Looking for ground : countertransference and the problem of value in psychoanalysis / Peter G.M. Carnochan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Carnochan, Peter, 1960-

Contributor:

Ellis D. Williams, College 1865, Endowment Fund.

Series:

Relational perspectives book series ; v. 21.

Relational perspectives book series ; v. 21

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Countertransference (Psychology).

Knowledge, Theory of.

Values--Psychological aspects.

Values.

Psychotherapist and patient.

Physical Description:

xiv, 417 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Hillsdale, NJ : Analytic Press, 2001.

Summary:

Despite a half-century of literature documenting the experience and meanings of countertransference in analytic practice, the concept remains a source of controversy. How may countertransference best be understood? In what ways does it impede or facilitate the analyst's activity? Does it serve diagnostic understanding or merely reflect the analyst's own intrusive subjectivity? For Peter Carnochan, such questions can be answered only by revisiting historical, epistemological, and moral issues intrinsic to the analytic enterprise. Looking for Ground is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive understanding of countertransference on the basis of a contemporary reappraisal of just such foundational assumptions.

Carnochan begins by reviewing the history of the psychoanalytic encounter and how it has been accompanied by changes in the understanding of countertransference. He skillfully delineates the complexities that underlie Freud's apparent proscription of countertransference before tracing the broadening of the concept in the hands of later theorists. Part II examines the problem of epistemology in contemporary analytic practice. For Carnochan, rejection of objectivist accounts of knowing need not lead to an untenable relativism. The answer to this apparent quandary, he holds, resides in a contemporary appreciation of affect, which, rather than merely limiting or skewing perception, forms an essential "promontory" for human knowing.

The final section of Looking for Ground takes up what Carnochan terms the "moral architecture" of psychoanalysis. Rejecting the claim that analysis operates in a realm outside conventional accounts of value, he argues that the analytic alternative to traditional moralism is not tantamount to emancipation from the problem of morality. Clarification of countertransference and its role in analytic therapy, in turn, follows from understanding and acceptance of the moral frame within which the analyst operates.

By way of rendering this frame explicit, Carnochan returns to the moral ground on which analysis was founded and then examines how this ground has evolved over the course of a century of analytic practice.

With wide-ranging scholarship and graceful writing, Carnochan refracts the major theoretical and clinical issues at stake in contemporary psychoanalytic debates through the lens of countertransference -- its history, its evolution, its philosophical ground, its moral dimensions. His achievement is not merely to offer a historically informed and brilliantly multifaceted exegesis of countertransference per se. Rather, it is to show how the examination of countertransference provides a unique and compelling window through which to apprehend and reappraise those basic claims at the heart of the psychoanalytic endeavor.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Atlas's Perch 1

Authenticity as Accident: The Quandary of Skillful Affectivity 3

Countertransference and the History of Psychoanalytic Technique 6

Accounts of Inquiry: Epistemology and the Countertransference 11

The Evolution of Morality 18

The Nature of Therapeutic Action 27

Chapter 2 Freud and the Advent of Psychoanalysis 33

Prohibition of the Countertransference 33

Epistemological Foundation 38

Culture and Mental Illness 41

Freud's Early Practice 44

Freud's Early Theory 53

Chapter 3 Freud: Gratification, Virtue, and the Therapeutic Process 67

Gratification, Motivation, and Making the Patient Work 68

Gratification and Sexual Noxae 75

Gratification and the Development of Freud's Technique 79

Chapter 4 Freud: Reality Testing and the Pleasure Principle 89

Freud and the Search for the Real 89

Reality Testing and Perception 91

Affect and Reality Testing 97

Objective Thought and the Location of the Real 103

Health and the Connection to Reality 106

Restoring the Real: The Analytic Attitude and the Analysand's Connection to the Real 109

The Analyst's Epistemological Process 114

The Therapeutic Environment, Gratification, and Reality 127

Countertransference and Analytic Objectivity 134

Chapter 5 The Evolution of Psychoanalytic Technique After Freud 147

Freud's Unfinished Legacy (1915-1939) 150

The Impact of Applied Technique (1919-1926) 153

Ferenczi's Humanistic Experiment (1919-1932) 159

Claims for Neutrality, the Lure of Activity (1925-1933) 171

The Resurrection of Neutrality (1936-1953) 178

Chapter 6 The Move to Modernity 183

The Changing Patient Population (1890-1975) 183

Ego Psychology, Object Relations Theory, and Interpersonal Psychoanalysis (1925-1960) 186

Motivation, Drives, and Relationship 188

Trauma and Choice 192

Reality and Creativity 197

Complications and Overlapping Ideas 201

Health as a Skill (1919-1960) 204

Therapeutic Action (1950-1999) 207

The Reemergence of the Countertransference (1942-1960) 208

The Rehabilitation of the Countertransference (1947-1999) 211

Chapter 7 Knowing and Analysis 223

The Death of Objectivism 225

The Untenability of Objectivism 231

The Shape of Knowing 238

Affect and Knowing 240

The Skill Theory of Affect 250

Validation and Objectivity 260

Chapter 8 Verification and Disclosure 275

Countertransference and Epistemology 276

The Use of the Countertransference 280

The Role of Disclosure 285

Knowing and Maturity 290

Chapter 9 Stillness and Provision Theories of Virtue in Psychoanalytic Practice 293

The Moral Evolution of Psychoanalysis 296

Foundations for Virtue 298

Drive and the Limits of Transcendent Accounts of Virtue 299

Schafer's Attempt to Rehabilitate Drive Theory 302

Natural Virtue and the Faith in Innocence 320

Chapter 10 Constructed Virtue The Architecture of Psychoanalytic Morality 327

The Activity of Health, the Structure of Suffering 334

Paradox and Compassionate Vision 341

Transference Reconsidered 350

The Actions of Psychoanalytic Technique 355

The Activity of Abstinence: Securing the Therapeutic Frame 360

The Necessity of Gratification 372

A Final Perspective on Countertransference 390.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 393-404) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Ellis D. Williams, College 1865, Endowment Fund.

ISBN:

0881633240

OCLC:

43567485