Integrating Classical and Relational Psychoanalysis: The Therapeutic Action of Analyst's and Patient's Interacting Transferences

Classical Psychoanalysis locates therapeutic action in analysis of the patient's transference. Relational Psychoanalysis locates therapeutic action in the analytic relationship, entailing the mutual influence of patient and analyst on one another. In several previous papers (Varga, 2005, 2006), I have begun the process of integrating these two perspectives through redefining analysis of transference as transformation of enactment. In this paper I extend this process of integration through developing the thesis that transformation of enactment occurs via the patient's and analyst's interacting transferences.

A fascinating, defining aspect of Psychoanalysis, entailed in its very inception, is that it advances both in understanding of human nature and in clinical effectiveness by turning the obstacle into the means of advance. In conducting hypnosis to address his patients' hysterical symptoms, Freud found that their tendencies to fall in love and/or become hostile limited their cooperation with the hypnosis. So, conceptualizing these interfering reactions as transference, analysis of transference became the vehicle of treatment and Psychoanalysis was born. Decades later the ubiquity of analysts' countertransference reactions having been recognized, this obstacle to objectivity was turned into a vehicle of advance through understanding that countertransference can serve as a reliable guide for insight into the patient's transference (Heimann, 1950; Little, 1951; Racker, 1957; Tower, 1956). In my view, at this point recognition that analysis entails the interacting subjectivities