TRANSFERENCE AND COUNTERTRANSFERENCE IN THE ADLERIAN SETTING

Abstract

Adler never deepened the concepts of Transference and Countertransference in his works.
Today we often meet these concepts in the individual-psychological language and these words have a wider meaning of relation than the driving model of Psychoanalysis. The Individual Psychology considers both Transference and Countertransference as intense expressions of life style determined by the emotiveness bursting out during the therapeutic situation. The analytical experience is an encounter and a clash between two life styles, the patient’s one and the analyst’s one, and their affective and emotional dynamics in the hic et nunc of the setting weave a new and original “story” which follows an unique and unrepeatable itinerary, orientated towards an aim, during which the couple evolves. The analyst, by the encouragement process, tries “to share” the private logic of the patient who “corrupts” the private logic of the analyst in a game of “reciprocal contamination”. With the interactive game of the “as if”, the patient teaches the analyst to consider him and to understand him as he is and he obliges the analyst to suffer his own deficit of Self and his own wounds. The prepared and courageous analyst, who has dismantled the “reinforced fiction” of the need of continuous narcissistic gratification towards the professional self-representation, can afford himself the risky adventure to plunge in a dual relation which involves inevitable dynamics of Transference and Countertransference