Certain problems in defining the psychoanalytic process emerged during the five years in which a COPE study group was attempting to clarify the concept. There was agreement about the bed-rock criteria to be included in a definition: e.g., transference, resistance, a dynamic unconscious, intrapsychic conflict, defense, infantile sexuality, insight which causes change, and change which brings ins...

The termination phase of treatment is recognized as a significant aspect of the therapy process and yet remains vastly understudied in psychotherapy literature. In the present study, therapists' perspectives were used to examine how 3 elements of the therapy relationship (working alliance, real relationship, and transference) during the termination phase relate to perceived client sensitivity t...

The development and empirical examination of a tripartite model of the therapeutic relationship over nearly three decades are described. The model asserts that all therapeutic relationships, to varying degrees, consist of a real relationship, a working alliance, and a transference-countertransference configuration. Research testing propositions about how each of these components is related to t...

The relevance and validity of ethnocultural factors in transference and countertransference reactions are proposed. Some of those prevalent in dyadic psychotherapy are described, focusing on intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic dyads. Case vignettes are presented to illustrate the ways in which ethnocultural factors serve as catalysts for such major therapeutic issues as trust, ambivalence, anger, and...

In the last decade or so, the understanding of countertransference has become an emerging area of common ground among psychoanalysts of diverse theoretical perspectives. This convergence can be traced to the development of two key concepts--projective identification and countertransference enactment. Projective identification has evolved from a patient's intrapsychic fantasy in Klein's original...

Transference and countertransference issues arising in the context of consultation-liaison (C-L) psychiatry could be more complex than originally assumed since they include reactions evoked within the frame of a unique "therapeutic triangle" of the patient, the physician, and the C-L psychiatrist. A clinical vignette illustrates how the projective identification process could mediate the relati...

Within a clinical-theoretical framework focused on transference-countertransference dynamics, the authors reflect on role-reversal and on the reasons it has been neglected for a long time in literature. This primitive inter- and intra-psychic process, often at the forefront in our practice, will be discussed in its principal aspects (patient's unconscious identification with parents' psychic cu...

The authors explore the interpersonal aspects of the early development of an experience of external reality and the roots of this experience in primary intersubjectivity. They suggest some implications that this has for psychoanalytic work with the patient's experience of external reality. They argue that the external world is not an independently existing 'given', for the infant to discover, a...

I investigated interpersonal defense theory, an interpersonal reconceptualization of defense processes, using the theory-building case study approach. Close examination of patient-therapist interaction during a psychotherapy session provided support for tenets of the theory. The analyses of the clinical material also elucidate some of the key concepts of interpersonal defense theory. Those conc...

This article explores the concept of transference-countertransference which, it argues, holds out the promise of an inherently relational understanding of the unconscious dimensions of affective, felt and emotional experience. This argument is contrasted to Ian Burkitt’s multi-dimensional model of affect, feeling and emotion which rejects the notion that these have unconscious dimensions unders...