Chapter 3. Countertransference

Introduction

As we explained in the first volume (Chap. 3), the history of countertransference exemplifies the rediscovery of complementarity as the fundamental principle of social interaction in psychoanalysis. If we acknowledge that Heimann (1950) explicitly grounded the positive value of countertransference, then we may consider the introduction of the concept of interaction into the discussion of psychoanalytic theories as characteristic of the next stage.

The effects of each psychotherapeutic interaction, regardless of its provenance, are doubtlessly reciprocal. Yet the doing of the one is not the action of the other;… the therapist's reactions in particular are partially balanced by his reflection, i. e., by his consideration of the intended, desired, expected, and feared reactions that the patient would like to precipitate. This is the case because, first, according to Freud thinking and reflecting in the psychotherapeutic situation comprise a trial action and, second, the affective precipitants inevitably have some effect within the professional relationship. (Thomä 1981, p. 391)

Of the various theories of interaction, the ones that Blumer (1973) used the fortunate term “symbolic interactionism” to refer to are particularly useful in psychoanalysis. According to Weiss (1988), this term refers to an approach to research whose primary premise is that individuals act toward subjects and objects on the basis of what these subjects and objects mean to them. Knowledge of the theories of intersubjectivity, for example as they have been summarized by Joas (1985), make countertransference phenomena more comprehensible. Mead, one of the leading representatives of symbolic interactionism, wrote in his study Mind, Self, and Society (1934):

We are more or less unconsciously seeing ourselves as others see us. We are unconsciously addressing ourselves as others address us We are calling out in the other person something we are calling out in ourselves, s