ABSTRACT
The analyst’s unconscious participation in the therapeutic relationship interests us today for a very different reason than it used to. The significance of countertransference no longer lies in its status as primary obstacle to the analyst’s perception of the truth. As the goals of psychoanalysis have shifted from the acquisition of insight to authenticity, the freedom to experience, and the expansion of relatedness (e.g., Mitchell, 1993), we have recognized that countertransference is as much what the analyst does as what she feels, thinks, and fantasizes, and these enactments, as we have come to call them, have become opportunities as much as obstacles. Insight remains crucial because it increases our range of choice. But no longer is the appearance of new understanding always viewed as the heart of the matter, as it was almost uniformly just a few short decades ago. Now, at least in some analytic circles, insight is just as likely to be viewed as a sign that the important change-the shift in analytic relatedness that allowed the new understanding to arise in the first place-has already occurred. Ghent (1995), for example, writes:
Among many others, the members of the Boston Change Process Study Group (BCPSG, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2008; D. N. Stern et al. 1998) are working this vein. Their transformational view of therapeutic action grows from the application of complexity theory to psychoanalysis, an area bursting with theoretical and clinical potential.1
