ABSTRACT
It has long been recognised that language can lead to proper communication only if analysts attend not simply to their patients’ words but to their context and to the non-verbal cues that accompany them. It is now equally clear that analysts must attend to their own reactions, to the countertransference in the broadest sense, and this includes not just their emotional state but also their thoughts and their actions.We have learned that internal conflicts in patients become externalised in the transference and elements from patients’ internal worlds are projected into their analysts. Feelings are created in analysts through projective identification that lead them to act so that they find themselves playing roles ascribed to them by their patients. An important possibility for communication emerges if analysts can contain their propensity to action, since they can then look at the pressures put on them and the feelings aroused in them as a part of the situation that needs to be understood.The period after giving an interpretation is also very important, and it is often only after analysts have been drawn into an enactment that they can become aware of what has happened. The patient’s reactions to what has happened can be monitored and used to test and then modify the interpretation,which, as a result,will normally become more precise and gradually more comprehensible to the patient.1 Analysts therefore have to integrate observations from different sources, indeed from all they can observe in the total situation of the transference, and also have to add something from their thinking and imagination before a meaningful understanding can be reached.
