related topics of split transferences and conjoint treatment.
All psychoanalysts have observed analysands working with extra-analytic transferences—to teachers, coaches, bosses, medical doctors, clergy, even distant celebrities—and perhaps have also noticed that their patients experience things with these extra-analytic figures that they do not experience with their analyst. However, most psychoanalysts, or at least most psychoanalysts who have published writings, don’t like split transferences. They feel it somehow dilutes the treatment (Wallerstein, 2000). Some modern analysts, however, acknowledge both the inevitability of split transference—for example, when an analysand is both in analysis and simultaneously in supervision—and also the potential usefulness of the split (London, 1989; Unger, 1978). With the partial exceptions of working with a psychoanalyst or student-psychoanalyst patient who is in supervision, or a patient who is sent to another analyst for couples therapy or group therapy, however, most of these extra-psychoanalytic transferences are serendipitous. That is true of the