The Role of Concordance and Complementarity in Psychoanalytic Treatment

Heinrich Racker (1968), in his seminal work on countertransference, highlighted the importance of concordance and complementarity in the countertransference. The present article argues that concordant and complementary identifications are ubiquitous in the organization of experience and in human relationships, and that insufficient attention has been given to the role that these identifications play in the treatment process. Self psychology and projective identification were critiqued in relation to how they either avoid recognition of complementarity or reduce complementarity to concordance. The article concludes with a reanalysis of the patient-nurse relationship in Ingmar Bergman's Persona, dynamics that had been previously described by Otto Kernberg (1975) as projective identification and critiqued by Robert D. Stolorow and George E. Atwood (1992).