Abstract
Thirty-five years ago John Klauber (1976), in a too-little-read paper, “The Identity of the Psychoanalyst,” writes about the difficulties, strains, and losses inherent in the analyst’s work. “I think the sense of identity of the psychoanalyst,” says Klauber, “depends essentially on one thing: an experience of conversion. By this I do not mean an intellectual conversion, but a change of mind and heart, a metanoia. . . . The identity of the psychoanalyst depends on the analytic fire in his belly” (p. 177). Klauber’s humane, plainspoken formulation serves well to introduce Transference and Countertransference: A Unifying Focus of Psychoanalysis—a collection of essays that reflect questions of passion and commitment, the analytic fire in the belly.
The editors, Jean Arundale and Debbie Bandler Bellman, have methodically constructed this volume of nine chapters by different authors, sensibly arranged, on the theme of transference and countertransference. The whole is preceded by a “Prelude” and an introduction that begins, “The aims of this book are twofold. The first is to contribute to the psychoanalytic literature on transference and countertransference. The second is to ‘introduce’ the British Psychoanalytic Association” (p. xiii). The order of these two aims, placing the intellectual focus ahead of the institutional, hints at an underlying story, as do the framing quotation marks qualifying (somewhat darkly) “introduce.”
But even before the introduction, similar clues emerge: in the brief acknowledgments preceding the introduction and prelude, the reader confronts a somewhat confusing trio of acronyms: BPA, BAP, IPA (later, BPAS is added). The mild overwhelm induced by so many shorthand namings (a confusion admittedly greater for an American reader unfamiliar with the British organizations) suggests a story to unfold. And so it does, as the introduction continues with some detailed historical background:
This book is the first to publish a group of papers written by members of the British Psychoanalytic Association (BPA), a new society of the International Psychoanalytical Association [IPA], and the second society to be established in the UK. The BPA occupies a unique place in that it is a distinct society, with its own training, its own Constitution, Executive Board, officers, and committees, but one that resides within the well-established British Association of Psychotherapists [BAP] in London. The analysts of the BPA are highly experienced practitioners: most worked for a number of years as psychoanalytic psychotherapists before gaining recognition as psychoanalysts from the IPA; a few are psychoanalysts, trained initially within an IPA Institute . . . [p. xiii].
Although the reader’s head is spinning a bit by the end of this earnest explanatory paragraph, at the same time it’s understandable and even admirable that the authors, some of whom are founding members of the BPA, would want their institutional story told and its uniqueness heralded. Who are the British Psychoanalytic Association? A group of psychoanalysts organized under the umbrella of an association of psychotherapists; and, as the second IPA society in England, they stand alongside the long-established British Psychoanalytical Society (BPAS).
To create the context for the volume’s nine chapters, the introduction quickly walks the reader through the history of transference and countertransference as concepts (the “unifying focus of psychoanalysis” that organizes the book), touching on the foundational contributions of Freud and Klein and briefly noting the work of Winnicott, Heimann, and Sandler. This survey helpfully identifies threads from a vast psychoanalytic literature, providing clarity while at the same time inevitably watering down richness and flattening complexity. The introduction concludes with a précis of each chapter, representing various theoretical viewpoints—Kleinian, Independent, Contemporary Freudian—thus reflecting the value of thinking across vocabularies about central concepts, one of the book’s strengths.
Bellman’s prelude, “From Psychotherapist to Psychoanalyst: Processes in the Formation of an IPA Society,” focuses on the volume’s second aim, elaborating the BPA’s ten-year journey to accreditation as a component society of the IPA, “a status awarded in January 2010” (p. xxi). The prelude narrates in considerable detail the steps to the society’s formation—from the central figures exploring the possibility of IPA membership, to the year-by-year progress toward making a formal application, to the guidance and critiques of the IPA’s site visitors. This narrative account includes the clinician’s acquisition of skills and, more important still, the requisite shift of identity in becoming a psychoanalyst. “Central to our story is, thus, a transition of professional identity,” writes Bellman, “having as its core the development of clinical work, the development of our capacities to work with unconscious processes within the transference-countertransference. Questions of what it means to be a psychoanalyst have occupied us, both as individual practitioners and as an ever-increasing group, throughout the ten-year process . . .” (p. xxi).
The most riveting element here, “a transition of professional identity,” gets buried in the mass of information, a problem of emphasis indicated by the prelude’s somewhat flat title. The thoroughness of detail feels almost insistent, as if reflecting an insecurity reminiscent of coming of age: the challenge to establish a psychoanalytic identity within a psychotherapeutic organization. Using Blos’s terms (1962), Bellman acknowledges the similarity to adolescent processes “in relation to ties to parental objects and superego and ego ideal restructuring” (p. xxiv). But a crucial question arises: how might the editors have more compactly and effectively recounted the organization’s significant genesis and evolution, while avoiding this muffling, rather inert weight of detail?
All of the essays are cleanly written and similarly structured (possibly the result of loving, meticulous editorial care). The downside of this consistency is some tendency toward the bland and formulaic, which some authors resist more successfully than others. In particular, Viqui Rosenberg’s “Sexuality and the Analytic Couple” is a gem: a lively, rich, and refreshing essay on sexuality, a subject (as the editors note) “gone rather silent” in the psychoanalytic literature. “Sexuality,” Rosenberg writes, “is in the fabric of the analytic relationship, and it belongs to both parties” (p. 60). Rosenberg’s essay captures—in a way reminiscent of Freud in Papers on Technique—the intensity of the clinical exchange, the centrality of sexuality, and the implicit reality of dangers inherent to the psychoanalytic situation. Connecting infantile sexuality with the development of object relations, she writes: “Recognition of these early experiences [of sexuality] as generating from, and expressing, our sexual life helps us to get the measure of this instinctual force, but this recognition would not be complete without the understanding that sexuality is always curtailed by the necessity to engage with others, and that, retrospectively, we experience sexual excitement from a perspective illuminated by the Oedipal dilemma. That is to say, sexuality is always linked to a sense of loss and absence, and the fantasy of sexual fulfillment inevitably leads to the notion of prohibition and guilt” (p. 46).
One sees implications for the clinical exchange, with its encouragement of the patient’s open expression of archaic modes of sexuality. “Paradoxically, however, in the countertransference,” Rosenberg astutely observes, “it is the adult sexuality of the analysand that threatens the infantile sexuality of the analyst,” an idea consistent with Cesio’s critique of “Observations on Transference-Love,” reversing Freud’s notion that the patient achieves her neurotic aim if the analyst satisfies the woman’s demand for love: “it is usually the analyst,” writes Cesio, “who in these cases achieves his neurotic aim, for, if he remains within the setting, this outcome is precluded” (1993, p. 141).
One of Rosenberg’s clinical vignettes captures the paradox of the analyst’s “yes” meaning “no”: a man who is far along in his analysis, and closer to feeling a grown man, “proposes a date” to end the treatment: “He might have fantasied that he was now ready to elicit my desire, and when he finally approached me with the idea of ‘arranging a date,’ in fantasy he was, in fact, ‘proposing’ to me. . . . and by my saying ‘yes,’ I said ‘no.’ I confirmed that I was his analyst and not his bride. I was prepared to let him go” (p. 58). When the analyst says “yes” (this treatment will end, I will let you go) she also means “no” (you can’t have me, I do not choose you, as your wish would be). The paradox Rosenberg beautifully illuminates is reminiscent of the profound paradox—though the “yes” and “ no” are reversed—underlying Freud’s principle of abstinence, the analyst’s “no” that says to the patient “yes, you may fully speak your desire” and “no, we will not touch.” Inherent in Freud’s idea is the implicit paradox of abstinence as alluring: the principle of abstinence protects both analyst and patient but, by design, also heats the treatment crucible, thus conflating the ethical and the technical.
In another excellent contribution, “From Hades to Oedipus: From Psychotic to Erotic Transference and Beyond,” Irene Freeden, from a Kleinian perspective, distinguishes usefully between Meltzer’s “claustrum” (1992) and Steiner’s “psychic retreats” (1993), locating the difference in the quality of projective identification. “Steiner’s retreats,” she writes, “are primarily understood as an almost benign sanctuary and safe haven, places of refuge from a threat of intimacy . . . whereas the impulse of Meltzer’s patients to intrude is predominantly one of envy and hate and a compulsion to control the object. . . . There is no capacity for symbol formation in the claustrum” (pp. 67–68). Later in this lively paper, reflecting on her own struggle working with a particularly difficult patient, Freeden writes: “I wish I had read Etchegoyen’s paper [on erotic transference] when I started working with Mr. A, but I had not” (p. 82). The author’s admirable naturalness in this moment represents a great virtue of this volume—acknowledging and manifesting the significant process of the analyst’s development of skills, the process of understanding and of commitment to the discipline.
Klauber’s passage about the analyst’s identity, with which I begin this review, continues: “becoming an analyst who can respond as both an analyst and a person is a very long process. This is the challenge from psychoanalysis itself which every analyst has to meet, and the fire can go out of his belly” (p. 177). Klauber’s essay ends with a question about the future of a discipline increasingly doubted and devalued by society—psychoanalysis struggling with a crisis of identity: “Can it retain its remarkable status as the most satisfying intellectual approach and best therapy for problems of personal conflict which may be intractable?” (p. 180). This volume, in the spirit that drives it, leaves one optimistic.