The Power of Countertransference: Innovations in Analytic Technique

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Description A signpost of the relational turn in contemporary psychoanalysis, Karen Maroda's The Power of Countertransference, published in , is perhaps the first systematic effort to integrate the need for mutual emotional exchanges, which may include the analyst's own self-disclosures, into an interactive model of psychoanalytic practice. This use of the nonhuman is well-known with respect to the delusions and hallucinations of psychotic people, but Searles characteristically shows that the same relationships occur in all of us in varying degrees and at various times.

A particularly important feature is the infant's wish to merge with the environment, an impulse that recurs throughout life. Searles is eloquent on this matter, since it is clear that he greatly loved the place where he grew up, the Catskill region of upstate New York, which, in his words, 'possesses an undying enchantment, a beauty and an affirmation of life's goodness which will be part of me as long as I live' Searles , p. He has always felt that life's meaning resides not only in human relationships but also in relations with the land itself - the hills, lakes, rivers and, in other ways, the urban landscape.

In my opinion, the issues about the inner and outer worlds explored in this difficult book are of central importance to human survival, a thesis which Karl Figlio is developing with respect to the Green Movement. As Searles rightly says, we ignore this relationship at our peril Searles, , p. His analysis of the nonhuman environment includes examples from cartoons, fairy tales, animals, pets - all as bearers of transference feelings, projections and identifications.

He draws on philosophy, anthropology and folk tales to illustrate the animism and anthropomorphism which are commonplace in all cultures, including our own. He suggests that much of our delay in realising the psychoanalytic importance of these matters is because they stir up psychotic anxieties from a period in infancy and childhood 'when the world around us seemed, oftentimes, comprised largely or even wholly of chaotically uncontrollable nonhuman elements' pp.

These anxieties recur in dealing with, for example, home plumbing, carpentry, videos, and income tax returns, as we all know. He refers to the interchangeability between the human and nonhuman, that is, the lack of a qualitative distinction between them p. He says, 'I believe that every human being, however emotionally healthy, has known, at one time or another in his life, the following feelings which Further, I think it could readily be shown that normal, adult human beings frequently undergo "phylogenetic regression," in waking life as well as in dreams, as a means of gaining release from the demands of interpersonal living and as a means of gaining a restoration of emotional energy so that, refreshed now, they can participate in more strictly human interpersonal relatedness with new freshness and vigour' p.

I won't pursue this theme in his work, except to commend the book to you, even though , as he admits, it's in parts a tough read, but it sheds floods of light on the whole area described by Winnicott as transitional objects and phenomena a theme to which Searles returns repeatedly in later writings, esp. He returns to this issue again and again and concludes that in our relations with the nonhuman environment, we are dealing with displacement of mother-directed feelings, both of dependency and of sadism Searles, , p.

Reflecting on this book in a characteristically candid moment of self-revelation in this case about his tendency to be self-isolating , he says, twenty years after it appeared, 'I finished one of the chapters midway along in the manuscript, and came home and cackled exultantly to my wife, "They'll have to have an oxyacetylene torch to get through that one!

He tries again in innumerable passages in later writings and, in particular, in a fine essay on 'Unconscious Processes in Relation to the Environmental Crisis' Searles, , ch.

Throughout his writings barriers which one takes for granted are dismantled and relationships which were thought to be very one-sided are shown to be much more nearly fully reciprocal than one thought. For example, he roots much mental distress in failed attempts to heal one's parents and gives some poignant personal history to support this. He argues that a phase of deeply regressed symbiosis is characteristic of much of the best analytic work. Most famously, he argues that therapists and patients seek to drive one another crazy and that this struggle is one of the main elements in successful psychotherapy with schizophrenics Searles, , p.

The aforementioned concept of symbiosis looms large in his writings. It refers to mutual dependency of a highly-regressed kind, and he offers a series of stages of symbiotic relatedness - passing from pathological symbiosis to autism to therapeutic symbiosis which can be preambivalent or ambivalent to a more mature and integrated stage he calls individuation. These are not rigid developmental stages in therapy and need not be passed through in every case, but the general theme is important and conforms to his profoundly dialectical model of the interpersonal relations between therapist and patient.

He says is his first book, 'For the deepest levels of therapeutic interaction to be reached, both patient and therapist must experience a temporary breaching of the ego boundaries which demarcate each participant from the other. In this state there occurs Then, similarly by introjection, the patient benefits from this intrapsychic therapeutic work which has been accomplished in the therapist' Searles, , pp.

In the centre of this storm there is 'a struggle as to whose will be the psychopathology in question' Searles, , p. I'll quote another passage referring to a point when things begin to get better: This is in contrast to the earlier, autistic phase, during which he had to adapt to long stretches of time during which he was given the feeling of being useless, neglectful, irrelevant, uncaring, incompetent, and, more than anything else, essentially nonhuman, precisely for the reason that the patient needed to regress, in his experience of the analyst, to the level of the young child's experience of the mother as being something far more than merely human, as a person is seen thorough adult eyes.

The patient needed to come to experience the analyst as being equivalent to the early mother who comprises the whole world of which the infant is inextricably a part, before he has achieved enough of an own self to be able to tolerate the feeling-experience of sensing her as separate from his own body, and the two of them as separate from the rest of the actual world.

The transition phase likewise stands in contrast, as regards the timeliness of transference interpretations, to the subsequent phase of therapeutic symbiosis, in which such interpretations are almost limitlessly in order' Searles, , p. An attentive listener - especially one with Kleinian ears - would have experienced trip-wires about early object relations and timing of transference interpretations, which might lead to a premature sniffiness about Searles' theoretical leanings.

One of my main reasons for commending him to you is that he wears his theory lightly, even professes not to have much which is never the case, of course , so that one can benefit from his stories and his ability too dwell honestly in the realm of primitive interactions, without getting unduly tangled up in doctrinal disputes. Before signing off I want to mention two more themes. The first is the subject of one of the funniest and most liberating essays I have ever read. It is a confessional critique of the noble therapist, or - in the American context - the 'dedicated physician'.

Searles' examples get right down into the pit of horrible feelings between therapist and patient.

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He points out that the young therapist 'is often genuinely unaware of feeling any hatred or even anger toward the patient who is daily ignoring or intimidating or castigating him, and unaware of how his very dedication, above all, makes him prey to the patient's sadism' Searles, , p. He recalls overhearing a patient saying to his therapist, 'The pleasure I get in torturing you is the main reason I go on staying in this hospital' p. A chronic schizophrenic woman once said to him, '"You should have the Congressional Medal of Spit. His serious point is that 'it is folly to set out to rescue the patient from the dragon of schizophrenia: The dragon is the patient's resistance to becoming "sane" - resistance which shows itself as a tenacious and savage hostility to the therapist's efforts' p.

He recalls discovering with wry amusement that Uccello's painting of St. George and the Dragon has the interesting feature that the dragon from which he is supposed to be rescuing her is actually a pet on a chain, apparently under her control pp. Those of you who are familiar with the Kleinian literature on aspects of the patient's mind which derive from the death wish or Thanatos, as well as recent writings about 'the gang in the mind' and 'pathological organisations' e. His clinical point about the harm the stance of dedication produces is this: I want to emphasize that it is no pernicious thing consciously to regard the patient as supremely important and meaningful to oneself.

For us consciously so to relate to him cannot but enhance his self-esteem and help him to become whole. The pernicious thing is that we repress both our idealized image and our diabolized image of him, hide both from ourself, and at the same time act out both these toward him by inappropriately employing, in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, the traditional dedicated-physician-treating-his-patient approach which, however conventionally accepted in the practice of medicine generally, conceals and reinforces the wall between patient and doctor when we employ it in this field' p.

He sees this attitude as a major barrier to the kinds of symbiosis outlined above, since it walls off the very negative emotions between patient and therapist which have to become apparent and unthreatening as a result of lowering defences, so that the essential symbiosis can occur and be worked through p. If there was space, I would take you on similarly unbuttoning tours of the supervisory relationship and paranoid structures in the therapeutic team, but you can by now guess what horrid and enlightening honesties he comes up with.

Instead, I'll close by offering a taste of his most famous and beloved paper, the eighty-page tour de force , 'The Patient as Therapist to his Analyst'. Most of those pages are filled with case material to illustrate a thesis I have found hard to doubt since the first moment I heard it: It should be noted, if only in passing, that there are religious ways of making this observation about the human spirit.

• Index Tracking, Essential Guide to Trailing Man and Beast;
• Notes to Walter.
• The Power of Countertransference: Innovations in Analytic Technique - Library?

He claims that the patient is ill because, and to the degree that, his own psychotherapeutic strivings towards lovedones have been frustrated and repressed. The patient's illness - in transference terms - expresses his unconscious wish to cure the therapist pp.

Searles claims that no other aetiological factor in mental illness is anywhere near this one in importance p. By the time we get to the end of this utterly fascinating essay and grasp its central place in his writings, two things are clear. The first is that the classical analytic position, in which the therapist is not a real person to the patient, is mad.

He says of classical psychoanalysis, 'to the degree that it is rigorously classical, it is delusional' p. The second thing that is clear is that countertransference is the royal road both to schizophrenia p. As he puts it in a more recent paper on the subject, 'I cannot overemphasize the enormously treatment-facilitating value, as well as the comforting and liberating value for the therapist personally, of his locating where this or that tormenting or otherwise upsetting countertransference reaction links up with the patient's heretofore-unconscious and unclarified transference -reactions to him.

In other words, the analyst's "own" personal torment needs to become translated into a fuller understanding of the patient's childhood-family events and daily atmosphere. I find it particularly helpful when a "personal", "private" feeling-response within myself, a feeling which I have been experiencing as fully or at least predominantly my "own," becomes revealed as being a still deeper layer of reaction to a newly-revealed aspect of the patient's transference to me' Searles, , p.

I said at the beginning that I thought I knew why countertransference is flavour of the month: Searles is, in my opinion, the best around. Surely he deserves a medal for honour, for writing so movingly, and for retaining his integrity during decades, awash with his own and others' spit, working with patients few would take on? In his Postscript to the dialogue with Langs he expresses his desperation and frustration at Langs' patronising treatment of him, including feeling at one point that Langs was trying to destroy him p.

In his own defence, Searles wrote, 'I felt that you entirely failed to realize that I am one of the world's leading experts on the psychoanalytic therapy of schizophrenic patients and very possibly the world's leading expert' p. He has worked with one woman for thirty-nine years and a number of others for extensive periods. He concludes that he has seen a number of patients move from a high percentage of schizophrenic psychopathology to a much-improved level of functioning but only one who became completely well.

In a recent interview he reflected stoically on his work and mused, ' Just continue to shock them? His work is also important to my understanding of a much wider issue, which Richard Rorty, in a lovely essay on 'The Contingencies of Selfhood' , ch. When we look within, I think it more fruitful, more human and more hopeful to find interpersonal relationships which can best be understood in moving and poignant stories, however fraught and distressing, rather than some rendering of mental physics, chemistry or biology - or even of linguistics - all of which serve, in my experience, to distance us from ourselves and one another.

Objectivity - the claimed guarantee of truth proffered by science - doesn't even work for so-called 'things' in nature. In spite of the official scientific account, we experience nature animistically and anthropomorphically, and so do the scientists See Young, , a.

We could get onto better terms with nature if we did so more honestly and full-bloodedly. Why on earth should we treat other subjects and our own inner world as objects? Human nature is human, and Harold Searles' profoundly plain-speaking and compassionate work helps one to have the courage to bear this truth and not succumb to reification - the treatment of relations between people as though they were relations between things. His forthrightness about the madness which we share with the patient and the vicissitudes of the process of working through it, is a big advance on that other form of madness which is called orthodoxy.

He invites us to acknowledge and live with the nearly unbearable fact that nasty, borderline and psychotic phenomenon both sides 'will be encountered in any deep-reaching course of psychoanalysis or intensive psychoanalytic therapy, for these phenomena are part of the general human condition' Searles, , p. This is the revised text of a talk delivered to the Arbours Association, London, in November A version of it has appeared in the Journal of the Arbours Association 9: It will also appear in Free Associations in Psychological Issues 4 no.

Selected Papers on Psycho-Analysis. Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. The Analytic Space and Process.

Coltart Slouching towards Bethlehem Free Association Books, pp. The Therapist's Contribution to the Therapeutic Situation. New York University Press. International Universities Press, A Life for Our Time. Her World and Her Work. Selected Problems in Psychoanalytic Theory. Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians. University of Chicago Press. A Personal Record of an Analysis with Winnicott. Innovations in Analytic Technique. New Dimensions in Countertransference and Transference. The Therapist's Subjectivity in the Therapeutic Process. Oxford University Press, Hogarth; reprinted Maresfield, Formulations of the Person in the Social Context.

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