The Emergence of an American Middle School of Psychoanalysis: Commentary on Karen Rosica's Paper

Karen Rosica raises for us a critical issue in analytic work, those moments in the transference-countertransference situation when one participant becomes a voice within the other rather than a voice from outside. Rosica hears a voice coming out of her (“Are you afraid that I cannot bear the burden of your loving me?”) and wonders whose it is. In her wondering she offers us an elegantly simple definition of countertransference: the analyst doesn't sound like herself to herself. She has become momentarily unrecognizable to herself. The voice has left out part of Rosica's understanding of the patient's state of mind: the disappointment and loss that lie behind her representation of Rosica as unable to bear the burden of her love. The voice has also violated a technical rule of practice in which Rosica believes: don't abruptly interpret an account of an extratransferential event as the manifestation of a latent narrative about oneself, especially not for the purpose of communicating reassuringly that you are not being the way the patient experiences you as being but have been mistaken for someone else, in this case the mother who cannot tolerate bad feelings in her daughter. The issue immediately engaged is: might this be anxiety of the patient communicated unconsciously to the analyst and symbolized in her consciousness through the question with which Rosica opens her essay? I place the clinical work in the paper by Rosica into a category I have previously called the American Middle