Countertransference and Oedipal love

Abstract

In this essay, the author will explore the use of countertransference in the therapeutic process, with particular emphasis on Oedipal love. We begin with countertransference as conceptualized by interpersonal psychoanalytic theorists, who immediately pointed out the technical relevance of the therapist as a person, and the importance of the use of the therapist’s feelings, thoughts, life experiences, and states of mind in the therapeutic relationship. Just as dreams, slips of the tongue, peripheral thoughts, and physical gestures are useful in reading the patient’s unconscious experience, accepting, examining, and exploring countertransference become useful in reading the analyst’s unconscious experience. The author will then identify a more radical and contemporary conception of countertransference as representative of the analyst’s unconscious receptivity to the patient within the enactments in which transference and countertransference reciprocally affect each other. Finally, the author will concentrate on the Oedipal feelings experienced by the therapist and their importance in treatment. A clinical case will illustrate the clinical ramifications of these hypotheses.

Key-words:

• countertransference
• Oedipal feelings
• love
• loss
• trauma-related dissociation
• integration dreams

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna Maria Loiacono

Anna Maria Loiacono is a relational/interpersonal psychotherapist and psychoanalyst who lives and works in Florence, Italy. She is President of the H.S. Sullivan Institute of Florence and has been faculty, training and supervising analyst at the Institute of Analytic Psychotherapy of Florence since 1991. She is also vice president of OPIFER (Confederation of Italian Relational Psychoanalysts Societies) and an executive member of the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies. An editorial reader for the International Forum of Psychoanalysis, she has also published clinical and theoretical articles, some of them in English, and the Italian version of The unformulated experience by D.B. Stern. Her book La teoria interpersonale di H.S.Sullivan e la Clinica della Dissociazione (The interpersonal theory of H.S.Sullivan and the clinic of dissociation) (Ed. Termanini) was published in 2016. She was the chair of the XXth IFPS Forum, held in Florence on October 17–20, 2018, on “New faces of Fear. Ongoing Transformations in our Society and in Clinical Practice.”