Houston Psychoanalytic Society

This event addresses: Compromised Analyses: On the Failure to Productively Use Difficult Countertransference Experience

Presented by Irwin Hirsch, PhD

Psychoanalysts have long questioned the relative value of insight as a mutative factor in psychoanalytic treatment. Currently, most analysts believe that insight has value, but is not sufficient in and of itself to produce structural change in most patients. The increasingly prevalent view is that the analytic relationship has more explanatory power in understanding why patients change. This presentation will explore which elements of the patient-analyst relationship have the most mutative power. Through the use of clinical examples, it will be shown that the analyst’s productive use of countertransference experience is key to successful analyses, whereas the failure to use conscious uncomfortable countertransference is a primary factor in compromised analyses.