Category: Journal

Not sure if I’ve linked to this essay before? I like his style. Interesting topic! What a culture psychotherapy creates around itself. This particular paragraph is interesting on countertransference.

http://bostonreview.net/BR27.6/boynton.html

Since Freud, there have been three main attitudes towards countertransference, explains Robert Young, a Texas-born, London-based analyst who was formerly the publisher of Free Association Books and a Cambridge don. He sums up the history of countertransference for me, citing several papers he has written on the subject. “An analyst can get rid of his countertransference through analysis and concentrate on the patient’s transference. He can try to exploit it in a controlled way, as Freud says when he advocates using the therapist’s unconscious as an instrument for fathoming the patient’s unconscious. Or he can, more or less, just ‘go with it,’ and treat this unconscious-to-unconscious communication as the only authentical communication between analyst and patient,” he tells me.