Alberto Stefana

The Origins of the Notion of Countertransference

The aim of this paper is to historically contextualize and analyze the birth and early development of the concept of countertransference, introduced by Sigmund Freud in 1909. In order to do so, scientific publications will be considered, as well as the epistolary and the historical information about the personal relationship between Freud and his students, and among his students and some of their colleagues and patients.

Cenni storici sul controtransfert: da Freud alla scuola inglese delle relazioni oggettuali

La psicoanalisi si trova oggi di fronte a un pluralismo di modelli, teorie e tecniche sconosciuto in passato; parte della letteratura analitica individua un possibile terreno comune nel controtransfert. Il presente lavoro propone una panoramica storico-descrittiva dello sviluppo del concetto di controtransfert, focalizzando l’attenzione su un filone ben preciso di tale sviluppo, ovvero quello che va dal contributo originario portato da Freud fino a quelli degli analisti della scuola inglese delle relazioni oggettuali che diedero, e continuano a dare, un apporto fondamentale nella diffusione della discussione, necessaria allo sviluppo scientifico, riguardo al controtransfert nei suoi aspetti teorico-clinici.

From the “squiggle game” to “games of reciprocity” towards a creative co-construction of a space for working with adolescents

ABSTRACT The “squiggle game” is, above all, a method for relating and encouraging mutual exchange between the analyst and the patient (no matter if child, adolescent, or adult), enabling him to experience holding and freely explore different communication possibilities. After having explored the “technique” as it has been developed by Winnicott, this study also exposes some theoretical considerations, and some variations in the basic technique, brought together by the crucial role played by reciprocity: “Me a little and you a little.” The paper is a clinical case with a Chinese adolescent.

Mourning the Death of a Foreign Child

To the Editor: North-American and Western European societies are multicultural. This affects hospital and outpatient organizations: the hospitalizations of patients coming from totally different cultural contexts are becoming more and more frequent. Among the hospitalized patients, there are also newborns and infants. Unfortunately, some of them do not survive. The importance of this phenomenon should not be underestimated [1]. Ways of dealing with death and mourning are closely related to collective and cultural characteristics of a society, which possesses its own collective language to express emotions [2]. It is also known that, in every age and cultural setting, there is always a potential for individual emotional variability [3], which also depends on the sexual gender of the grieving person [4]. At first glance, the reactions to the death of a child and the stages of the grieving process do not show substantial dissimilarities in people that belong to and/or embrace cultures or religions that are totally different from one another. Many foreign parents seem to have deserted their ancestral death rituals replacing them with those of Western origin. But if we look beyond appearances, we are able to discover that this phenomenon is just the (superficial) result of a process of adaptation to the Western cultural environment into which the parents of the hospitalized child have immigrated. Foreign parents do adapt (probably worrying about being judged) to Western culture, but these adopted reactions to death as well as the modes and taboos of mourning, manifest themselves in ways that do not belong to them. It is therefore possible to state that beneath this ‘westernized’ appearance lies a quintessentially different reality, one deeply infused with the beliefs and precepts of the culture of origin. To make it possible for professionals to create for the parents a sufficiently suitable environment in which to deal with the loss of their child and begin the work of mourning, they must acquire specific knowledge about the customs and traditions of the parents’ culture of origin. This is not a task to be regulated or standardized on the basis of protocols and precedents. It must be ‘customized’ to fit each specific case.