Countertransference
On this page 7 sections ›
ELI5
Countertransference is when the analyst's own hang-ups, prejudices, or personal feelings get in the way and start steering the treatment in a direction that suits the analyst rather than helping the patient.
Definition
In the Lacanian tradition, countertransference names the ensemble of the analyst's subjective interferences with the clinical process. Lacan's canonical definition—drawn from the Écrits and deployed consistently across the corpus—characterises it as "the sum total of the analyst's biases, passions, and difficulties, or even of his inadequate information, at any given moment in the dialectical process" of an analysis. This formulation is deliberately broader than the Freudian notion of "unconscious feelings toward the patient" and the Kleinian rehabilitation of countertransference as a useful clinical instrument: it encompasses theoretical prejudices, normative ideals, libidinal investments, identificatory distortions, and gaps in knowledge. Lacan insists, against Paula Heimann and the object-relations tradition, that countertransference is a form of resistance—ultimately the analyst's own resistance—that hinders treatment rather than illuminating the analysand's inner state.
At the structural level, Lacan locates countertransference in the imaginary register. It arises wherever the analyst's ego enters into a specular, rivalrous relation with the analysand's ego—the axis of same/different, love/hate that characterises imaginary relations. To operate from countertransference is to interpret from within this narcissistic dyad, substituting the analyst's own frame of reference for the analysand's unconscious discourse. In his late seminars Lacan goes further, linking unresolved countertransference to the analyst's own unexamined jouissance: when an analyst endures a decade of intolerable tension without questioning what satisfaction she is deriving from it, countertransference has become structurally equivalent to a transference neurosis—a neurosis of the analyst that is the engine of interminable analysis. Lacan therefore criticises the very term "countertransference" as implying a false symmetry with transference; he generally prefers to speak of the analyst's desire, or of the analyst's resistance, as the proper theoretical categories.
Evolution
In the early 1950s (return-to-Freud period), Lacan treats countertransference primarily as a clinical obstacle and resistance. In the 1951 "Intervention on Transference" he reads Freud's failure with Dora as the paradigm case: Freud's identification with Herr K, his normative heterosexist bias, and his inadequate theoretical grasp of homosexuality in hysteria are each parsed as instances of countertransference under his four-part taxonomy (biases, passions, difficulties, inadequate information). In the Écrits passage "From the Psychoanalyst's Pathway to Its Maintenance" Lacan sharpens the critique ideologically, calling the contemporary "promotion of effects placed under the heading of countertransference" a "step backward"—on a par with the discredited notion of the "communication of unconsciouses"—and labelling its fashionable deployment an "alibi" that allows the analyst to evade responsibility for interpretation and the production of truth.
By the mid-1950s (Écrits, "Direction of the Treatment"; Seminar V), Lacan begins to generalise the concept beyond individual pathology toward the structural background of theoretical prejudices shaping analytic discourse, and criticises Ferenczi's subjectivism as a precursor of the countertransference-centred technique. In "The Function and Field of Speech and Language" he names the emphasis on countertransference as one of the three degenerative tendencies of post-Freudian psychoanalysis, linking it to the broader abandonment of speech and language as the privileged medium of treatment.
In the structuralist-ethics period (Seminar VIII, 1960–61), Lacan engages Kleinian and object-relations theory directly in a sustained "Critique of Countertransference," acknowledging that countertransference is "no longer considered in our time to be in essence an imperfection" and that it designates "the analyst's feelings in analysis, which are determined at every instant by his relations with the analysand." He reads Paula Heimann's rehabilitation of countertransference sympathetically as a corrective to the "stoical ideal" of emotional neutrality, while insisting the Kleinian framework remains theoretically inadequate because it lacks the Graph of Desire, the concept of demand, and the structural account of the subject.
In the object-a period (Seminars X and XII, 1962–65), Lacan introduces the most radical reformulation: countertransference is recast as structurally homologous to a transference neurosis. When the analyst fails to locate the function of the analysand as objet petit a and instead allows herself to be "transformed into an object" by the patient, her own unexamined jouissance in sustaining that position becomes the true engine of interminable analysis. This move effectively dissolves the countertransference/transference binary in favour of a unified structural account centred on the analyst's desire.
Fink's secondary-literature elaborations (across A Clinical Introduction to Freud, Against Understanding vols. 1 and 2, and The Lacanian Subject) rigorously apply Lacan's definition while extending it to encompass the analyst's entire Weltanschauung—the fantasy-laden world-view the analyst inevitably brings to treatment—and explicitly critique the object-relations concept of projective identification as an empirically unverifiable "mystical" inflation of the countertransference concept.
Key formulations
A Clinical Introduction to Freud: Techniques for Everyday Practice (page unknown)
Lacan's definition of countertransference. It is, he says, 'the sum total of the analyst's biases, passions, and difficulties, or even of his inadequate information, at any given moment in the dialectical process' of an analysis
This is Lacan's canonical four-part taxonomy of countertransference, deployed by Fink to categorise Freud's clinical failures with Dora; it reframes countertransference from a vague emotional reaction into a structured epistemological concept.
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (p.293)
The false consistency of the notion of countertransference, its stylishness, and the fanfare it fosters can be explained by the fact that it serves as an alibi: the analyst thereby avoids considering the action that it is incumbent upon him to take in the production of truth.
Lacan's most polemical formulation: countertransference is not merely a technical concept but an ideological alibi that allows the analyst to evade interpretive responsibility, exposing its 'false consistency' as symptomatic of post-Freudian deviation.
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (p.106)
This level of rivalry is the level at which Lacan situates what most American analysts call 'countertransference'... Lacan's perspective is not that countertransferential feelings do not exist, but that they are always and inescapably situated at the imaginary level and thus must be set aside by the analyst.
Fink's clearest structural statement: countertransference is not denied but re-registered as inescapably imaginary, stripping it of the intersubjective therapeutic value assigned to it by ego psychology and object relations.
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (p.108)
here there is highlighted what is more or less legitimately called counter-transference and which is, as is always the case in a transference neurosis, what is said to be at the source of interminable analyses.
Lacan's late reformulation that structurally homologates countertransference with transference neurosis, locating the engine of interminable analysis in the analyst's unexamined jouissance rather than in any simple affective reaction.
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key (p.89)
The emphasis on countertransference, which was trendy already by the 1950s and has lost little of its fervor, does not, Lacan argues, put the emphasis on speech as constitutive for the speaking subject.
This formulation pinpoints Lacan's structural objection to countertransference-centred technique: it reinforces the Saussurean communication model of speech and eclipses speech's constitutive, subject-forming dimension.
Cited examples
Freud's treatment of Dora (Ida Bauer): identification with Herr K, normative bias toward heterosexuality, distress before homosexual currents, ambition to demonstrate dream theory *(case_study)*
Cited by Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (p.201). Lacan uses the Dora case as the paradigm instance of countertransference in action: Freud's identification with Herr K and his normative bias about the Oedipus complex are parsed as concrete sub-types (passion, bias) of his four-part definition. The result was a 'negative transference' that drove Dora to terminate the treatment prematurely.
Lucia Tower's case report of two male analysands (discussed in Seminar X) *(case_study)*
Cited by Seminar X · Anxiety (p.205). Lacan reads Tower's account to argue that countertransference only becomes analytically operative when the analyst's own desire is genuinely implicated; Tower's shift from 'reasonably well on guard' to full emotional activation in one case illustrates how the structural engagement of the analyst's desire—not its suppression—moves the analysis.
Margaret Little's case in which a previous analyst had merely interpreted his own unconscious envy *(case_study)*
Cited by Seminar X · Anxiety (p.150). Little's observation that the analyst's misinterpretation derived from his own unconscious is cited by Lacan to illustrate countertransference as the analyst's own unconscious material displacing attention from the patient's actual discourse.
Ella Sharpe's chess analysis of a patient (discussed in Seminar VI) *(case_study)*
Cited by Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation (p.216). Lacan argues that Sharpe's sensitivity to the countertransferential aggression in the chess/cornering metaphor paradoxically blinds her to the structural signifying stakes at play, illustrating how countertransference awareness can itself become a theoretical blind spot.
Dr. Ralph Greenson's treatment of Marilyn Monroe *(case_study)*
Cited by Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key (p.219). Fink presents Greenson's progressive boundary violations—home sessions, family entanglement, travel accompaniment—as a clinical illustration of countertransferential collapse: the analyst was captured by the analysand's hysteria rather than maintaining analytic neutrality.
Lothstein's paper advising analysts on managing 'negative counter-transference' with transsexual patients *(case_study)*
Cited by Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (p.47). Gherovici cites this as a symptomatic example of how countertransference, when unanalysed, becomes the mechanism through which analysts enact normative gender policing rather than clinical analysis with transgender patients.
Tensions
Within the corpus
Whether countertransference can ever be a legitimate clinical instrument or is always and only an obstacle/alibi to be set aside.
Lacan (Écrits, p. 293): The 'false consistency' of countertransference 'serves as an alibi' allowing the analyst to evade responsibility for the production of truth; it is categorically a step backward and must be refused as a clinical instrument. — cite: jacques-lacan-ecrits p. 293
Lacan (Seminar X, p. 205): Through Lucia Tower's case, Lacan argues that countertransference only becomes analytically operative when the analyst's own desire is genuinely implicated — implying that the activation (not suppression) of the analyst's affective response can move the analysis forward. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-10 p. 205
This tension marks the difference between Lacan's polemical early statements against countertransference as alibi and his later, more nuanced engagement with it as the site of the analyst's desire in the object-a period.
Whether countertransference is best understood as the analyst's imaginary rivalry (fixed at the ego level) or as a structural phenomenon tied to the analyst's jouissance and the objet petit a.
Fink (The Lacanian Subject, p. 106): Countertransference 'is always and inescapably situated at the imaginary level and thus must be set aside by the analyst' — it is the level of ego-to-ego rivalry and nothing more. — cite: the-lacanian-subject-between-l-bruce-fink p. 106
Lacan (Seminar XII, p. 108): Counter-transference is 'as is always the case in a transference neurosis, what is said to be at the source of interminable analyses' — its roots lie in the analyst's unexamined jouissance and failure to locate the patient as objet a, a structural problem exceeding the imaginary register. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-12 p. 108
Fink's imaginary-register framing is a useful pedagogical simplification, but Lacan's later seminars embed countertransference in the real of jouissance, producing a richer and more demanding account.
Across frameworks
vs Ego Psychology
Lacanian: Lacan insists that countertransference is the analyst's resistance—an obstacle rooted in the imaginary register that must be set aside rather than cultivated. The analyst's task is not to strengthen a healthy ego or model adaptive reality-testing, but to disappear as a personality and operate as the cause of the analysand's desire. Any analyst who uses their own emotional reactions as a guide to the patient's inner life has collapsed the structural asymmetry of the treatment into an imaginary dual relation.
Ego Psychology: Ego psychology (following Anna Freud and later Hartmann) treats countertransference as a technical problem to be managed through the analyst's autonomous ego capacities: with sufficient training analysis and self-awareness, the analyst can use countertransferential signals as diagnostic data about the patient's resistances and defenses. The goal is a well-functioning analyst ego that can act as a reality anchor and model for the patient's own ego-strengthening.
Fault line: Lacanian theory rejects the autonomous ego as a clinical ideal, whereas ego psychology makes it the cornerstone of analytic technique; this means that what ego psychology calls 'using countertransference productively' is, for Lacan, precisely the analyst's failure to vacate the imaginary and operate at the symbolic-real level.
vs Frankfurt School
Lacanian: For Lacan, countertransference is not a social or ideological phenomenon in the first instance but a structural feature of the analyst's subjective position within the transference. The analyst's biases are significant insofar as they distort interpretation and the dialectical process, not because they reproduce capitalist or patriarchal ideology. The remedy is the analyst's own analysis and ongoing theoretical self-critique, not ideological demystification.
Frankfurt School: Frankfurt School critical theory (Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm) would read countertransference as the site where broader socio-ideological formations—repressive social norms, authoritarian character structures, the culture industry's colonisation of desire—inscribe themselves in the analytic dyad. The analyst's unreflective countertransference reproduces social domination; a critically reflexive practice requires not only personal analysis but socio-historical consciousness about the conditions shaping both analyst and analysand.
Fault line: Lacan keeps countertransference within a structural-linguistic account of the subject, refusing to ground it in social-historical determination, whereas the Frankfurt School insists on the social mediation of all psychic phenomena including the clinical encounter.
vs Humanistic Self Actualization
Lacanian: Lacan treats countertransference disclosure—sharing one's feelings with the analysand to foster authentic encounter—as a technical error that produces suppression and censorship in the analysand, reinforces imaginary relations, and substitutes the analyst's narrative for the analysand's. The analyst's desire must remain opaque so that the subject's own desire can emerge.
Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic and person-centred approaches (Rogers, Maslow) valorise the therapist's authentic, transparent presence as the primary curative factor. Countertransference, far from being an obstacle, is the medium of genuine encounter: the therapist's congruent self-disclosure creates the unconditional positive regard and empathic attunement that allows the client's self-actualising tendency to unfold. Withholding one's genuine reactions is a form of inauthenticity that blocks therapeutic contact.
Fault line: Lacan grounds analytic efficacy in the structural function of the analyst's non-presence (as objet a), whereas humanistic theory grounds it in the analyst's full affective presence; for Lacan, humanistic 'authenticity' collapses the treatment into an imaginary encounter between two egos.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (53)
-
#01
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.28
**The Imaginary Is Centered on Understanding Meaning**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Imaginary register, defined as the domain of images and self-projection onto the Other, constitutes a fundamental obstacle to clinical listening: by reducing the Other's speech to what conforms to the analyst's own framework, it produces structural blindness to difference and deafness to the unconscious (slips, ambiguities), making it antithetical to psychoanalytic practice.
The imaginary register brings with it a frame or paradigm of just this sort, a paradigm based on the analyst's own particular, personal way of seeing the world.
-
#02
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.31
AGAINST UNDERSTANDING
Theoretical move: Fink argues that the analyst's primary ethical and technical task is to listen in the symbolic register—attending to what is actually said rather than projecting imaginary meaning onto the analysand's speech—and that resistance in analysis belongs fundamentally to the analyst, not the analysand, when the analyst fails to prompt free association toward what is left unsaid.
We form images of ourselves as the kind of people who are capable of performing the difficult task of understanding others.
-
#03
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.43
**Notes**
Theoretical move: These endnotes elaborate several key Lacanian theoretical pivots: the primacy of symbolization over conscious realization in symptom resolution, the shift from intersubjectivity to méconnaissance and nonsense as the telos of language, the structural independence of signifier from signified, the irrelevance of speaker-confirmation in interpretation due to split subjectivity, the analyst's resistance as the true locus of analytic resistance, and jouissance as a pain-pleasure satisfaction structurally tied to symptoms.
Resistance finds its point of departure in the analyst himself… The patient's resistance is always your own
-
#04
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.89
*Intersubjectivity*
Theoretical move: Fink argues, following Lacan, that the core problem of post-Freudian analytic practice is the reduction of speech to a mere communication circuit between constituted egos, which leads analysts to neglect speech's constitutive power and replace it with pre-existing psychoanalytic knowledge, thereby trapping analysis in an aporia where the analyst can only reproduce his own ego's organization back to the analysand.
The emphasis on countertransference, which was trendy already by the 1950s and has lost little of its fervor, does not, Lacan argues, put the emphasis on speech as constitutive for the speaking subject.
-
#05
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink
**Section III**
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of empathy, the "communication of unconsciouses," and Ferenczi's subjectivism converge on a single theoretical move: the analyst's function requires preserving the place of the Other and non-knowledge rather than identification or resemblance with the analysand.
Ferenczi's emphasis on the analyst's own subjectivity, criticizing the fact that the only thing Ferenczi offers by way of signposts along the path of analytic treatment are recommendations regarding 'the order of subjectivity that the analyst must bring about in himself'
-
#06
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.96
*Tracking the Structure of Desire*
Theoretical move: Fink reconstructs Lacan's argument that desire is structurally self-referential (desire for desire, x^x), that lack originates in the premature birth of the human infant via the mirror stage and Hegelian dehiscence from natural harmony, and that ego psychology's prescription to model the analysand's ego on the analyst's is mere narcissism grounded in imaginary misrecognition rather than any genuine "reality function."
by targeting the analysand's ego, 'the analyst falls under the sway of the illusions [the armorial] of his own ego, no less naively than the [analysand] himself does'
-
#07
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.98
*True Speech versus True Discourse*
Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes Lacan's concepts of "true speech" (mutual recognition of subjects) from "true discourse" (correspondence to the thing / knowledge of reality), arguing that each undermines the other, and that both analysand and analyst are compelled to navigate an "intermediate discourse" that holds both in tension — a tension that is clinically productive when the analyst learns to hear authentic speech within it.
To do so, she has to silence the intermediate (a—a´) discourse in herself
-
#08
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink
<span id="page-119-0"></span>A PSYCHOANALYTIC [ETHICS OF TRANSLATION](#page-7-0)
Theoretical move: Lacan draws a sharp opposition between analytic interpretation and the imaginary act of "understanding," arguing that it is precisely a refusal of understanding—a resistance to filling in meaning—that opens the space for genuine analytic intervention.
when they have said to me, 'I had the impression he meant this and that'
-
#09
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink
**Complicating Factors**
Theoretical move: The passage makes a clinical-technical argument that the analyst's affective stance (equanimity vs. anxiety) functions differently depending on the structure of the patient's pathology—specifically distinguishing masochistic from fetishistic configurations—and that the analyst's non-interventionist position with respect to medications illustrates the analytic stance of non-suggestion.
it is sometimes decidedly difficult to deal with the anxiety the patient repudiates and thrusts upon the analyst, and equanimity on the analyst's part only leads to the escalation
-
#10
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink
**Treatment Implications of the Case**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that masochistic trends and associated life difficulties can be substantially resolved through long-term psychoanalytic treatment, on the condition that the analyst has worked through their own countertransference around sexuality via personal analysis, leaving the analysand's sexual orientation undetermined.
conditional upon therapists having resolved questions about their own sexuality through their own personal analysis
-
#11
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.219
**Herstoria**
Theoretical move: This passage is a biographical/clinical narrative passage setting up a case study of Marilyn Monroe as an illustration of hysteria; it is predominantly contextual and transitional rather than theoretically substantive, with the only load-bearing conceptual gesture being the announcement that her life story will illuminate the structure of hysteria.
Greenson's statements show that Marilyn had him wrapped around her little ¿ nger... Greenson invited her to have her sessions at his own home... the whole family becoming very wound up in her troubles.
-
#12
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.252
A SUMMARY COMPARISON [OF PSYCHOANALYTIC PARADIGMS](#page-8-0)
Theoretical move: Fink contrasts three paradigms for the role of the analyst — Freudian observer, contemporary co-participant, and Lacanian — arguing that the Lacanian approach distinguishes itself by positioning the analyst as objet petit a (cause of desire) operating at the level of the Real, rather than as an imaginary ego or relational participant, while channelling a desire for the analytic work itself over any particular outcome.
Total participation often means the analyst becomes extremely invested in particular outcomes (achievement of specific goals… etc.), leading to further alienation of the analysand.
-
#13
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.254
**Transference as distortion.** > **Analyst's actual behavior strongly affects analysand.** *Critique:* The analyst acts differently with analysands than their parents did, supposedly allowing them to break out of old patterns of behavior toward signi ¿ cant others. However, this often leads simply to conscious knowledge of old patterns by the "observing ego," not to new patterns.
Theoretical move: Fink's comparative table argues that the Lacanian approach to transference, countertransference, interpretation, and truth is theoretically superior to both a Freudian caricature and contemporary eclectic approaches, specifically because it subordinates imaginary empathy to the analyst's desire, treats interpretation as constitutive (not revelatory) of truth, minimises transference interpretation to preserve the subject supposed to know, and maintains a strict structural distinction between neurosis and psychosis.
Countertransference disclosure contraindicated... Analyst feels the feelings that the analysand unwittingly has or has split off (projective identification). Critique: Feelings are not repressed; thoughts (representations or signifiers) are.
-
#14
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink
**Two-person psychology.** > **Mutuality.**
Theoretical move: Fink critiques "two-person psychology" mutuality frameworks for evacuating the unconscious in favour of ego-level interaction, arguing that by prioritising equality and the here-and-now, these approaches reduce the analytic goal to ego-identification rather than genuine analytic work.
subverting power differentials… the notion that the analyst has more knowledge than the 'client'
-
#15
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.268
**Two-person psychology.** > **Four-person (or more).** > CRITIQUE
Theoretical move: This passage is a book index (chunks 268-269 of Fink's *Against Understanding, Volume 1*), listing concepts and page references across the text; it is non-substantive as theoretical prose and serves only as a navigational apparatus.
countertransference [72–3, 236–7]; disclosure [238]
-
#16
Against Understanding, Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.272
**Two-person psychology.** > **Four-person (or more).** > CRITIQUE
Theoretical move: This is an index (back-matter) chunk from Bruce Fink's *Against Understanding*, listing key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts with page references; it is non-substantive as theoretical prose but its entries map the deployment of canonical Lacanian concepts throughout the book.
countertransference [236–7]
-
#17
Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.39
<span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Lacan's Ode to Mediation**
Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacan's early work introduces language as an irreducible third term that supersedes both one-person and two-person psychological frameworks, reconceptualizing the analytic dyad as always already mediated by the big Other (language/culture), which is radically heterogeneous to the persons it encompasses.
I was struck by the debate between the so-called one-body or one-person psychology… and what is referred to by some as the 'two-body' or 'two-person' psychology… on the topic of transference and countertransference
-
#18
Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.41
<span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Lacan's Ode to Mediation** > COMMENTARY
Theoretical move: Fink argues that the only form of objectivity available in psychoanalysis is the semantic polyvalence or ambiguity inherent in what the analysand actually says—not any privileged access to reality—and that the big Other (the shared language outside both parties) is the condition of possibility for detecting unconscious meaning in speech acts.
as opposed to some objectively known external reality or some sort of 'objective countertransference' (Winnicott, 1949, p. 70)
-
#19
Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.44
<span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Lacan's Ode to Mediation** > COMMENTARY
Theoretical move: Fink argues that all analytic access to the analysand's experience is necessarily mediated by interpretation through the analyst's own symbolic order, and that the illusion of unmediated access (intuition, attunement, projective identification) reduces the Other to the Same; Lacan's "ode to mediation" is thus a defense of radical otherness and the precondition of interpretation itself.
what we think and feel during sessions cannot plausibly be put into us by our analysands in any sort of transparently immediate way
-
#20
Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.55
<span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Concluding Remarks**
Theoretical move: Fink consolidates the distinctively Lacanian analyst's stance against three common analytic failures: direct intuition of the analysand's experience, settling for spontaneous associations rather than working unconscious formations fully, and lapsing into clinical passivity — all in contrast to other contemporary approaches.
analysts can have no immediate access to the analysand's experience: they cannot directly intuit his thoughts or feel his feelings, much less feel what he is not feeling
-
#21
Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink · p.84
<span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > **Conclusion**
Theoretical move: Fink argues that Lacanian ethics requires the analyst to continually deconstruct their own fantasmatic Weltanschauung (which constitutes countertransference) in order to serve the analysand's desire, and gestures toward a resolution of the desire/drive conflict not through sublimation but through a changed relation between desire and the drives.
countertransference is, as Lacan defines it, 'the sum total of the analyst's biases, passions, and difficulties, or even of his inadequate information, at any given moment' in the analysis
-
#22
Against Understanding, Volume 2: Cases and Commentary in a Lacanian Key · Bruce Fink
<span id="page-36-0"></span>[WHAT'S SO DIFFERENT ABOUT](#page-7-0) LACAN'S APPROACH TO PSYCHOANALYSIS? > <span id="page-236-0"></span>[CONTOURS OF TRAUMA](#page-8-0)
Theoretical move: This passage introduces a clinical case study to explore the contextual conditions under which events acquire traumatic status, while also illustrating, via a counter-example, the clinical principle that the analyst must keep their own personality and background out of the treatment.
a not uncommon example of how contemporary psychotherapists sabotage their work with patients because they cannot or refuse to keep their own backgrounds and personalities out of the therapy
-
#23
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_14"></span>**affect**
Theoretical move: Lacan dissolves the classical affect/intellect opposition by grounding affect in the symbolic order rather than treating it as a primary, pre-discursive realm; the implication is that psychoanalytic treatment targets the truth of desire through speech, not abreaction, and that affects function as signals tied to the subject's relation with the Other—with anxiety uniquely singled out as the non-deceptive affect.
the affects are lures which can deceive the analyst, and hence the analyst must be wary of being tricked by his own affects ... he must know how to make adequate use of them (see COUNTERTRANSFERENCE).
-
#24
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_164"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0186"></span>***R*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_ncx_172"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part28.xhtml_page_0193"></span>**resistance**
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes resistance as a structural feature of the analytic process rooted in the imaginary register of the ego, not the ill will of the analysand, and distinguishes it from defence by locating resistance on the side of the object (transitory, imaginary) and defence on the side of the subject (stable, symbolic), while also implicating the analyst's own resistance as the true source of any obstruction to treatment.
'there is no other resistance to analysis than that of the analyst himself' (E, 235)
-
#25
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_30"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_page_0045"></span>***C*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part13.xhtml_ncx_42"></span>**countertransference**
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes countertransference not as the analyst's affective reactions per se, but as the analyst's failure to make adequate use of those affects; ultimately, he dissolves the countertransference/transference binary by insisting on the non-symmetrical, unified structure of transference in which both analyst and analysand are implicated.
Lacan defines countertransference as 'the sum of the prejudices, passions, perplexities, and even the insufficient information of the analyst at a certain moment of the dialectical process' of the treatment
-
#26
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_202"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_page_0231"></span>***T*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part30.xhtml_ncx_208"></span> **transference**
Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's evolving theorisation of transference from a Hegelian-dialectical and anthropological-symbolic account, through identification with the compulsion to repeat and the Agalma, to its mature formulation as the attribution of knowledge to the Other (Subject Supposed to Know), while also deploying Lacan's critique of ego-psychology's "adaptation to reality" model and its implicit collapse into suggestion and méconnaissance.
Although Lacan does speak occasionally of COUNTERTRANSFERENCE, he generally prefers not to use this term.
-
#27
Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.72
**3** > <span id="page-63-0"></span>Soon after, I add:
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Lacanian unconscious is constituted by and invariably expresses itself through language, such that the "talking cure" works not by using speech as a medium to access a non-linguistic reality but by operating immanently within language itself — and that non-Lacanian analysts err precisely by abandoning the literal text of free associations in favour of extra-linguistic phenomena (transference, affect, gesture) that are, in truth, always already woven into discourse.
non-Lacanian analytic orientations post-Freud had come to reorient themselves toward things other than their analysands' speech and language, things such as transference, counter-transference, affects, gestures, actions, projective identifications
-
#28
Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan's 'The Freudian Thing' · Adrian Johnston · p.79
<span id="page-74-0"></span>**4**
Theoretical move: Johnston argues that Lacan's "Parade" section of "The Freudian Thing" performs a double theoretical move: it exposes how ego psychology and object-relations theory misidentify the speaking subject of the unconscious by substituting the second topography (id-ego-superego) for the first, and it defends the primacy of free-associational speech and the signifier—against both anti-linguist and pan-linguist camps—as the sole royal road to the Freudian unconscious.
The analyst's (counter-transferential) emotions and feelings ('the passion that inflamed him and made him') stirred up by encounters with his/her own and/or the analysand's unconscious, threaten, if not leashed by one who knows a thing or two about the unconscious, to kill off…the very part of him/her-self in contact with the unconscious
-
#29
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.201
Presentation on Psychical Causality > Presentation on Transference
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes transference not as a mysterious affective phenomenon but as the appearance, at moments of stagnation in the analytic dialectic, of the subject's permanent modes of constituting objects—while countertransference (Freud's biases, passions, and inadequate information) is identified as the primary cause of the Dora treatment's failure, specifically Freud's over-identification with Herr K and his normative bias toward the paternal figure.
Can it not be considered here to be an entity altogether related to countertransference, defined as the sum total of the analyst's biases, passions, and difficulties, or even of his inadequate information, at any given moment in the dialectical process?
-
#30
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.208
Presentation on Psychical Causality > On the Subject who Is Finally in Question
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that training analysis, properly understood, is the purest or most restricted form of psychoanalysis—revealing the subject at stake in all analysis—and that this recognition requires grounding psychoanalysis in a scientific theory of the subject constituted by the signifying chain, where the symptom is not a sign of truth but is truth, made of the same material as the signifying order itself.
the uncertainty that remains regarding the very end of analysis has the effect of leaving between the patient and the subject that we append to him only the difference, promised to the second, of repeating the experience [with patients of his own], it even being legitimated that their theoretical equivalence is fully maintained in the countertransference.
-
#31
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.219
Presentation on Psychical Causality > The Function and Field of Speech 237 and Language in Psychoanalysis > *Preface* > *Introduction* 242
Theoretical move: Lacan diagnoses the deterioration of psychoanalytic discourse as a systematic abandonment of the foundation of speech and language, driven by imaginary and adaptive trends (especially in American ego psychology), and argues that Freudian concepts can only be properly grasped when oriented within a field of language and the function of speech.
The importance of countertransference and, correlatively, of analytic training. Here the emphasis has resulted from the difficulties related to the termination of analytic treatment.
-
#32
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.228
Presentation on Psychical Causality > **/ .** *Empty Speech and Full Speech in the Psychoanalytic Realisation of the Subject*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that psychoanalytic technique must be grounded entirely in the structure of the patient's speech—distinguishing empty from full speech, showing that the ego is constituted by alienation rather than frustrated desire, and that the analyst's proper medium is the symbolic relation expressed in discourse, not any imaginary "contact" with the patient's reality.
Young analysts, who might nevertheless allow themselves to be impressed by the impenetrable gifts such recourse implies, will find no better way of dispelling their illusions than to consider the success of the supervision they themselves receive.
-
#33
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.269
Presentation on Psychical Causality > *III. The Resonances of Interpretation and the Time of the Subject in Psychoanalytic Technique*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the intersubjective, dialectical character of psychoanalytic interpretation—anchored in speech and the subject's truth—is systematically degraded by ego-psychological "two-body psychology," which reduces analysis to an imaginary, objectifying relation; he demonstrates this through the Rat Man and Dora cases and mounts a critique of the analysis of defenses, countertransference misuse, and suggestion as pseudo-technique.
the analyst's biases (that is, his countertransference, a term whose correct use, in my view, cannot be extended beyond the dialectical reasons for his error)
-
#34
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.293
Presentation on Psychical Causality > *From the Psychoanalyst's Pathway to Its Maintenance, Considered from the Viewpoint of Its Deviation*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "turning point" of circa 1920 in analytic technique—the shift from interpretation of meaning to analysis of resistance via the ego—constitutes a fundamental deviation that inverts the correct relationship between the constituting subject of speech and the constituted ego, thereby degrading psychoanalysis into a routinized, ego-psychological ideology grounded in bad faith and countertransference as alibi.
The false consistency of the notion of countertransference, its stylishness, and the fanfare it fosters can be explained by the fact that it serves as an alibi: the analyst thereby avoids considering the action that it is incumbent upon him to take in the production of truth.
-
#35
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.298
Presentation on Psychical Causality > *From the Psychoanalyst's Pathway to Its Maintenance, Considered from the Viewpoint of Its Deviation*
Theoretical move: Lacan diagnoses the deviation of post-Freudian ego psychology and object-relations technique—where treatment becomes an attack on the subject's defenses and interpretation degenerates into ego-to-ego suggestion—as the consequence of abandoning the primacy of speech and intersubjective dialectic, thereby reducing analysis to the imposition of the analyst's own ego organization onto the subject.
an attitudinal reaction in the session will hold our attention more than a syntactical error and will be examined more in terms of its energy level than its gestural import
-
#36
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.507
The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power > /. *Who Analyses Today?*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the analyst's power in treatment derives not from "being" (ego strength, emotional reeducation, autonomous ego) but from a structural position within the transference—a quadripartite division that alienates the analyst's freedom and whose misrecognition by ego-psychology and object-relations approaches collapses the analytic situation into crude suggestion or the imposition of the analyst's reality.
trendy remarks are made about countertransference, which contribute, no doubt, to masking its conceptual impropriety
-
#37
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.515
The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956 > The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power > /. *Who Analyses Today?* > *II. What Is the Place of Interpretation?*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has inverted Freud's proper order of treatment—rectification of reality, transference development, then interpretation—by subordinating interpretation to transference management and ego-strengthening, a regression only overcome by grounding interpretation in the radical structure of the unconscious as language and the function of the signifier.
It has nothing to do with countertransference on the part of this or that analyst; it has to do with the consequences of the dyadic relation, if the therapist does not overcome it.
-
#38
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.299
Presentation on Psychical Causality > *From the Psychoanalyst's Pathway to Its Maintenance, Considered from the Viewpoint of Its Deviation* > *On the Ego in Analysis and Its End in the Analyst*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the ego's function in psychoanalysis is structurally grounded in the narcissistic (imaginary) relation—not in ego-strength or countertransference—and that character analysis (Reich) errs precisely by misrecognizing this imaginary function as a substantive armour rather than a symbolic medium; only by tracing the ego through Freud's 1910–1920 work on narcissism, the death drive, and the mirror stage can psychoanalysis be returned to a veridical path.
the current promotion of effects that are placed under the heading of 'countertransference' is equally a step backward.
-
#39
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.312
Presentation on Psychical Causality > *From the Psychoanalyst's Pathway to Its Maintenance, Considered from the Viewpoint of Its Deviation* > *What the Psychoanalyst Must Know: How to Ignore What He Knows*
Theoretical move: Lacan grounds the analyst's authority not in privileged knowledge but in the structural function of speech: true speech (parole) constitutes the subject's being through symbolic recognition, while the analyst's task is to silence the intermediate discourse of narcissistic misrecognition in himself so as to interpolate a revelatory interpretation that undoes the latent "word chain" determining the subject's destiny.
The dazzling comprehension Freud demonstrates in such cases is, of course, clouded over often enough by the effects of his own narcissism.
-
#40
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.397
The Freudian Thing > *The talk given was couched in the following terms:*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the impasses of hysteric and obsessional neurosis cannot be resolved through imaginary exchange or ego-strengthening (as contemporary ego psychology proposes), but only by recourse to the big Other as the structural place of the symbolic and guarantor of speech—thereby indicting contemporary psychoanalysis for a fundamental misreading of Freud that produces increased alienation rather than analytic progress.
the pompous avowal of propitious complicities recognized in the countertransference, on the basis of bemired erring concerning the conditions for the righting of dependency
-
#41
Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English · Jacques Lacan · p.405
The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956
Theoretical move: Lacan diagnoses a structural degeneration in post-Freudian psychoanalysis: the foundational conceptual apparatus Freud built around the symbolic order and the signifier has been progressively replaced by an imaginary dyadic relation and pre-conceptual, inarticulate notions (affect, character armor, countertransference, object-relation), producing a clinico-theoretical impasse that can only be overcome by restoring Freud's symbolic-order grounding of the imaginary.
no longer having anything but the itchings of our countertransference with which to deduce our auspices from the defiance of their oblique fluttering
-
#42
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.205
**x** > **WOMAN, TRUER AND MORE REAL**
Theoretical move: Through a close reading of Lucia Tower's clinical case report, Lacan argues that countertransference only becomes analytically operative when the analyst's own desire is genuinely implicated in the transference relation; and that sadism, properly understood, aims at the missing partial object rather than at masochistic self-punishment in the analyst.
the countertransference responses she perceives in herself are, she says, of a reasonably normal character... she bears the consequences of this desire, to the point that she feels what analysts include under the label carry over
-
#43
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.150
**x** > **ON A LACK THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO THE SIGNIFIER**
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the analytic paradox of "defence against anxiety" by arguing that defence is not against anxiety itself but against the lack of which anxiety is a signal, and he further differentiates the structural positions of the objet petit a in neurosis versus perversion/psychosis to clarify the handling of the transferential relation — culminating in a redefinition of mourning as identifying with the function of being the Other's lack.
Margaret Little, who took over the patient from this previous analyst, is struck by the fact that the analyst, in his interpretation, had merely interpreted what was going on in his own unconscious
-
#44
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.163
**x** > **PUNCTUATIONS ON DESIRE**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that anxiety arises not from Hegelian mutual recognition (where the Other acknowledges or misrecognizes me) but from a temporal dimension in which the Other's desire puts my very Being in question by targeting me as the cause of desire (as *objet a*) rather than as its object — a structure that also defines the operative dimension of analytic transference.
if there are a few people who've said something sensible about so-called countertransference, they are all women.
-
#45
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.108
**Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**
Theoretical move: The child's "omnipotence" over the adult has no magical source but derives from the fact that the child *is* the objet petit a for the desiring parent; the analyst's failure to locate this function means she herself is transformed into an object by the patient, and the question of her own jouissance in enduring ten years of intolerable tension reveals that counter-transference is structurally equivalent to a transference neurosis—a neurosis of the analyst grounded in a failure of the desire of the analyst.
here there is highlighted what is more or less legitimately called counter-transference and which is, as is always the case in a transference neurosis, what is said to be at the source of interminable analyses.
-
#46
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.108
**Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**
Theoretical move: The child's "all-powerfulness" is not magical omnipotence but derives from the child's structural position as the objet petit a for the desiring adult; the analyst's failure to recognise this makes her into an object herself, turning counter-transference into a transference neurosis that renders analysis interminable.
here there is highlighted what is more or less legitimately called counter-transference and which is, as is always the case in a transference neurosis, what is said to be at the source of interminable analyses.
-
#47
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.373
**THE 'STILL WATERS RUN DEEP' DREAMS** > **THE OTHER'S DESIRE**
Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Bouvet's object-relations account of obsessional neurosis—centred on imaginary phallic incorporation—by insisting the phallus must be understood as a signifier (part object properly so called), and he uses this critique as a springboard to re-articulate the Graph of Desire, showing that desire is constitutively located in a field *beyond* demand, irreducible to the passage of need through the defiles of demand.
It's not a question of speaking about the countertransference of a particular person, but of the countertransference in a more general sense, where one may consider it as formed by what I often call the analyst's prejudices.
-
#48
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.216
SACRIFICING THE TABOO QUEEN
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the chess metaphor — specifically the patient's refusal to sacrifice his queen — to argue that the phallus is a hidden signifier displaced onto the female partner (wife/analyst), and that the subject's desire is structured around preserving this phallic substitute at the cost of remaining bound in a fantasy of omnipotence; the analytic task is to bring this secret relation between subject and partner into the open.
it is precisely because she so clearly senses the aggressive import of the analytic game for this patient that she does not see its exact import... the analyst shows her true colors here
-
#49
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.201
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE OBJECT OF DESIRE A N D THE DIALECTIC OF CASTRATION** > <span id="page-192-0"></span>**A CRITIQUE OF CO UNTERTRANSFERENCE**
Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the Kleinian theory of countertransference by showing that what analysts call "countertransference" — the analyst's feelings determined by the analysand — is not an incidental imperfection but a structural feature that must be theorized through the Graph of Desire (especially the relation between demand, the Other, and the superego), not simply attributed to projection of the "bad object."
Countertransference is no longer considered in our time to be in essence an imperfection... the analyst's feelings in analysis, which are determined at every instant by his relations with the analysand
-
#50
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection · Julia Kristeva · p.40
POWERS OF HORROR > PHILOSOPHICAL SADNESS AND THE SPOKEN DISASTER OF THE ANALYST
Theoretical move: Kristeva argues that analytic speech achieves a "poetic" catharsis by passing through abjection rather than sublating or purifying it, positioning the analyst's mimetic identification with the analysand as the site where Freudian jouissance disrupts the Kantian-Hegelian tradition of ethical consciousness that would reduce defilement to normative sadness and silence.
I am thinking, in short, of the completely mimetic identification (transference and countertransference) of the analyst with respect to analysands.
-
#51
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.106
<span id="page-101-0"></span>Object (a): Cause of Desire > *Imaginary Objects, Imaginary Relations*
Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's early theorisation of the ego as imaginary object (*a*), showing how imaginary relations (love/identification and hate/rivalry) operate through the logic of same/different, and contrasts this with the later emergence of the real object cause of desire (objet petit a), while situating countertransference as an inescapably imaginary phenomenon that the analyst must set aside.
This level of rivalry is the level at which Lacan situates what most American analysts call 'countertransference'... Lacan's perspective is not that countertransferential feelings do not exist, but that they are always and inescapably situated at the imaginary level and thus must be set aside by the analyst.
-
#52
Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.47
**BRING SEX BACK**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that contemporary psychoanalysis has systematically repressed sexuality — its foundational concern — in favor of object-relations, attachment, and relational frameworks, and that this desexualization constitutes both a clinical failure and a theoretical regression; Lacanian sexuation and Zupančič's reading of the sexual as inherently identity-disrupting are mobilized to diagnose this suppression and call for psychoanalysis to re-engage transgender discourse as a site of productive contestation.
a great part of the sparse clinical literature published in recent years on psychoanalysis with transgender analysands deals with the analyst's countertransference and reveals how often psychoanalysts feel tempted to carry out gender policing rather than actual psychoanalysis
-
#53
Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference · Patricia Gherovici · p.196
**INDEX** > **184** Index
Theoretical move: This is a book index (pages 196-197) listing names, concepts, and page references for a text on transgender psychoanalysis; it is non-substantive as a theoretical passage.
counter-transference 35, 37