Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Alan J. Eisnitz stressed that failure to understand the patient poses a narcissistic threat to the analyst and facilitates the establishment of countertransference reactions. Defining countertransference as the persistent mobilization in the analyst of an unconscious wish and the defenses against that wish evoked by the patients, their fantasies, or the analyst's fantasies about the patients, Dr. Eisnitz suggested that identification and treating patients as an extension of the self should be considered narcissistic transference. As a consequence of the ongoing and intense relationship with the parents of a child in analysis, unconscious reactions to the analyst's own infantile objects may more easily be stimulated. The unconscious tendency to try to prove that analysts are better parents than either their own parents, their analysts, or their child patient's parents leads to a common countertransference attitude, one that might well be a potential factor in every intense adult-child relationship. Dr. Peter B. Neubauer suggested that not all the reactions to the patient described by the authors were specific to child analysts. Adults reporting material from different developmental levels may produce the same kind of reactions in the analyst. He also noted two major differences between child and adult analysis: the absent or minimal transference neurosis in children and the necessity for immediate responses with children. Immediate action on the part of the child analyst stimulates a variety of feelings and responses in both patient and analyst. Dr. Harold P. Blum observed that child analysts often serve as an auxiliary ego for the child and the child's parents. As a consequence, they will frequently be asked to provide advice and guidance but must resist the temptation to abuse their position or their knowledge.