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It was Michel Neyraut (2004 [1974]) who introduced, running contrary to commonly held ideas, the notion of the precession of the countertransference in relation to the transference. As he points out, the etymology of the term “countertransference, transposed from the German Gegen übertragung, suggests that “the countertransference is opposed to the transference, occurs after the transference, is determined by it [and] is essentially second and reactive” (p. 14). Now, even in its extended sense, which includes in the countertransference everything that occurs in the analyst, this does not account for the “conflictual and dynamic relationship that is formed in the analytic situation” (p. 16).
In his approach to the transference, it is essentially this dialectical character of the analytical encounter that Neyraut highlights. He shows that it is the transference that comes second in two respects: as a concept, it appeared retrospectively; in analysis it cannot be first because it occurs during the analytic process. “If psychoanalytic thinking,” he writes, “is constituted essentially by a response, we are obliged to note that sometimes the response precedes the question and that this is a first form of countertransference” (p. 18). This conception reveals the fundamental ambiguity of the
countertransference and makes our approach to it considerably more complex because it also locates the demand on the analyst's side. This can be illustrated by a clinical sequence that seemed particularly enigmatic at the time.
The analyst had just opened the door to receive a patient for a first interview. A man entered. Their eyes met and at that very moment, a thought crossed the analyst's mind: “Yet another drug addict (Encore un toxico)!” The interview then unfolded perfectly normally. After the event, however, she still felt affected by this incomprehensible “psychic incident” that had occurred before the man had even said anything.
Why “yet another”? It did not correspond to anyt