Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

November 15, 1982. THE ANALYST AND THE PATIENT'S OBJECT WORLD; NOTES ON AN ASPECT OF COUNTERTRANSFERENCE. Theodore J. Jacobs, M.D.

Dr. Jacobs focused on an aspect of countertransference that has been given little attention in the literature: the analyst's reaction to objects in the patient's life. The analyst may develop emotional reactions to people in the patient's life that affect the analytic work. Because these reactions are not directed at the patient, they often are not recognized as countertransference phenomena and are not the subject of the analyst's self-analysis. Reactions to the patient may be displaced to the patient's objects and are thus hidden from the analyst's scrutiny. As the analyst develops mental representations of the patient's objects, he may invest them with aspects of self- and object representations from his own present and past. The patient's account of these objects may reawaken in the analyst fantasies, memories, and expectations from his own childhood that unconsciously affect his feelings about the object and the patient either through re-enactment or defense. In the special situation in which the analyst knows someone in the patient's life, he may, in guarding against conscious reactions, neglect the possibility that the object evokes unconscious responses in him with links to his own childhood experiences. Reconstructions may also be invested with the analyst's unconscious associations to the objects of the patient's past.

Dr. Jacobs used Racker's 1968 comprehensive definition of "countertransference," in which the term encompassed all of the emotional responses stirred up in the analyst by his contact with the patient. He elaborated upon Racker's terms, "complementary" and "concordant" identifications and "direct" and "indirect" countertransference. Complementary identifications—identification of the analyst's ego with the patient's internal objects—are the result of the patient's treating the analyst as a projected inte