HATE IN THE COUNTERTRANSFERENCE

The early postwar years saw Winnicott continuing to publish in both mainstream psychoanalytic journals and for a wider readership, and continuing his broadcasts on the BBC. His writings demonstrate the influence of his wartime experience, and this, together with his work with borderline patients and psychotics as ‘research cases’, encouraged a renewed interest in countertransference phenomena. Michael and Alice Balint had published their paper ‘On Transference and Counter-Transference’ in the IJPA in 1939. It addressed the subject of the analyst’s affective response and introduced the idea that countertransference was as often as not pathological but useful. Winnicott’s paper followed and later others in the Independent tradition, notably Pearl King’s 1978 paper ‘Affective Responses of the Analyst to the Patient’s Communication’ (IJPA). Joseph Sandler, in the Contemporary Freudian tradition, published ‘Countertransference and Role Responsiveness’ in 1975 (International Review of Psycho-Analysis). These are increasingly differentiated from the tendency to use the concept of projective identification as the explanation for countertransference phenomena.