Report From the 8th Nordic Congress

Contertransference and transference was the main theme of the 8th Nordic Psychoanalytic Congress which was held 12-15 August 1982 at Lillehammer, a small town in the south-eastern part of Norway. 123 participants from four Scandinavian countries were heartily welcomed by the chairman of the Norwegian Psychoanalytic Association, Kjell Ugulen, who expressed his wish for a more clinically- than theoretically-oriented congress. To ensure the fulfillment of this intent, there was only one main lecture every day in the morning. The rest of the day the participants worked in small groups, relating the theme of the main lecture to their own clinical experiences and discussing case presentations, mostly from candidates.

The scientific programme began with a paper read by Irene Matthis (Sweden), with the title: “I don't understand. On problems of communication and countertransference in the psychoanalytic situation.” She started by describing and exemplifying some problems of communication she had herself experienced as a psychoanalyst. She underlined that there are situations when our ordinary verbal interpretations are impossible or improper to use. In such a situation it is necessary to use countertransference in order to understand the meaning of the interaction and to find a way of relating to the patient which will facilitate identification. Through identification, such internal psychological conditions are created, which are necessary if verbal symbolic interpretations are to be effective. She also made an attempt to explain these communication problems etiologically through relating them to disturbances in early object relations. She proposed the hypothesis that such patients have not integrated the two functions of language: the concrete and the symbolic language. In the last part of her presentation, she discussed how to handle such communication problems in the analytic situation, and reflected upon how the psychoanalyst, through use of countertransference, can be