Transference, relationship and the analyst as object: Findings from the north american comparative clinical methods working party

Abstract

Data from the North American Comparative Clinical Methods (CCM) Working Party a is used to 1) explore how psychoanalysts in North America conceive and address the transference and the relationship between analyst-analysand and 2) to study what kinds of 'objects' psychoanalysts become, explicitly and implicitly, within psychoanalytic treatments. The North American CCM Working Party closely studied 17 clinical cases presented by North American psychoanalysts across the spectrum of analytic schools at their meetings. We found that the 17 analysts fell into three different groupings according to the internal consistency of their method and their approaches to transference, relationship and analyst-as -object. We also found that analysts' individual work, while heavily influenced by their schools of thought, also involved unique interpretations of their particular paradigms.