Commentary on “The Meanings and uses of Countertransference,” by Heinrich Racker

The contemporary reader of Heinrich Racker's “The Meanings and Uses of Countertransference” (1957) will find that this paper, published fifty years ago, continues to serve as a relevant and even current guide to the subject of countertransference. The paper addresses most of the central issues that are debated in the contemporary literature on the subject: How can we understand the emotional position of the analyst in the psychoanalytic process? Does the analyst's inner world—his wishes, his feelings, and his internal objects —come alive in analysis as the patient's does? How does countertransference come about—that is, how does the analyst's emotional life come to resonate with the patient's? Does the main impetus for countertransference come from the analyst or from the patient? How can the analyst recognize his countertransference and what can he learn from it? And, finally, how reliable are the inferences that the analyst draws from the data of countertransference—data that is by definition shaped by the analyst's own subjectivity?

It may be less apparent to the reader that it was Racker who first mapped out these questions for us in a systematic way. In a seminal series of papers (Racker 1953, 1957, 1968), he shifted the discussion of countertransference from the debate that occupied most of his contemporaries—a debate about whether the countertransference was meaningful and useful—to a detailed exploration of