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Counterresistance: On the Resistance of the Analyst. By Elisabeth Skale, pp. 340-353.
The author begins by stating that the meanings of countertransference and counterresistance have become collapsed in the psychoanalytic literature. She examines whether there is a counterresistance that is different from the analyst's countertransference. Her thesis is that there is a specific counterresistance, i.e., a resistance that interferes with the analyst's maintaining an optimal analytic attitude and function. Skale believes that counterresistance is different from the personal resistances of an individual analyst, which arise from that analyst's countertransference.
Skale defines countertransference as the analyst's conscious and unconscious transference attitude toward his various patients, which can become a countertransference resistance. The analyst's counterresistance (which she sees as omnipresent) is defined as the force in the analyst that resists the progress of the psychoanalytic process, analogous to such a resistance in the patient. Counterresistance leads to the analyst's withdrawal from newly emerging anxiety-provoking, confusing, primary-process-type material brought by the patient.
When an analyst is under the influence of counterresistance, she may insist on free association in the patient, adopt an insistent and inflexible attitude toward the patient, and show a refusal to be surprised by the analytic material. There can a be a refusal to offer interpretations, or the same interpretations may be offered repeatedly because the analyst