One of those most difficult negotiations in the treatment
is that of the erotic transference-countertransference dialectic. Davies writes
eloquently and candidly about it. Celenza writes pointedly about it. I look
back to Harold Searles’ encouragement on the subject. Searles, from the
Freudian perspective, states that the analyst also goes through a kind of
Oedipal phase vis a vis the patient.
Just like the patient fantasizes about marrying the analyst, so too does
the analyst feel toward the patient. Searles says that this type of love by the
analyst is helpful when it aids the patient in her/his struggle to accept, then
give up, these feelings. He discouraged disclosing such feelings. Today we
might recognize the real component, that is, the part that is not solely
transferred from previous relationships, in the love between patient and
analyst as something that is not relinquished but negotiated, and its lack of
fruition, mourned. The analyst’s suffering and sadness helps the patient with
mourning.
Kohut saw an oedipal phase as normative, only developing
into a neurotic complex when parents have failed to welcome the child’s oedipal
strivings. Telling, for example, a boy what a fine husband he will make
welcomes his love-driven fantasies.
Telling a boy that he will have to find his own age-appropriate partner
once grown up insidiously rejects his ardent feelings. In treatment, how to encourage
the feelings when the outcome will always end in rebuff? How then to proceed in
the erotic transference-countertransference dialectic? How to jump into the
depths of a crater without losing one’s grip on the rim? to hold both the truth
of the love (and hate) between you and your patient and to hold the truth of
nothing more than a moment of meeting or understanding can become of this? A colleague recently asked me in earnest, why
again do we not have sex with our patients?
Celenza writes that it is out of hopelessness for the
treatment, a sense that there is nothing left to try that leads to boundary violations.
It is an attack on psychoanalysis itself. In an earlier paper she writes of a
longer list, including an intolerance of the negative transference and the
reaction formation towards one’s own countertransference hate, sobering reasons
all. All this by way of saying it behooves the analyst, when working with unremittingly
attacking patients, to reread Winnicott’s papers on hate in the counter transference
and its survival.
Celenza,
A. (1998). Precursors to Therapist Sexual Misconduct: Preliminary Findings.
Psychoanal. Psychol., 15:378-395.
Searles, H (1959) Oedipal Love in the Countertransference.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis. XL, 180-190.
Winnicott, D.W. (1969).
The Use of an Object. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 50:711-716.
1 comment:
Worthy of more discussion that it currently receives. Is there a way to access the articles referenced? They seem to require a subscription. -Frank
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