The brunhilde fantasy freud's countertransference in the analysis of elma

Abstract

The authors start from the hypothesis that there existed a “blind-spot” in Freud's countertransference in his analysis of Elma, an ex-patient of Sandor Ferenczi. In their search for support for this idea, they review the correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi contemporary to Elma's treatment in addition to works by Freud on theory and technique. They believe to have found therein several facts which support the above idea: for instance, the diagnosis of “dementia praecox” that Freud formulated in his first interview with the patient; and some of the vicissitudes of the treatment, in particular, the circumstances which determined its termination. The Brunhilde fantasy, which Freud attributes to Elma in a letter to Ferenczi, enables them to penetrate further the possible relationship between this “blind-spot” and details of Freud's life and childhood as revealed in his self-analysis.     

The countertransference dream1

Can the analyst's night‐dream about his patient be considered as a manifestation of countertransference‐and, if so, under what conditions? In what way can such a dream represent more than just the disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish of the analyst? Is there not a risk of the analyst unconsciously taking up and ‘using’ the content of a session or other elements coming from the analytic situation for his own psychic reasons? The author, closely following Freud's dream theory, shows the mechanisms which can allow us to use the dream content in the analytical situation: preserved from the secondary processes of conscious thinking, other fantasies and affects than in the waking state can emerge in dream thought, following an ‘unconscious perception’. After examining the countertransference elements of Freud's dream, ‘Irma's injection’, which leads off The interpretation of dreams, the author presents a dream of her own about a patient and its value for understanding affects and representations which had hitherto remained unrepresented.     

Tacit assumptions,countertransference and psychoanalytic technique. Part two: The influence of countertransference on theory and technique

In this article, the author examines bodily symptoms attributed to psychic mediating factors in the light of a psychoanalytic model of affect and sym- bolization. He uses clinical material from a consultation-liaison setting and a psychoanalytic treatment to illustrate how the model might help to understand different bodily symptoms as manifestations of different degrees of failure in the psychic elaboration of affect. On a more personal note, this could be seen as an attempt to understand, using a newly acquired conceptual tool, what went on in his 20 years of experience in the general hospital psychiatry setting.     

Situational countertransference

Situational Countertransference refers to those responses on the part of the therapist that are generated primarily by severe, though temporary, distresses in the therapist's personal life. It has been this writer's experience that many patients are quite attuned to the inner turmoil of their therapist, and that they will react to it in a variety of ways, which will be described. Moreover, a comparison of the level of functioning of two similar therapy groups over the course of nine months found that the group which had inadvertently learned the source of their therapist's distress functioned significantly better than the group which ostensibly knew nothing about it.     

Technique and countertransference in Freud's analysis of the Rat Man

Freud's records of his treatment of the Rat Man constitute a unique document in the history of psychoanalysis. Through the years different analysts have used these records to support different theories about analytic technique. Certain non-interpretive interventions of Freud's have especially aroused their interest, and many reasons have been put forward to "explain" Freud's behavior. One reason never yet advanced and documented is that a countertransference tension may have been involved in one of these instances. This is surprising, since countertransference is a necessary part of every analysis. Evidence is presented that Freud's behavior may indeed have been under the sway of countertransference. Some recently discovered details concerning his early life are discussed as constituting a plausible background for ths countertransference enactment.     

Negativism and countertransference

The purpose of this work is to explore the phenomenon of negativism and the analyst's response to it during the course of analytic work with a patient in whom negativism is a central behavioral pattern. Melville's short story, "Bartleby the Scrivener," describing in telling detail the response of a sympathetic lawyer to profound and pervasive negativism in his legal scribe, is discussed as a literary analogy to the analyst-analysand dyad. Aspects of the concept of negativism within psychoanalysis are discussed. The potential usefulness of understanding certain unexpected countertransference responses to pervasive negativism is explored, as this is a relatively neglected area of psychoanalytic technique. A case is presented describing the analysis of a patient whose character, like Bartleby's, is a mixture of profound negativism along with schizoid, obsessional, and masochistic elements.