ABSTRACT
The unresolved transference to Freud as fountainhead of all psychoanalytic wisdom has grave consequences for the experience and use of countertransference as well. The uses of countertransference or its avoidance are often linked to the concept of neutrality. Relatively little of the literature actually presents case material. Particularly informative psychoanalytic reports are to be found in the collection by Levine and a 1992 “Symposium on Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse” in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues. The all-important stimulus to somatic and other kinds of countertransference is, of course, an analysand’s material, especially when it is connected with infancy. The latter has wider and deeper range but is more diffuse, since the messages are being emitted from multiple sources. In total communication, complementarity is involved, with each modality proffering a commentary on the other. Perhaps the usual reading of dissociation as resistance only will have to be broadened to include “dissociation as enactment of trauma.”.
