Tag: Carl Jung

On This Day … 26 July [2022]

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Events

  • 1990 – The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 is signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.

People (Births)

Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 or ADA (42 U.S.C. § 12101) is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability.

It affords similar protections against discrimination to Americans with disabilities as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, and other characteristics illegal, and later sexual orientation and gender identity. In addition, unlike the Civil Rights Act, the ADA also requires covered employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities, and imposes accessibility requirements on public accommodations.

In 1986, the National Council on Disability had recommended the enactment of an Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and drafted the first version of the bill which was introduced in the House and Senate in 1988. The final version of the bill was signed into law on 26 July 1990, by President George H.W. Bush. It was later amended in 2008 and signed by President George W. Bush with changes effective as of 01 January 2009.

Disabilities Included

ADA disabilities include both mental and physical medical conditions. A condition does not need to be severe or permanent to be a disability. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission regulations provide a list of conditions that should easily be concluded to be disabilities:

Other mental or physical health conditions also may be disabilities, depending on what the individual’s symptoms would be in the absence of “mitigating measures” (medication, therapy, assistive devices, or other means of restoring function), during an “active episode” of the condition (if the condition is episodic).

Certain specific conditions that are widely considered anti-social, or tend to result in illegal activity, such as kleptomania, paedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, etc. are excluded under the definition of “disability” in order to prevent abuse of the statute’s purpose. Additionally, gender identity or orientation is no longer considered a disorder and is also excluded under the definition of “disability”.

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 to 06 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies.

Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler. During this time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.

Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his “new science” of psychoanalysis and to this end secured his appointment as president of his newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung’s research and personal vision, however, made it impossible for him to follow his older colleague’s doctrine and a schism became inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung’s analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation – the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual’s conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex and extraversion and introversion.

Jung was also an artist, craftsman, builder and a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.

Glynis Breakwell

Dame Glynis Marie Breakwell DBE DL FRSA FAcSS (born West Bromwich, 26 July 1952) is a social psychologist and an active public policy adviser and researcher specialising in leadership, identity process and risk management. In January 2014 she was listed in the Science Council’s list of ‘100 leading UK practising scientists’. Her achievements as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bath in Bath were marred by controversy culminating in her dismissal in a dispute regarding her remuneration.

Breakwell has been a Fellow of the British Psychological Society since 1987 and an Honorary Fellow since 2006. She is a chartered health psychologist and in 2002 was elected an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Breakwell was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to higher education. She is also a Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Somerset.

On This Day … 06 June [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1900 – Manfred Sakel, Ukrainian-American psychiatrist and physician (d. 1957).

People (Deaths)

  • 1961 – Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist (b. 1875).
  • 2014 – Lorna Wing, English psychiatrist and physician; pioneered studies of autism (b. 1928).

Manfred Sakel

Manfred Joshua Sakel (06 June 1900 to 02 December 1957) was an Austrian-Jewish (later Austrian-American) neurophysiologist and psychiatrist, credited with developing insulin shock therapy in 1927.

Sakel was born on 06 June 1900, in Nadvirna (Nadwórna), in the former Austria-Hungary Empire (now Ukraine), which was part of Poland between the world wars. Sakel studied Medicine at the University of Vienna from 1919 to 1925, specialising in neurology and neuropsychiatry. From 1927 until 1933 Sakel worked in hospitals in Berlin. In 1933 he became a researcher at the University of Vienna’s Neuropsychiatric Clinic. In 1936, after receiving an invitation from Frederick Parsons, the state commissioner of mental hygiene, he chose to emigrate from Austria to the United States of America. In the US, he became an attending physician and researcher at the Harlem Valley State Hospital.

Dr. Sakel was the developer of insulin shock therapy from 1927 while a young doctor in Vienna, starting to practice it in 1933. It would become widely used on individuals with schizophrenia and other mental patients. He noted that insulin-induced coma and convulsions, due to the low level of glucose attained in the blood (hypoglycaemic crisis), had a short-term appearance of changing the mental state of drug addicts and psychotics, sometimes dramatically so. He reported that up to 88% of his patients improved with insulin shock therapy, but most other people reported more mixed results and it was eventually shown that patient selection had been biased and that it didn’t really have any specific benefits and had many risks, adverse effects and fatalities. However, his method became widely applied for many years in mental institutions worldwide. In the US and other countries it was gradually dropped after the introduction of the electroconvulsive therapy in the 1940s and the first neuroleptics in the 1950s.

Dr. Sakel died from a heart attack on 02 December 1957, in New York City, NY, US.

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 to 06 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler. During this time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.

Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his “new science” of psychoanalysis and to this end secured his appointment as president of his newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung’s research and personal vision, however, made it impossible for him to follow his older colleague’s doctrine and a schism became inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung’s analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation – the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual’s conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex and extraversion and introversion.

Jung was also an artist, craftsman, builder and a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.

Lorna Wing

Lorna Gladys Wing OBE FRCPsych (07 October 1928 to 06 June 2014) was an English psychiatrist. She was a pioneer in the field of childhood developmental disorders, who advanced understanding of autism worldwide, introduced the term Asperger syndrome in 1976 and was involved in founding the National Autistic Society (NAS) in the UK.

Although Wing trained as a medical doctor, specialising in psychiatry, her focus narrowed to childhood developmental disorders in 1959. At that time autism was thought to affect around 5 in 10,000 children, but its prevalence in the 2010s was considered to be around 1 in 100 following the awareness raised by Wing and her followers. Her research, particularly with her collaborator Judith Gould, now underpins thinking in the field of autism. They initiated the Camberwell Case Register to record all patients using psychiatric services in this area of London. The data accumulated by this innovative approach gave Wing the basis for her influential insight that autism formed a spectrum, rather than clearly differentiated disorders. They also set up the Centre for Social and Communication Disorders, the first integrated diagnostic and advice service for these conditions in the UK.

Wing was the author of many books and academic papers, including Asperger Syndrome: a Clinical Account, a February 1981 academic paper that popularised the research of Hans Asperger. Although ground-breaking and influential, Wing herself cautioned in her 1981 paper that “It must be pointed out that the people described by the present author all had problems of adjustment or superimposed psychiatric illnesses severe enough to necessitate referral to a psychiatric clinic … (and) the series described here is probably biased towards those with more severe handicaps.”

Along with some parents of autistic children, she founded the organisation now known as the National Autistic Society in the UK in 1962. She was a consultant to NAS Lorna Wing Centre for Autism until she died. She was also President of Autism Sussex.

In the 1995 New Year Honours list Wing was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for ‘services to the National Autistic Society’.

What is Abreaction?

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Introduction

Abreaction (German: Abreagieren) is a psychoanalytical term for reliving an experience to purge it of its emotional excesses – a type of catharsis.

Sometimes it is a method of becoming conscious of repressed traumatic events.

Psychoanalytic Origins

The concept of abreaction may have actually been initially formulated by Freud’s mentor, Josef Breuer; but it was in their joint work of 1895, Studies on Hysteria, that it was first made public to denote the fact that pent-up emotions associated with a trauma can be discharged by talking about it. The release of strangulated affect by bringing a particular moment or problem into conscious focus, and thereby abreacting the stifled emotion attached to it, formed the cornerstone of Freud’s early cathartic method of treating hysterical conversion symptoms. For instance, they believed that pent-up emotions associated with trauma can be discharged by talking about it. Freud and Breur, however, did not treat the spontaneous emotional reliving of traumatic event as curative. They instead described abreaction as the full emotional and motoric response to a traumatic event necessary in adequately relieving a person of being repetitively and unpredictably assailed by the trauma’s original and unmitigated emotional intensity. Although the element of surprise is not compatible with Freud’s approach to therapy, other theorists consider that, in abreaction, it is an important part of analytic technique.

Early in his career, psychoanalyst Carl Jung expressed interest in abreaction, or what he referred to as trauma theory, but later decided it had limitations in treatment of neurosis. Jung said:

Though traumata of clearly aetiological significance were occasionally present, the majority of them appeared very improbable. Many traumata were so unimportant, even so normal, that they could be regarded at most as a pretext for the neurosis. But what especially aroused my criticism was the fact that not a few traumata were simply inventions of fantasy and had never happened at all.

Later Developments

Mainstream psychoanalysis tended over time (with Freud) to downplay the role of abreaction, in favour of the working through of the emotions revealed through such acting-out of the past. However, Otto Rank explored abreaction of birth trauma as a central part of his revision of Freudian theory; while Edward Bibring revived the notion of abreaction as emotional reliving, a theme subsequently taken up by Vamik Volkan in his re-grief therapy.

Abreaction Therapies

In Scientology, Dianetics is a form of abreaction that science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard borrowed from the United States Navy when he spent three months in a San Diego hospital in 1943 with the complaints of an ulcer and malaria. Hubbard later wrote, in his autobiography My Philosophy, that he had observed abreactive therapy in the hospital, though in later life he claimed to have made the discovery on his own after being wounded in battle and given up as untreatable.

What is Transference?

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Introduction

Transference (German: Übertragung) is a phenomenon within psychotherapy in which the feelings a person had about their parents, as one example, are unconsciously redirected or transferred to the present situation.

It usually concerns feelings from a primary relationship during childhood. At times, this transference can be considered inappropriate. Transference was first described by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, who considered it an important part of psychoanalytic treatment.

Occurrence

It is common for people to transfer feelings about their parents to their partners or children (that is, cross-generational entanglements). Another example of transference would be a person mistrusting somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance, or being overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend.

In The Psychology of the Transference, Carl Jung states that within the transference dyad both participants typically experience a variety of opposites, that in love and in psychological growth, the key to success is the ability to endure the tension of the opposites without abandoning the process, and that this tension allows one to grow and to transform.

Only in a personally or socially harmful context can transference be described as a pathological issue. A modern, social-cognitive perspective on transference explains how it can occur in everyday life. When people meet a new person who reminds them of someone else, they unconsciously infer that the new person has traits similar to the person previously known. This perspective has generated a wealth of research that illuminated how people tend to repeat relationship patterns from the past in the present.

High-profile serial killers often transfer unresolved rage toward previous love or hate-objects onto “surrogates”, or individuals resembling or otherwise calling to mind the original object of that hate. It is believed in the instance of Ted Bundy, he repeatedly killed brunette women who reminded him of a previous girlfriend with whom he had become infatuated, but who had ended the relationship, leaving Bundy rejected and pathologically rageful (Bundy, however, denied this as a motivating factor in his crimes). This notwithstanding, Bundy’s behaviour could be considered pathological insofar as he may have had narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder. If so, normal transference mechanisms cannot be held causative of his homicidal behaviour.

Sigmund Freud held that transference plays a large role in male homosexuality. In The Ego and the Id, he claimed that eroticism between males can be an outcome of a “[psychically] non-economic” hostility, which is unconsciously subverted into love and sexual attraction.

Transference and Counter-Transference during Psychotherapy

In a therapy context, transference refers to redirection of a patient’s feelings for a significant person to the therapist. Transference is often manifested as an erotic attraction towards a therapist, but can be seen in many other forms such as rage, hatred, mistrust, parentification, extreme dependence, or even placing the therapist in a god-like or guru status. When Freud initially encountered transference in his therapy with patients, he thought he was encountering patient resistance, as he recognised the phenomenon when a patient refused to participate in a session of free association. But what he learned was that the analysis of the transference was actually the work that needed to be done: “the transference, which, whether affectionate or hostile, seemed in every case to constitute the greatest threat to the treatment, becomes its best tool”. The focus in psychodynamic psychotherapy is, in large part, the therapist and patient recognising the transference relationship and exploring the relationship’s meaning. Since the transference between patient and therapist happens on an unconscious level, psychodynamic therapists who are largely concerned with a patient’s unconscious material use the transference to reveal unresolved conflicts patients have with childhood figures.

Countertransference is defined as redirection of a therapist’s feelings toward a patient, or more generally, as a therapist’s emotional entanglement with a patient. A therapist’s attunement to their own countertransference is nearly as critical as understanding the transference. Not only does this help therapists regulate their emotions in the therapeutic relationship, but it also gives therapists valuable insight into what patients are attempting to elicit in them. For example, a therapist who is sexually attracted to a patient must understand the countertransference aspect (if any) of the attraction, and look at how the patient might be eliciting this attraction. Once any countertransference aspect has been identified, the therapist can ask the patient what his or her feelings are toward the therapist, and can explore how those feelings relate to unconscious motivations, desires, or fears.

Another contrasting perspective on transference and countertransference is offered in classical Adlerian psychotherapy. Rather than using the patient’s transference strategically in therapy, the positive or negative transference is diplomatically pointed out and explained as an obstacle to cooperation and improvement. For the therapist, any signs of countertransference would suggest that his or her own personal training analysis needs to be continued to overcome these tendencies. Andrea Celenza noted in 2010 that “the use of the analyst’s countertransference remains a point of controversy”.

What is Persona (Psychology)?

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Introduction

The persona, for Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, was the social face the individual presented to the world – “a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.”

Jung’s Persona

Identification

According to Jung, the development of a viable social persona is a vital part of adapting to, and preparing for, adult life in the external social world. “A strong ego relates to the outside world through a flexible persona; identifications with a specific persona (doctor, scholar, artist, etc.) inhibits psychological development.” For Jung, “the danger is that [people] become identical with their personas—the professor with his textbook, the tenor with his voice.” The result could be “the shallow, brittle, conformist kind of personality which is ‘all persona’, with its excessive concern for ‘what people think'” – an unreflecting state of mind “in which people are utterly unconscious of any distinction between themselves and the world in which they live. They have little or no concept of themselves as beings distinct from what society expects of them.” The stage was set thereby for what Jung termed enantiodromia – the emergence of the repressed individuality from beneath the persona later in life: “the individual will either be completely smothered under an empty persona or an enantiodromia into the buried opposites will occur.”

Disintegration

“The breakdown of the persona constitutes the typically Jungian moment both in therapy and in development” – the “moment” when “that excessive commitment to collective ideals masking deeper individuality—the persona—breaks down… disintegrates.” Given Jung’s view that “the persona is a semblance… the dissolution of the persona is therefore absolutely necessary for individuation.” Nevertheless, the persona’s disintegration may lead to a state of chaos in the individual: “one result of the dissolution of the persona is the release of fantasy… disorientation.” As the individuation process gets under way, “the situation has thrown off the conventional husk and developed into a stark encounter with reality, with no false veils or adornments of any kind.”

Negative Restoration

One possible reaction to the resulting experience of archetypal chaos was what Jung called “the regressive restoration of the persona,” whereby the protagonist “laboriously tries to patch up his social reputation within the confines of a much more limited personality… pretending that he is as he was before the crucial experience.” Similarly in treatment there can be “the persona-restoring phase, which is an effort to maintain superficiality;” or even a longer phase designed not to promote individuation but to bring about what Jung caricatured as “the negative restoration of the persona” – that is to say, a reversion to the status quo.

Absence

The alternative is to endure living with the absence of the persona – and for Jung “the man with no persona… is blind to the reality of the world, which for him has merely the value of an amusing or fantastic playground.” Inevitably, the result of “the streaming in of the unconscious into the conscious realm, simultaneously with the dissolution of the ‘persona’ and the reduction of the directive force of consciousness, is a state of disturbed psychic equilibrium.” Those trapped at such a stage remain “blind to the world, hopeless dreamers… spectral Cassandras dreaded for their tactlessness, eternally misunderstood.”

Restoration

Restoration, the aim of individuation, “is not only achieved by work on the inside figures but also, as conditio sine qua non, by a readaptation in outer life” – including the recreation of a new and more viable persona. To “develop a stronger persona… might feel inauthentic, like learning to ‘play a role’… but if one cannot perform a social role then one will suffer.” One goal for individuation is for people to “develop a more realistic, flexible persona that helps them navigate in society but does not collide with nor hide their true self.” Eventually, “in the best case, the persona is appropriate and tasteful, a true reflection of our inner individuality and our outward sense of self.”

Later Developments

The persona has become one of the most widely adopted aspects of Jungian terminology, passing into almost common vocabulary: “a mask or shield which the person places between himself and the people around him, called by some psychiatrists the persona.” For Eric Berne, “the persona is formed during the years from six to twelve, when most children first go out on their own… to avoid unwanted entanglements or promote wanted ones.” He was interested in “the relationship between ego states and the Jungian persona,” and considered that “as an ad hoc attitude, persona is differentiated also from the more autonomous identity of Erik Erikson.” Perhaps more contentiously, in terms of life scripts, he distinguished “the Archetypes (corresponding to the magic figures in a script) and the Persona (which is the style the script is played in).”

Post-Jungians would loosely call the persona “the social archetype of the conformity archetype,” though Jung always distinguished the persona as an external function from those images of the unconscious he called archetypes. Thus, whereas Jung recommended conversing with archetypes as a therapeutic technique he himself had employed – “For decades I always turned to the anima when I felt my emotional behavior was disturbed, and I would speak with the anima about the images she communicated to me” – he stressed that “It would indeed be the height of absurdity if a man tried to have a conversation with his persona, which he recognized merely as a psychological means of relationship.”

Jordan Peterson

University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson, a well-known as an admirer of Jung’s work, uses Jungian terminology but reconfigures it into a model that divides the psychological world into the domains of nature and culture. The Great Father of culture is an archetypal force that shapes the potential of chaos into the actuality of order. In this framework, the persona would be the aspect of the personality that has been adapted to culture, more specifically to the social dominance hierarchy, which Peterson refers to as the competency hierarchy. People who refuse to submit to this social discipline or carry the responsibility inherent in having a role in the world remain as undifferentiated potential, known in more Jungian terms as Peter Pan syndrome, or the negative aspect of the puer aeternus.

Though Jung does not reference dominance hierarchies specifically, the above is broadly in accordance with his conception of the persona as defined in his Two Essays on Analytical Psychology:

“We can see how a neglected persona works, and what one must do to remedy the evil. Such people can avoid disappointments and an infinity of sufferings, scenes, and social catastrophes only by learning to see how men behave in the world. They must learn to understand what society expects of them; they must realize that there are factors and persons in the world far above them; they must know that what they do has a meaning for others.”

What is Psychical Inertia?

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Introduction

Psychical inertia is a term introduced by Carl Jung to describe the psyche’s resistance to development and change.

He considered it one of the main reason for the neurotic opposing, or shrinking from, his or her age-appropriate tasks in life.

Refer to Repetition Compulsion.

Freudian and Other Developments

Freud argued that such psychic inertia played a part in the lives of the normal, as well as of the neurotic, and saw its origins in fixation between early instincts and their first impressions of significant objects. As late as Civilization and its Discontents (his 1930 book), he considered as a major obstacle to cultural development “the inertia of the libido, its disinclination to give up an old position for a new one”.

Later Jungians have seen psychic inertia as a force of nature reflecting both internal and outer determinants; while others have seen it as a product of social pressures, especially in relation to ageing.

On This Day … 26 July

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People (Births)

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung, born Karl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 to 06 June 1961), was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler. During this time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.

Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his “new science” of psychoanalysis and to this end secured his appointment as President of his newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung’s research and personal vision, however, made it impossible for him to follow his older colleague’s doctrine and a schism became inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung’s analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation – the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual’s conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex and extraversion and introversion.

Jung was also an artist, craftsman, builder and a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.

Glynis Breakwell

Dame Glynis Marie Breakwell DBE DL FRSA FAcSS (born West Bromwich, 26 July 1952) is the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bath in Bath. She is a social psychologist and an active public policy adviser and researcher specialising in leadership, identity process and risk management. In January 2014 she was listed in the Science Council’s list of ‘100 leading UK practising scientists’.

Breakwell has been a Fellow of the British Psychological Society since 1987 and an Honorary Fellow since 2006. She is a chartered health psychologist and in 2002 was elected an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Breakwell was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to higher education. She is also a Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Somerset.

What is Countertransference?

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Introduction

Countertransference is defined as redirection of a psychotherapist‘s feelings toward a client – or, more generally, as a therapist’s emotional entanglement with a client.

Refer to Transference and Body-Centred Countertransference.

Early Formulations

The phenomenon of countertransference (German: Gegenübertragung) was first defined publicly by Sigmund Freud in 1910 (The Future Prospects of Psycho-Analytic Therapy) as being “a result of the patient’s influence on [the physician’s] unconscious feelings”; although Freud had been aware of it privately for some time, writing to Carl Jung for example in 1909 of the need “to dominate ‘counter-transference’, which is after all a permanent problem for us”. Freud stated that since an analyst is a human himself he can easily let his emotions into the client. Because Freud saw the countertransference as a purely personal problem for the analyst, he rarely referred to it publicly, and did so almost invariably in terms of a “warning against any countertransference lying in wait” for the analyst, who “must recognize this countertransference in himself and master it”. However, analysis of Freud’s letters shows that he was intrigued by countertransference and did not see it as purely a problem.

The potential danger of the analyst’s countertransference – “In such cases, the patient represents for the analyst an object of the past on to whom past feelings and wishes are projected” – became widely accepted in psychodynamic circles, both within and without the psychoanalytic mainstream. Thus, for example, Jung warned against “cases of counter-transference when the analyst really cannot let go of the patient…both fall into the same dark hole of unconsciousness”. Similarly Eric Berne stressed that “Countertransference means that not only does the analyst play a role in the patient’s script, but she plays a part in his…the result is the ‘chaotic situation’ which analysts speak of”. Lacan acknowledged of the analyst’s “countertransference…if he is re-animated the game will proceed without anyone knowing who is leading”.

In this sense, the term includes unconscious reactions to a patient that are determined by the psychoanalyst’s own life history and unconscious content; it was later expanded to include unconscious hostile and/or erotic feelings toward a patient that interfere with objectivity and limit the therapist’s effectiveness. For example, a therapist might have a strong desire for a client to get good grades in university because the client reminds her of her children at that stage in life, and the anxieties that the therapist experienced during that time. Even in its most benign form, such an attitude could lead at best to “a ‘countertransference cure’…achieved through compliance and a ‘false self’ suppression of the patient’s more difficult feelings”.

Another example would be a therapist who did not receive enough attention from her father perceiving her client as being too distant and resenting him for it. In essence, this describes the transference of the treater to the patient, which is referred to as the “narrow perspective”.

Middle Years

As the 20th century progressed, however, other, more positive views of countertransference began to emerge, approaching a definition of countertransference as the entire body of feelings that the therapist has toward the patient. Jung explored the importance of the therapist’s reaction to the patient through the image of the wounded physician: “it is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal”. Heinrich Racker emphasised the threat that “the repression of countertransference…is prolonged in the mythology of the analytic situation”. Paula Heimann highlighted how the “analyst’s countertransference is not only part and parcel of the analytic relationship, but it is the patient’s creation, it is part of the patient’s personality”. As a result, “counter-transference was thus reversed from being an interference to becoming a potential source of vital confirmation”. The change of fortune “was highly controversial. Melanie Klein disapproved on the grounds that poorly analysed psycho-analysts could excuse their own emotional difficulties” thereby; but among her younger followers “the trend within the Kleinian group was to take seriously the new view of counter-transference” – Hanna Segal warning in typically pragmatic fashion however that “Countertransference can be the best of servants but is the most awful of masters”.

Late Twentieth-Century Paradigm

By the last third of the century, a growing consensus appeared on the importance of “a distinction between ‘personal countertransference’ (which has to do with the therapist) and ‘diagnostic response’ – that indicates something about the patient…diagnostic countertransference”. A new belief had come into being that “countertransference can be of such enormous clinical usefulness….You have to distinguish between what your reactions to the patient are telling you about his psychology and what they are merely expressing about your own”. A distinction between “neurotic countertransference” (or “illusory countertransference”) and “countertransference proper” had come (despite a wide range of terminological variation) to transcend individual schools. The main exception is that for “most psychoanalysts who follow Lacan’s teaching…counter-transference is not simply one form of resistance, it is the ultimate resistance of the analyst”.

The contemporary understanding of countertransference is thus generally to regard countertransference as a “jointly created” phenomenon between the treater and the patient. The patient pressures the treater through transference into playing a role congruent with the patient’s internal world. However, the specific dimensions of that role are coloured by treater’s own personality. Countertransference can be a therapeutic tool when examined by the treater to sort out who is doing what, and the meaning behind those interpersonal roles (The differentiation of the object’s interpersonal world between self and other). Nothing in the new understanding alters of course the need for continuing awareness of the dangers in the narrow perspective – of “serious risks of unresolved countertransference difficulties being acted out within what is meant to be a therapeutic relationship”; but “from that point on, transference and counter-transference were looked upon as an inseparable couple…’total situation'”.

Twenty-First-Century Developments

Further developments in the current century might be said to be the increased recognition that “Most countertransference reactions are a blend of the two aspects”, personal and diagnostic, which require careful disentanglement in their interaction; and the possibility that nowadays psychodynamic counsellors use countertransference much more than transference – “another interesting shift in perspective over the years”. One explanation of the latter point might be that because “in object relations therapy…the relationship is so central, ‘countertransference’ reactions are considered key in helping the therapist to understand the transference”, something appearing in “the post-Kleinian perspective…[as] Indivisible transferencecountertransference”.

Body-Centred Countertransference

Psychologists at NUI Galway and University College Dublin have recently begun to measure body-centred countertransference in female trauma therapists using their recently developed “Egan and Carr Body Centred Countertransference Scale”, a sixteen symptom measure. High levels of body-centred countertransference have since been found in both Irish female trauma therapists and clinical psychologists. This phenomenon is also known as “somatic countertransference” or “embodied countertransference” and links to mirror neurons and automatic somatic empathy for others due to the actions of these neurons have been hypothesised.