The Transference and Countertransference in Psychoanalysis, designates the automatically established and updated bond of the patient with the analyst, which updates the signifiers that sustained his or her love requests in childhood.

It was on the occasion of the failure of Anna O's cathartic treatment with Josef Breuer that Sigmund Freud was led to discover and take into account the phenomenon of transference, and it was this that led him to abandon hypnosis.

Understanding Transference and Countertransference

The establishment of this intense emotional bond is automatic, inevitable and independent of any context of reality. It may happen that some people are not apt for transference, but, for this reason, do not request analysis. F or the analysis framework, the phenomenon of transference is constant, omnipresent in relationships, whether professional, hierarchical, romantic, etc. In this case, the difference with what happens within the framework of an analysis consists in the fact that the two partners are each in the grip of their own transference, of which they are mostly unaware.

As a result, the place of an interpreter is not spared, embodied by the analyst within the framework of the analytic treatment. In fact, the analyst, through his personal analysis, must be able to know how his personal relations with others are woven, so as not to interfere in what is happening on the side of the analyzing one. Moreover, this is a sine qua non condition for the analyst to be available and listen to the unconscious.

It is important for the analyst to be able to identify the various figures that he comes to embody for his patient. Furthermore, the inevitability and automaticity of the transference are accompanied for the patient, The patient completely forgets that the reality of the analytic picture has nothing to do with the situation experienced in the past, which then aroused this affection.

Transference and Countertransference and Psychoanalysis

It is at this point that the analyst's intervention is decisive, even if it is sometimes limited to an attentive silence, but which, in one way or another, gives an account of what the analyst has understood where the patient places him (the father, the mother, etc.). Moreover, the analyst knows that he is only lending himself to this role. The transference, therefore, presents itself as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it is what allows the patient to feel confident and want to talk, to seek to discover and understand what is happening in him, and on the other hand, it can be the site of the most stubborn resistance to the progress of the analysis.

In fact, just as in dreams, the patient in analysis attributes an actuality and a reality to the affections he is led to relive, and this against all reason, without taking into account what really is: "Nothing is more difficult in analysis than overcoming resistance, But let us not forget that it is precisely these phenomena that render us the most precious service, by allowing us to shed light on the emotions of love.

Secrets and forgotten by patients and giving these emotions a topical character, because one must remember that no one can be killed in absentia or in effigy." It is because the transfer is the place and occasion for the reproduction of these tendencies, of these fantasies that Freud says that transference is only a fragment of repetition and that "repetition is the transference of the forgotten past.

Repetition, Transference and Countertransference

Not only for the person of the doctor, but also for all other areas of the present situation." This is where the role of resistance comes in. In fact, the greater the resistance to remembrance, the more the staging will prevail, It is through the management of transference that, little by little, this compulsion to repeat becomes a reason to remember and, thus, little by little, allows the patient to re-appropriate his or her history.

The obligatory accompaniment to the transference is the analyst's countertransference, understood as the sum of the affections aroused in him by his analisand. The analyst must be able to analyze it to prevent it from impeding the functioning of the analysis, diverting the analyst from a correct position.

However, Lacan warns against a tendency to conceive of the analytic relationship in a dual and symmetrical way and does not encourage the analysis of the countertransference, which he would redefine more precisely as what the analyst represses from the signifiers of the 'analysand. Instead, he invites us to take into account the fact that, When a patient comes to an analyst, he assumes of him beforehand, the knowledge about what it seeks in itself.

Conclusion

Lacan reminds us that there can be no spoken word or even elaborated thought without this reference to a great other to whom we implicitly address ourselves and who would be the guarantor of a good order of things. It follows that transference exists only as a phenomenon that accompanies the exercise of speech. Without the exercise of speech, there would be no transfer possible.

This article was written by Michael Sousa ( [email protected] ). He graduated in Psychoanalysis at the Brazilian Institute of Clinical Psychoanalysis, and seeks daily to specialize more and more in the subject and in clinical practice. He is also a columnist for Terraço Econômico, where he writes about geopolitics and economics.