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Panel Discussion: “Transference and Countertransference”
February 17, 1966 Meeting
Dr. Gerald J. Aronson presented a paper, “Some Types of Transference and Countertransference.” There is a tradition in psychoanalysis to turn obstacles into major instruments of treatment. Freud stated in 1912 that transference manifestations are both the greatest hindrance and yet of indispensable help to the treatment. This same kind of jiu-jitsu flourishes to the present, being applied to mechanisms of defense, acting out, negative therapeutic reactions and early persistent object relations. When Freud writes of transference he is referring to emotions, actions and fears pertaining to oedipally held, incestuously cathected family members of early life, i.e., whole objects. Transferences springing from this period carry with them the appurtenances of secondary process thinking, thus enabling the patient to understand he is reacting to us as if we were father or mother. We will call these reactions normal transferences. In other kinds of reactions toward us the ratio between transference reaction and sense of reality is grossly tilted; the analyst is considered not a surrogate but the object itself. This is an erotized transference. In psychosis, a third type is noted, the archaic transference, in which the analyst is seen as either dehumanized, a part of the patient's body or a score of cut-up, monstrously reconstructed percepts.
These three types of transference have not been equally valued by us, though all types probably coexist and comingle in the same patient. We must include understanding and interpretation of all three to consider treatment to be complete. Dr. Harvey D. Strassman questioned the use of “normal” in referring to transference. Dr. Aronson amended it then to “classical” to avoid confusion.
Dr. Saul L. Brown presented his paper on “Regressive Crisis and Transference.” Transference is a phenomenological construct through which the regressive components of a current obje