You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this paper, the author discusses several issues that have raised complex questions and controversies in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking. Dr. Jacobs stresses that while such matters as countertransference, enactments, intersubjectivity, and self-analysis have been very valuable in opening up new perspectives on the analytic process, they have also led to much confusion. He focuses on the notion of countertransference, related questions of the analyst's subjectivity, and the question of self-analysis and working through in the analyst. The presentation of a clinical case, in which the patient's intuitive understanding of certain features of the analyst's personality played a crucial role, is used to highlight these. In this case report, an open and nondefensive listening to the patient's comments regarding the personality of the analyst, and the emotional effects they had on him, allowed a process of self-examination and working through to take place.
In an attempt to clarify the confusion and uncertainty that surround the use of the analyst's subjective experience, the author emphasizes that in using his or her inner experience, the analyst must not compromise the ability to listen to the patient. In the author's view, the analyst gives himself over quite totally to the patient. He loses himself, his personality, and his personal concerns in listening. It is this immersion that allows the unconscious of patient and analyst to resonate in such a way as to give rise to affects, fantasies, and memories in the analyst that are related to, and illuminate aspects of, the patient's inner world. The analyst makes no effort to focus on him- or herself. Rather, he or she allows what is stirred and mobilized from within to arise. Some of what arises is familiar, but when something out of the ordinary registers within the analyst—a strong affect, a fantasy, a daydream, or an impulse to act—the analyst's attention shifts to his or her internal world. This internal experien