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Volume 10, Number 1
January - June 2006

The transference countertransference interaction revisited
Silvio Zucconi

SUMMARY

In this paper , based on Joseph Sandler's paper of 1976 entitled Countertransference and Role Responsiveness, the author refers to the transference and countertransference dynamics and the nature of their interplay. Through the detailed presentation of clinical material he attempts to investigate if and how much the psychoanalyst's subjectivity influences his analytic task. Giovanna's eight years analysis confirm the author's assumption that each psychoanalytical treatment is characterized by constant oscillations between different polarizations of the transference-countertransference interactions. Continuous oscillations and reciprocal interactions of explicit and explicit dimensions, thought and action, repetition and transformation, interpretation and stage-acting give place, since the very first session, to the analytic practise that develops between opposite poles of what is predictable and unpredictable, of what is organized and what is spontaneous, methodical or intuitive.