This chapter links psychoanalysis, Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, and political/social criticism. I will begun by exploring some links between current understandings of 'countertransference' and the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, a term deriving from a different discipline but useful and suggestive in a variety of ways.
This chapter links psychoanalysis, Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, and political/social criticism. I will begun by exploring some links between current understandings of 'countertransference' and the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, a term deriving from a different discipline but useful and suggestive in a variety of ways. Then I will try to move the resultant mixture in the general direction of politics, culminating in an attempt to depict a new kind of citizen that I call citizen-as-therapist.
To effect the initial link between a clinical concept such as countertransference and a wider idea such as the mundus imaginalis, I will be making use of a research project I have conducted in which the countertransference experiences of nearly thirty psychotherapists have been collected, collated and evaluated.
To effect the second move in a political direction, I shall describe workshops that I call 'political clinics' in which I try to operationalise this thinking. I think this is a somewhat unusual project and the empirical hands-on approach gives a firm base to my overall intent. This is to propose a theory that will, in pluralistic vein, harness together the functional realities of the analyst's profession and its implicit value system or ideology with a position statement about the relations between depth psychology and politics. There will be an interplay of technique and soul, data and emotion, questionnaire and rhetoric, process and content, relationship and image, left and right hemispheric activity.
By 'politics', I mean the concerted arrangements and struggles within an institution, or in a single society, or between the countries of the world for the organisation and distribution of resources and power, especially economic power. Politics concerns the way in which power is held or deployed by the state, by institutions, and by sectional interests to maintain survival, determine behaviour, gain control over others and, more positively perhaps, enhance the quality of human life. Politics implies efforts to change or transform these arrangements and efforts to maintain them. Economic and political power includes control of processes of information and representation to serve the interests of the powerful as well as the use of physical force and possession of vital resources such as land, food, water or oil.
On a more personal level, as feminist thinking demonstrates, there is a second kind of politics. Here, political power reflects struggles over agency, meaning the ability to choose freely whether -to act and what action to take in a given situation. But politics also refers to a crucial interplay between these two dimensions, between the public and private dimensions of power. There are connections between economic power and power as expressed on an intimate, domestic, level. Power is a process or network as much as a stable factor. This version of political power is demonstrated experientially: in family organisation, gender and race relations, and in religious and artistic assumptions as they affect the life of individuals.
Where the public and the private, the political and the personal, intersect or even meld there is a special role for depth psychology in relation to political change and transformation. The tragicomic crisis of our fin de de siecle civilisation incites us to challenge the boundaries that are conventionally accepted as existing between the external world and the internal world, between life and reflection, between extraversion and introversion, between doing and being, between politics and psychology, between the political development of the person and the psychological development of the person, between the fantasies of the political world and the politics of the fantasy world. Subjectivity and intersubjectivity have political roots; they are not as 'internal' as they seem (cf. Samuels, 1993).
From its beginnings, depth psychology has been interested in the world of politics. In his paper entitled 'The claims of psychoanalysis to the interest of the nonpsychological sciences', written in 1913, Freud staked a claim for the proactive capacity of psychoanalysis:
To throw light on the origins of our great cultural institutions - on religion, morality, justice, and philosophy... Our knowledge of the neurotic illnesses of individuals has been of much assistance to our understanding of the great social institutions. (Freud, 1913a, p.235)
Jung made a similar point about the relationship of depth psychology and politics in a more reactive vein in 1946 in his preface to a collection of his essays on Nazi Germany:
We are living in times of great disruption: political passions are aflame, internal upheavals have brought nations to the brink of chaos.... This critical state of things has such a tremendous influence on the psychic life of the individual that the analyst ... feels the violence of its impact even in the quiet of his consulting room. ... The psychologist cannot avoid coming to grips with contemporary history, even if his very soul shrinks from the political uproar, the lying propaganda, and the jarring speeches of the demagogues. We need not mention his duties as a citizen, which confront him with a similar task (CW 10, para. 11).
At times, it seems that Freud and Jung were as interested in the broad sweep of cultural evolution and in an engagement with collective psychology as they were in their day-to-day work with clients. Certainly, there is a tension between their cultural and clinical projects and this is a tension that is still with their descendants today.
It certainly seems that the existence of a rupture between analysis and therapy in the consulting room and analysis and therapy in the political world is once again being challenged, if not exactly closed. We can tell that something significant is going on by the existence of fierce opposition to the challenge from those who regard the clinical as an untouchable, privileged category, on the basis of its contribution to the alleviation of human suffering.
Although I abhor that kind of clinical triumphalism, I do not suggest in this chapter that we should close all the consulting rooms. This is because I can see that clinical practice may be something other than a bastion of possessive individualism and 'narcissistic' introspection. It is right to criticise myopic (and greedy) clinicians who cannot apperceive that their work has a political and cultural location and implication. But it is not right to indulge in simplistic thinking that would do away with the entire clinical project of depth psychology. Without their connection to a clinical core, why should anyone listen to analysts and therapists at all? The rejection of the clinical forecloses what is, for me, the central issue: the relations between the private and the public spheres of life. This foreclosure mimics the attitude of the most conservative, dyed-in-the-wool clinicians and mental health professionals. The high-profile apostates of therapy (Hillman and Ventura, 1992; Masson, 1989) are as terrified of exploring the relations between the personal and the political as are the fanatical professional adherents of therapy. Both groups fail to see that the critique of analysis and therapy as self-indulgent, introspective and 'narcissistic' has been causing intense debates throughout the entire history of the enterprise. It is not a new dispute.
In fact, the history of depth psychology's attempt to do something about and in the world is so extensive and longstanding (the Frankfurt School, R.D. Laing etc.) that I have suggested Hillman and Ventura's title could well have been We've had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy's Attempts to Improve the World but the World's Stayed Pretty Much the Same.
The countertransference revolution
These are the words of one of the participants in the research project, writing about a client:
Veronica is 20 and single. She is depressed and lives at home with her parents; she works for a bank. At school she was a model pupil and head girl. She started drinking heavily in her late teens and turned down several offers of university places at the last moment. After my third session with her, as I was getting into my car, I experienced a sharp moment of anxiety, an image of a car crash came to me and I found myself thinking, 'What'll happen to Veronica if I have a car crash?'
The therapist knew that she was not going mad and that what had happened related to her client. She was an experienced worker and able to manage her shaken feelings. Her conclusion was that she was being affected by her client's massive feelings of destructiveness towards her and that her worry about the client's well-being was representative of the client's own guilt. The therapist regarded her countertransference reactions as having been stimulated by communications from the client. Though such reactions are by no means the only source of information about the client, they play a special part because of the depth and intensity of their impact upon the therapist. My concern is with this type of countertransference experience, to try to understand it and explain how such things can happen at all, and then move on to consider the political and social utility of these phenomena.
People who have never been analysts or therapists are often surprised to find that clinical practice is a red-hot emotional activity. It is not usually the case that a client quietly reports a problem to an analyst who then explains its origins by reference to specialised knowledge about such matters as childhood or the significance of chains of association. In particular, the analyst's state of mind often shows signs of altered levels of consciousness and the presence of intense fantasy and aroused emotion. These may lead to disturbed bodily and behavioural functioning on the analyst's part. These central features of the analyst's experience, which are the regular currency of discussion amongst clinicians have, rightly or wrongly, been tagged as 'countertransference' (see Rayner, 199 1; Slatker, 1987).
Those of my readers who are in clinical practice will know something of the revolution in clinical theorising that has taken place (see Clarkson, 1995, pp.62-107). This revolution has made it possible to review the analyst's subjective experience in a calm and considered way, underscoring its utility and resisting, but certainly not forgetting, the tendency to conclude that analysts are prone to mad responses to their clients. Because many readers will not be familiar with this revolution, I want to give a brief history of it. Although no hard-and-fast consensus exists about the use of the countertransference, something which need not dismay us (as we shall see), a definite historical trend in theorising about it can be observed. In this trend, countertransference experiences of the analyst are re-theorised as communications from the client and hence as being of clinical utility. Analysis and therapy result from an interplay of subjectivities - they are intersubjective phenomena; there is no subjectivity (no subject) without an Other (see Papadopoulos, 1991).
For Freud, it was apparently, but by no means exclusively, a problem that analysts reacted to their clients in ways that suggested neurosis (or even psychosis) on the analyst's part. Freud regarded these kinds of responses as undesirable and as something the analyst should overcome by more analysis or self-analysis. In the way Freud himself worked, it is clear that he did not function as a 'blank screen', as he seems to have had a strong personal presence in relation to his clients; this is apparent in his case histories. But it is also clear that, quite deliberately, from time to time he functioned as if he were a blank screen, a person without emotion or subjective life when seen from the client's point of view. In this way, he argued, the clients' projections of problematic figures from the past could be more freely transferred on to the person of the analyst - hence, 'transference' (which was also considered a phenomenon that interfered with treatment right at the very start of psychoanalytic endeavour).
By the 1950s, some analysts were, controversially, regarding countertransference as other than inevitably neurotic, seeing it as an informative phenomenon with distinct clinical value (e.g. Heimann, 1950). Nowadays there are numerous analysts who see their subjectivity, carried by the countertransference, as a central feature of the clinical encounter. Such analysts conceive of themselves as 'ready' for the experience of countertransference (Bollas, 1987, pp.201-3).
There have been parallel debates in analytical psychology but there has been less of a sense of overturning the applecart because Jung constantly asserted that the analyst was 'in' the treatment just as much as the client. In 1929 Jung regarded countertransference as a 'highly important organ of information' about the client and felt that an analyst who could not let him or herself be influenced by the client's psychological emissions would be an ineffective clinician (CW16, para. 163).
There are many strands of post-Freudian theorising about the countertransference. One strand lays emphasis on the analyst's emotions and emotionality, meaning his or her total involvement in the analytical process. The idea is that the analyst's unconscious somehow 'understands' that of the client in an empathic, feeling manner. This view is claimed, with justification, to stem from Freud who, in spite of warning against the possibility of neurosis in the analyst, also referred to the analyst's unconscious as a receptive organ' in relation to the 'transmitting unconscious of the patient' (1913b, p.194). Psychoanalysts (and analytical psychologists) who have theorised treatment as an emotional encounter do not, on the whole, advocate spontaneous or simple (as opposed to disciplined) disclosure or sharing of their emotional states with their clients.
Another strand of post-Freudian thinking about countertransference makes use of a form of communication theory. Everything that happens between the analyst and client, whether originating in analyst or client, may be regarded as a symbolic communication. This permits a further revision - in this instance, it is a revision of the role of the client. The client is regarded as a person who helps the analyst conduct the treatment, pointing out errors and misjudgements either directly or by communication with the analyst's unconscious. In the latter case, it is the analyst's countertransference that provides the means by which the client can communicate his corrections of the analyst's errors (Langs, 1978).
A third way in which contemporary psychoanalysis has modified Freud's views of countertransference also makes use of a notion of communication. But in this approach communication is understood as the interplay of projective and introjective processes, the movement of psychological material between people, out of one and into the other and, maybe, back again. These processes are understood as special variants of generally occurring psychosocial phenomena and so countertransference theorising can be understood as part of a wider apprehension of how people communicate. The advantage of this theory is that it is possible to see how parts of the client's psyche crop up in the analyst's subjectivity, and vice versa (Racker, 1968). Post-Jungian theorising about countertransference has made use of similar thinking about projection and introjection.
The concern and preoccupation with countertransference has reached a peak in Britain and Latin America, where it sometimes seems that analysis consists of nothing but an exploration of the countertransference, But the United States, Germany and Italy are rapidly catching up, as a review of the literature demonstrates (Gorkin, 1987, pp.81104).
The situation in France is different. Jacques Lacan criticised (quite correctly, in my view) tendencies to fashion ego-to-ego communication out of the countertransference (1988, pp.30-3). However, Lacan's view of what happens dramatically oversimplifies the experience and practices of those who pioneered a revision of Freud's methodological suggestions. Though the question of disclosure remains a pressing one, Lacan overlooks the issues of the level of the analyst's disclosure and the work he or she might do on what is to be disclosed prior to communicating it (see M. Stanton, 1977, pp. 29-47).
Research project
The hypothesis
Before introducing more of the research material, I want to state the hypothesis on which the project was based. My thinking is that there are two rather different sorts of usable countertransference - though both may be seen as communications from the client. The difference between the two is shown in this simple example. Suppose, after a session with a particular client, I feel depressed (this may be a single occurrence or part of a series). Now I may know from my own reading of myself that I am not actually depressed, and certainly not seriously depressed. I may conclude that the depressed state I am in is a result of my close contact with this particular client. It may be that the client is feeling depressed right now and that neither of us is aware of that. In this instance, my depression is a reflection of his or her depression. So I would call this an example of reflective countertransference. In time, I may be able to make use of this knowledge, particularly if I had not realised the existence (or extent) of the client's depression. But there is another possibility. My experience of becoming a depressed person may stem from the presence and operation of such a 'person' in the client's psyche. The client may have experienced a parent as depressed and my reaction precisely embodies the client's emotionally experienced parent. I have also become a part of the client's inner world. I stress 'inner world' rather than the client's actual infancy or history to make the point that I am not attempting any kind of factual reconstruction. That 'person' will inevitably also be symbolic of a theme active in the client's psyche or of a part of his personality This entire state of affairs I have come to call embodied countertransference and it is to be distinguished from the former category of reflective countertransference. There is a considerable difference between, on the one hand, my reflecting of the here-and-now state of my client, feeling just what he or she is unconscious of at the moment, and, on the other, my embodiment of an entity, theme, or person of a longstanding, intrapsychic, inner-world nature. One problem for the analyst is that, experientially, the two states may seem similar. Perhaps some countertransferences are both reflective and embodied.
'Embodied' is intended to suggest a physical, actual, material, sensual expression in the analyst of something in the client's inner world, a drawing together and solidification of this, an incarnation by the analyst of a part of the client's psyche and, as the Shorter oxford English Dictionary defines it, a 'clothing' by the analyst of the client's soul. If our psyche tends to personify, as Jung suggests, then embodiment speaks of the way the person/analyst plays his or her part in that.
I am grateful to Neville Symington (personal communication, 1986) for suggesting that it is important to distinguish between countertransference states in the analyst that refer to the client's ego and countertransference states that refer more to the client's objects. Reflective countertransference would, I think, refer more to the client's ego position whereas embodied countertransference could refer to either the client's ego or to his or her objects, according to the specific context. The main point is that the problem that the analyst and client are working on can become embodied in the analyst.
Now any analyst who proposes new terms must explain why he or she does so in order not to be charged with word-mongering. This is particularly the case when, as in this instance, the new terms overlap with those already in use. Fordham's concept (1957) of syntonic countertransference is one for which 1, in common with many Jungian analysts, am extremely grateful. His achievement was to drag analysts out of their ivory towers, help them truly to listen to what their clients were trying to tell them, and make a reality out of pious commitments to 'the dialectical approach'. But gradually I began to feel that the term 'syntonic' was distant from my experience; often one does not feel in tune with the client in these countertransferences and there may be dissonance inside oneself Later, it may be clear that one was in tune. So 'syntonic' leans too much towards an Olympian standpoint, intellectual, even technical or technological, and, hence, to radiate commitment to a mode of observation more suited to the outer world than to the empathic processes we are talking about. Embodiment, on the other hand, does imply a becoming, with its consequent involvements, and also a suggestion of a medium for countertransference communications from the client; this, it will turn out, is often the analyst's body. Again, many of these countertransference states are nonverbal or pre-verbal - and embodiment speaks to that.
The unease with the notion of syntonic countertransference was a particular problem for me, as I was deliberately trying to keep my theorising on the 'low road', 'experience-near', in Kohut's phrases, using the empirical stance and data collection together with an empathic attitude (Kohut, 1982). So I chose the terms 'embodied' and 'reflective' quite deliberately, to be of help in the task of bracketing together countertransference (specific to the practice of analysis) and the mundus imaginalis, a more general, cultural term employed in archetypal psychology. it may turn out that these ideas particularise and extend Fordham's theory - paradoxically by invoking an approach with which he was in total disagreement (numerous personal communications 1976-94).
The term 'incarnate', which was one of the associations to which embodiment led, has a history in analytical psychology. It was first used in 1956 by Plaut to describe how an analyst may have to let himself become what the client's imagery dictates he be. However, Plaut's pioneering paper referred to the analyst's reactions to transference projections of which he was aware, and to his control (or lack of it) of his response. For example, what to do when a woman client saw him as a remarkable teacher: should he contradict this, teach her about wise old men, or 'incarnate' the image so as to develop a knowledge of how to use it? Plaut's concern was not with states in the analyst that are apparently devoid of any causation outside of the analytical relationship.
It should be reiterated that not all countertransference reactions are usable communications from the client. We need to bear neurotic countertransference in mind - identifying with the client, idealising the client, the analyst's retaliation to the client's aggression, his or her destruction of his or her own work, his or her attempt to satisfy his or her own infantile needs through the relationship with the client. Nor is it always immediately clear what the client's communications mean. As Jung said, the analyst may have to stay in a muddled, bewildered state for a period, allowing an understanding to germinate, if it will. An ability to rest with the anxiety and maintain an attitude of affective involvement becomes crucial.
The results
I will turn now to the material that I gathered through the research project. I embarked on it because I felt a need to check hypotheses like the reflective/embodied countertransference model and did not trust myself to use my own case material in isolation. For many years, I had been giving seminars to psychotherapy trainees in which I suggested that there were these two sorts of countertransference. I contacted 32 qualified psychotherapists who had been in supervision with me during this period and asked them for a few examples of countertransference reactions of theirs that they considered to result from the unconscious communications of their clients (see Table I for the questionnaire). The hypothesis that there are two different kinds of countertransference was restated, and the participants were reminded of the existence of neurotic countertransference. The countertransference reaction was to be reported in detail and I asked which kind of countertransference this was thought to be and how this experience had affected the work. The final question, which summarises the intent of the whole project, was: 'Can you say how the clients may have provoked or evoked these feelings in you?'
It may also be necessary to justify such empiricism to those who see it as opposed to poetic, rhetorical, imaginal explorations. An empirical base does not necessarily lead to prosaic conclusions. The findings of the project are quite the opposite. Empiricism, as expressed in this research venture, supports a poetic, metaphorical, imaginal explanation for the mysterious workings of countertransference.
The 26 completed replies covered a total of 57 cases. Because some cases involved more than one example of a countertransference communication and because some countertransferences could be said to be both reflective and embodied, the total of such examples came to 76. Of these, 35 (46%) were held by the respondents to be of embodied countertransference and 41 (54%) of reflective countertransference.
Table 1. questions I asked the participants in the research project
1. Age of client
2. Your age
3. Marital status of client
4. Your marital status
5. Presenting problem(s)
6. Brief history of client
7. Countertransference experience in detail
8. Is this reflective or embodied?
9. How did this affect the future of the work?
10. How did this affect your understanding of the history?
11. Can you say how the client may have provoked or evoked these feelings in you? What did they say or do?
12. Any other comments?
It was abundantly clear that the participants could see how to use such a classification of countertransference. Here is an example said to be of embodied countertransference. The client was a young, unmarried woman who had presented originally with a mixture of intolerable guilt accompanied by a sense of responsibility for the spiritual and moral welfare of others. She had also had a depressive breakdown. She had had several traumatic religious experiences in childhood. This is the therapist's account:
This event happened after three years of work when we were thinking of adding a second session. She was always extremely controlled, with periods in every session which felt almost autistic. She said nothing which had not already been minutely examined 'inside'. She watched my face for the slightest move, flicker of an eye, for instance, and would interpret what she thought she saw there - to herself - as me laughing at her, getting fed up with her, getting irritated by her. I suggested that perhaps one day she might feel able to entrust a bit more of what was inside to me, with the feeling that I would not change it or take it away, -that I could just hold it. As I was speaking I had a very strong impression or image of a large black open-mouthed pot which was strong yet open - like a big belly. The pot was huge and black and also like a witch's cauldron (I later realised). I said to her that it would be rather like having a pot which she could safely leave things in. Her immediate reaction was that it would be like a wall which something had been hurled at violently. My instantaneous image was of a violent expelling-type vomit, running down the wall, uncontained and wasted. We were both quite staggered by the strength and opposite nature of the two images we had had.
The therapist felt that the pot image demonstrated that the client's mother had longed to be of use to her. But the witch's cauldron and the image of vomiting suggest something else besides. The cauldron was described as big enough to swallow up a human being - and hence a sinister and dangerous part-self or splinter psyche within the client. Thus there were two aspects to this embodied countertransference: her mother's longing on the one hand and, on the other, an embodiment by the therapist of a split-off part of the client's psyche.
The next illustration is an example of a reflective countertransference. This therapist found herself coming to supervision with me in clothes very much like those worn by her client at their most recent session. This was something she realised during the supervision, but, in fact, I had been struck by the clothes she was wearing the moment I met her at the door: a little-boy presentation, school sweater, crooked tie and collar, muddied, practical shoes. And, though I did not know it, she was wearing a coat of the same colour as her client's, a coat she had not worn for years until that day As we talked, it became clear that the client had never felt able to relate closely to her mother. She was the middle of three daughters and had been 'assigned' to her father - memories of being placed, unwillingly, on his knee. She had never felt 'at one' with her mother. And she certainly could not let herself feel like her mother, like a woman. The way she had resolved this was to let herself be 'Daddy's girl' but in a way that ruled out incestuous involvement (the little-boy strategy).
The therapist's behaviour, in which she became merged with her client, might have been considered neurotic. But the notion that it reflects her client's desire to be at one with her therapist, and, indeed, her whole life struggle to obtain mothering, is equally plausible. For instance, the therapist writes: 'In some ways she had been treating me like a man although she had sought out a woman therapist. I found myself being more active and penetrating than my usual style and generally more assertive.' Mattinson (1975) has written of the way in which the dynamics of one situation (therapy) are reflected in those of an adjacent situation (supervision).
What I have been describing was, for me, a confirmation of a hypothesis. As I mentioned earlier, in addition to that, it was also possible to detect an overall pattern in the 76 countertransference responses and, moreover, one about which I had had no hypothesis. The countertransference responses described fell into distinct groups or categories, as follows.
- First, bodily and bebavioural responses. For example, wearing the same clothes at the client, walking into a lamp-post, forgetting to discuss something important, a strange sensation in the solar plexus, a pain in a particular part of the body, sexual arousal, sleep.
- Second, feeling responses. For example: anger, impatience, powerfulness, powerlessness, envy, irritation, depression, manipulation, redundancy, being flooded, bored.
- Finally, fantasy responses. For example: this is the wrong client, there's something wrong with my feet, a large black pot, I killed her mother, I'm a prostitute, I feel reverence for her serious, private place, be has God on his side, all colour has gone out of the world, a car crash, he'll rummage through my desk and books if I leave the room, the client is getting bigger and bigger and is filling the room.
Exposing myself to these accounts, this time without the protection of the reflective/embodied theory, made me aware that all these instances of countertransference may be said to be images, and this is true even of the bodily or feeling responses. They are images because they are active in the psyche in the absence of a direct stimulus which could be said to have caused them to exist. That is, nothing has been done to the analyst that would, in the usual way of things, explain the presence of such a reaction in him or her. A person may be conscious or unconscious of an image but, either way, the image may be regarded as promoting feelings and behaviour and not as secondary, a coded message about them (cf. Newton, 1965 or Kugler's (1982) use of a term such as 'acoustic image').
In the questionnaire, I also asked the participants what was the presenting problem of their clients. One finding is particularly interesting. It would seem that clients with instinctual (sex, aggression, food) problems are more likely to evoke reflective and embodied countertransference than other clients. What is highlighted, therefore, is the special part that may be played by the body in the client's evocation of countertransference in the analyst. This bodily proposition will have to be looked at later, alongside the earlier idea that it is the image that is the decisive factor. Here, the mundus imaginalis turned out to be relevant. In both the 'pot' example of embodied countertransference and the 'clothes' example of reflective countertransference, imagery and bodily perceptions played intermingled roles. In sum: the hope is that these findings justify a classification of usable countertransference responses into reflective and embodied, and that both terms accurately depict what happens. Further, the additional grouping of countertransferences under the headings of bodily and behavioural, feeling, and fantasy responses may also be justified.
Implications for technique
A central technical issue is constellated by a vision of countertransference as a possible communication from the client: what is the analyst to do with the knowledge he or she may gain from an analysis of his or her counter-transference experiences? Should he or she disclose them to the client? If so, how? Should the analyst weld his or her understanding of the countertransference into his or her interpretations? If so, how? Should he or she do little more than stay in touch with what is being discovered?
When I first began to think about these matters, I expected to find a sharp divide between Freudians and Jungians, with the latter group being more willing, even eager, to disclose countertransference material. True, a few Jungian analysts (e.g. Stein, 1987) are strong advocates of disclosure, particularly of feelings about the client generated in the analyst. But even such an extreme viewpoint is also represented in psychoanalysis, for example by Winnicott in 'Hate in the countertransference' (1949). The comprehensive literature review in Gorkin (1987) suggests strongly that there are numerous psychoanalysts who can see occasions on which it is advisable and justifiable to disclose countertransference. In psychoanalysis much more has been written about the kind of client with whom this is appropriate than in analytical psychology.
Perhaps because of the Freudian/Jungian consensus referred to above, most analysts seem to agree with Segal's position, summarised by Casement (1986, p,548):
The analyst is in no position to interpret if the interpretation is based only upon what the analyst is feeling in the session. Unless it is possible to identify how the client is contributing to what the analyst is feeling, and in such a way that the client could recognise this, then it is better to remain silent.
Casement notes the twin dangers of gratifying clients who want a magician for an analyst and of persecuting others with omniscience. Precisely because of dangers like these, I felt it necessary to go on with my investigations of countertransference, so as to find an ideological basis for the careful use of the tacit knowledge of the client that the countertransference can provide for the analyst. In other words, I think more is needed than an understanding of the dynamics of any one client. What is required is an understanding of how these phenomena generally tend to function. I do not mean a tight theory or categorisation, because that would defeat the purpose of utilising countertransference, but I do mean something more than clinical Pragmatics. My working out of the theme of the mundus imaginalis is intended to be that kind of ideological project.
Succinctly, an understanding of what it is that the analyst reflects or/and embodies can serve as a kind of resource out of which he or she fashions the actual words and images of the interpretation, rendering them fresh and, above all related to the client - hence not 'cliche interpretations' (Casement, 1986).
What I aim at is summarised thrillingly in this note sent by Bion to Meltzer (who quotes it in 1978, p. 126):
Now I would use as a model: the diamond cutter's method of cutting a stone so that a ray of light entering the stone is reflected back by the same path in such a way that the light is augmented the same 'free association' is reflected back by the same path, but with augmented 'brilliance'. So the patient is able to see his ,reflection', only more clearly than he can see his personality as expressed by himself alone (i.e. without an analyst).
