The Psychology of the Analyst in Two Cultures

The two papers we are republishing in this issue as part of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly's continuing 75^th anniversary year commemoration were seminal contributions to what some would say has become the subject matter of our time, the psychology of the analyst. Although fifteen years, two continents, and two radically different psychoanalytic cultures separate the publication of Robert Fliess's “The Metapsychology of the Analyst” (1942) and Heinrich Racker's “The Meanings and Uses of Countertransference” (1957a), the similarities between the two papers are as instructive as they are fascinating.

Born in Poland and first educated in musicology, Heinrich Racker (1910-1961) began his analytic training in Vienna, to which the family had escaped from the ravages of World War I. He had to flee once again in 1939, this time from the Nazis, and settled in Buenos Aires, where he completed his training.

Robert Fliess (1895-1970), the son of Freud's one-time friend Wilhelm Fliess, trained in Berlin with Abraham as his analyst. In 1936, he emigrated to New York—like Racker, in flight from the Nazis—and, after establishing a medical practice there, Fliess devoted himself full-time to psychoanalysis, joining the faculty of New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

Both men had interests beyond those evident in these papers. Although best known for his work on countertransference, Racker continued to explore what he called the psychoanalysis of the spirit, the title of one of his books, Psicoanálisis del Espiritu (1957b), in which he presented a wide-ranging psychoanalytic view of philosophy, religion, anthropology, music, literature, and film.