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Radical Critiques: Transference in the Social or Interpersonal Paradigm 

Overview 

Whereas conservative critics of the blank screen concept are relatively abundant, radical critics are relatively 

scarce, particularly among classical Freudian analysts. I would number among the foremost of them, Merton Gill 

(1979) ; (1982a) ; (1982b) ; (1983) ; (Gill and Hoffman, 1982a) ; (1982b) certainly a leading exponent of this 

perspective coming out of a classical Freudian orientation; Heinrich Racker (1968), who takes his cue from a 

landmark paper on countertransference by a fellow Kleinian, Paula Heimann (1950) but whose rich and detailed 

account of the inevitable reciprocity of transference and countertransference is unique in the literature; Joseph 

Sandler (1976), another classical Freudian who, however, conceptualizes the psychoanalytic situation in 

object-relations terms. Another contributor to this stream of thought is Lucia Tower if only for her one remarkable 

paper on countertransference in 1956, the implications of which have never penetrated the mainstream of 

psychoanalytic thinking about the relationship between transference and reality. Levenson (1972) ; (1981), 

Issacharoff (1979), Feiner (1979) ; (1982), and Ehrenberg (1982) are among the neo-Sullivanians whose work leans 

heavily in this direction. Harold Searles (1978–1979) should certainly be included as a major exponent of the 

radical perspective. An important recent contribution is that of Paul Wachtel (1980), whose Piagetian conceptual 

framework for understanding transference I will be drawing on myself in what follows. 

To digress for a moment, although I have counted Gill among the radical critics, within his recent work there is 

actually a movement from a somewhat inconsistent but generally conservative position to a more consistently radical 

one. Thus, in his 1982 monograph, Gill (1982a) criticizes those, like Anna Freud and Greenson who define 

transference in terms of distortion of reality (p. 12). However, his objection is tied specifically to what he describes 

as "a lack of recognition that Freud's inclusion of the conscious, unobjectionable positive transference in his concept 

of transference is not an unfortunate lapse but an integral aspect of the concept" (p. 12). Throughout his discussion 

of the distinction between the unobjectionable "facilitating" transferences and the "obstructing" transferences (pp. 

9–15), it is only the former which is considered to have realistic features. There is nothing about realistic elements 

in the "obstructing" transferences, not to mention any question being raised about the dimension 

"realistic-unrealistic" itself. Overall, in the first six chapters of the monograph, Gill apparently had not yet 

extricated himself from the traditional asocial paradigm for understanding transference (that is, neurotic or 

obstructing transference) although he was struggling to do so. His transitional, but still essentially conservative 

stand is exemplified by the following: 

Analysts have largely followed Freud in taking it for granted that the analyst's behavior is such that the patient's 

appropriate reaction to it will be cooperation in the joint work. But there are significant interactions between the 

patient and the analyst which are not transference but to which the patient's appropriate response would not be 

cooperation. If the analyst has given the patient cause to be angry, for example, and the patient is angry, at least some 

aspect of the anger is neither a transference nor cooperation—unless the idea of cooperation is confusingly stretched 

to mean that any forthright appropriate reaction of the patient is cooperative since it is a necessary element in 

continuing an open and honest relationship. We do conceptualize inappropriate behavior on the analyst's part as 

countertransference, but what is our name for an analysand's realistic response to countertransference? (p. 94; italics 

added) 

There is a noticeable shift in the book beginning with chapter seven to a fully social and relativistic position 

(see, for example, p. 118). Moreover, in subsequent writing Gill has been unequivocal in his adoption of the social 

paradigm for understanding all aspects of transference (Gill, 1982b) ; (Gill, 1983) ; (Gill and Hoffman, 1982a) ; 

(1982b). 

I believe that the various proponents of the radical perspective may have more in common with each other than 

each of them has with what would generally be recognized as their particular school or tradition. In effect, I believe 

there is a kind of informal "school" of thought which cuts across the standard lines of Freudian, Kleinian, and 

Sullivanian schools. For example, what Gill (in his most recent work), Racker, and Levenson have in common may 

be much more important than how they differ because what they have in common is a perspective on the 

fundamental nature of the psychoanalytic situation. 

Radical critiques of the notion that the patient's neurotic transference experience is divorced from the actual 

nature of the analyst's participation, i.e. that it distorts the actual nature of that participation, rest on two basic 

propositions, with one or the other or both emphasized depending upon the particular theorist. The two 

propositions, for which I am partly indebted to Wachtel (1980), are: 

1. 

The patient senses that the analyst's interpersonal conduct in the analytic situation, like all interpersonal 

conduct, is always ambiguous as an indicator of the full nature of the analyst's experience and is always 

amenable to a variety of plausible interpretations. 

2. 

The patient senses that the analyst's personal experience in the analytic situation is continuously affected by and 

responsive to the way in which the patient relates and participates in the process. 

Implications of the Ambiguity of the Analyst's Conduct in the Analytic Situation 

There is an underlying view of reality that the radical critiques of the screen concept share. This view is simply 

that reality is not a preestablished given or absolute. As Wachtel (1980) says, arguing from the perspective of 

Piaget's theory of cognitive development: "neither as children or as adults do we respond directly to stimuli per se. 

We are always constructing reality every bit as much as we are perceiving it" (p. 62). Moreover, the realm of 

interpersonal events is distinguished from that of physical events in that "such events are highly ambiguous, and 

consensus is much harder to obtain" (p. 69). 

Keep in mind that we have as our principal concern one person's ideas (which may or may not be conscious 

themselves) about another person's experience. The other person's experience can only be inferred, it is never 

directly visible as such. Although we may believe we recognize signs of it in verbal and non-verbal behavior, the 

relationship between such signs and actual experience is always uncertain. When we think about patients, we know 

that there may well be discrepancies between what a patient says and what he consciously thinks as well as 

discrepancies between what he consciously thinks and what he vaguely senses but resists facing up to in himself. 

We know that the relation between what is manifest and what is latent may be extraordinarily complex. We know 

this of our patients and in a general way of ourselves. What we are prone to ignore or deny however is that this 

ambiguity and complexity applies to the way in which the therapist participates in the therapeutic process. As 

Racker (1968) says: 

The first distortion of truth in "the myth of the analytic situation" is that analysis is an interaction between a sick 

person and a healthy one. The truth is that it is an interaction between two personalities, in both of which the ego is 

under pressure from the id, the superego, and the external world; each personality has its internal and external 

dependencies, anxieties, and pathological defenses; each is also a child with his internal parents; and each of these 

whole personalities—that of the analysand and that of the analyst—responds to every event in the analytic situation (p. 

132). 

And in another paper Racker (1968) says: 

The analyst's relation to his patient is a libidinal one and is a constant emotional experience (p. 31). 

The safeguards of the analytic situation do not prevent the analyst from having this "constant emotional 

experience." What is more, every patient senses this, consciously or preconsciously. Also every patient brings to 

bear his own particular perspective in interpreting the meaning of the analyst's manifest behavior as it 

communicates, conveys, or inadvertently betrays something in the analyst's personal experience. The fact that a 

particular perspective may be charged with tremendous significance and importance for the patient does not nullify 

its plausibility. If anything the opposite may be the case. The patient's transference predisposition acts as a kind of 

geiger counter which picks up aspects of the analyst's personal response in the analytic situation which might 

otherwise remain hidden. As Benedek (1953) put it: 

Rarely does one realize that the patient, under the pressure of his emotional needs—needs which may be motivated by 

the frustration of transference—may grope for the therapist as a real person, may sense his reactions and will 

sometimes almost read his mind … Yes, the patient … bores his way into the preconscious mind of the therapist and 

often emerges with surprising evidences of empathy—of preconscious awareness of the therapist's personality and even 

of his problems (p. 203). 

What the patient's transference accounts for is not a distortion of reality but a selective attention to and 

sensitivity to certain facets of the analyst's highly ambiguous response to the patient in the analysis. What one 

patient notices about the analyst another ignores. What matters to one may not matter to another, or may matter in a 

different way. One could make a case for using the term "distortion" for just this kind of selective attention and 

sensitivity, but that is not usually the way the term is used and I do think it would be misleading. After all, it is not 

as though one could describe the "real analyst" or the true nature of the analyst's experience independent of any 

selective attention and sensitivity. As Wachtel (1980) says: 

To be sure, each patient's experience of the analyst is highly individual and shaped by personal needs and fantasies. 

But consider the enormous variation in perception of the analyst by those other than his patients—the differences in 

how he is experienced by his spouse, his children, his teachers, his students, his friends, his rivals. Which is the 

"undistorted" standard from which the transference distortion varies? (pp. 66–67)6 

There is no perception free of some kind of pre-existing set or bias or expectation, or, to borrow from Piaget's 

framework, no perception independent of "assimilation" to some preexisting schema. Such assimilation does not 

twist an absolute external reality into something it is not. Rather it gives meaning or shape to something "out there" 

that has among its "objective" properties a kind of amenability to being assimilated in just this way. Moreover, the 

schema itself is flexible and tends to "accommodate" to what is in the environment even while it makes what is in 

the environment fit itself. Thus, turning to the clinical situation which concerns us, a patient who, for example, has 

a readiness to feel used, may detect and be selectively attentive and sensitive to whatever qualifies as a plausible 

6In what seems to me to be a non-sequitur, Wachtel retreats from the implications of this position at the end of his paper (p. 74) and accepts 

the term distortion in a manner which contradicts the heart of his argument. 

indication of an exploitative motive on the part of the particular analyst he is seeing. With one analyst it might be 

his high fee, with another his use of a tape recorder for research purposes, with another his use of the therapy for 

his own training, with another his (allegedly) sadistic use of silence, with another his (allegedly) sadistic use of 

active interpretation. 

The analytic situation is comprised of only two people—both of whom are participating in a charged 

interpersonal interaction which can result in either one of them resisting recognizing something in himself that the 

other discerns. From the perspective of the radical critic, it behooves the analyst to operate with this skepticism 

about what he knows of himself at a particular moment always in mind and to regard the patient as a potentially 

astute interpreter of his own (the analyst's own) resisted internal motives. In fact, in some cases a patient with a 

particular "transference predisposition" (a phrase that Racker uses that is comparable to the notion of schema) may 

guess something about the countertransference that most other independent judges would not have picked up. As 

Gill and I have written (1982b): 

In some instances, a group of judges may agree that the therapist has behaved in a particular way, one which could be 

construed as seductive, or disapproving or whatever, only after some subtle aspect of his behavior is called to their 

attention by another single observer. This observer, might of course, be none other than the patient (p. 140). 

Not despite the influence of the transference but because of it: 

[The patient] may notice something about the therapist's behavior or suggest a possible interpretation of it that most 

judges would overlook. Nevertheless, once it is called to their attention, they may all agree that the patient's 

perceptions and inferences were quite plausible (p. 140). 

Implications of the Responsiveness of the Analyst's Experience in the 

Psychoanalytic Situation 

In what I have said so far I have deliberately contrived to deemphasize the second major consideration that 

addresses the implication of the analyst's personal presence for the transference. I have done this in order to take the 

argument associated with the ambiguous nature of the analyst's involvement as far as I could. But it is the second 

consideration, coupled with the first, that I think clinches the argument of the radical critic that the patient's 

plausible interpretations of the analyst's experience be considered part of the transference and that the transference 

not be defined in terms of perceptual distortion. 

This second consideration is simply that the analyst in the analytic situation is continuously having some sort of 

personal affective reaction that is a response to the patient's manner of relating to him. What is more, every patient 

knows that he is influencing the analyst's experience and that the freedom the analyst has to resist this influence is 

limited. Patients create atmospheres in analysis—atmospheres which we sometimes actually speak of as though 

something were "in the air" between the participants. These atmospheres include the therapist's personal reaction to 

the patient, the patient guessing what the reaction is partly on the basis of what he thinks his own behavior is likely 

to have elicited, the analyst guessing what the patient is guessing, and so on. 

Sandler (1976) puts it this way: 

In the transference, in many subtle ways, the patient attempts to prod the analyst into behaving in a particular way and 

unconsciously scans and adapts to his perceptions of the analyst's reaction. The analyst may be able to "hold" his 

response to this "prodding" in his consciousness as a reaction of his own which he perceives, and I would make the 

link between certain countertransference responses and transference via the behavioral (verbal and non-verbal) 

interaction between the patient and the analyst (p. 44). 

Sandler's emphasis on the analyst's behavior as a basis upon which the patient concludes (pre-consciously) that 

he has elicited the response he is looking for underestimates the extent to which the patient's ideas about the 

countertransference can flow directly and plausibly from what he knows about the evocative nature of his own 

behavior. However the analyst believes he has behaved, if the patient thinks he has been continually depreciating, 

or harshly critical, he has reason to believe that the analyst may feel somewhat hurt, or that he may experience a 

measure of irritation and a wish to retaliate. Such ideas do not require perceptual confirmation in order for the 

patient to believe, with reason, that they are plausible. The perceptual confirmation might follow in any number of 

ways. For example, if the analyst keeps his cool and shows not the slightest bit of irritation, the patient might well 

imagine that this is precisely the expression of the analyst's revenge, i.e., that the analyst will not give the patient the 

satisfaction of thinking he can affect him in a personal way. And, undoubtedly, ostensible adherence to the more 

more austere canons of "proper" analytic conduct can sometimes function as a disguised vehicle for the expression 

of intense countertransference attitudes on the part of the analyst. However, the perceptual confirmation may be 

secondary, since from the patient's point of view the die is cast and the outcome is highly likely given his own 

evocative behavior. 

For a theorist like Racker the countertransference is inevitable and his discussion of it carries none of the 

opprobrium that comes across so heavily and oppressively in the work of Langs. Racker and Heimann take the 

same step forward with respect to countertransference that Freud took when he moved from thinking of the 

transference as an obstacle to thinking of transference as the principal vehicle of the analytic process. The 

countertransference in the social paradigm of the radical critics is likely to embody something resembling aspects of 

the patient's internal objects or aspects of the patient's self-representation. Heimann (1950) goes so far as to say: 

The analyst's counter-transference is not only part and parcel of the analytic relationship, but it is the patient's

creation, it is part of the patient's personality (p. 83)

.

The element of hyperbole in Heimann's position illustrates an error that often appears in discussions of the 

mechanism of projective identification. Instead of being a blank screen, the analyst becomes an empty "container" 

(Bion, 1962) into which the patient deposits various parts of himself. Although the emphasis is on interaction, the 

metaphor of the container lends itself, ironically, to yet another asocial conception of the situation since somehow 

the analyst's personality has once again been extricated from the process (cf. Levenson, 1981, p. 492). 

Nevertheless, the concept of projective identification, with the hyperbolic metaphor removed, does help bridge the 

alleged gap between the intrapsychic and the interpersonal (Ogden, 1979). It should be evident that in this paper the 

terms "social" and "interpersonal" do not connote something superficial or readily observable from "outside" or 

something non-intrapsychic, the pejorative connotations that these terms have unfortunately acquired for many 

classical analysts. Experience that is conceptualized in the terms of the social paradigm is experience that is layered 

by reciprocal conscious, preconscious, and unconscious responses in each of the participants.7 What is more, 

something can "unfold" in the course of the analysis which bears the stamp of the patient's transference predispositions. 

What is intrapsychic is realized in the patient's idea of the interaction of the transference and the countertransference 

which is likely to include a rough approximation of the quality if not the quantity of the actual countertransference. 

It is in this element of correspondence between the patient's idea of the countertransference and the actual 

countertransference that the elusive interface of the intrapsychic and the interpersonal lies. www.psychspace.com心理学空间网