Looking for Ground by Peter G. M. Carnochan (9780881633245)

Description - Looking for Ground by Peter G. M. Carnochan

Despite 50 years of literature documenting the experience and meanings of countertransference in analytic practice, the concept remains a source of controversy. How may countertransference best be understood? In what ways does it impede or facilitate the analyst's activity. Does it serve diagnostic understanding or merely reflect the analyst's own intrusive subjectivity? For Peter Carnochan, such questions can be answered only by revisiting historical, epistemological, and moral issues intrinsic to the analytic enterprise. This study is an attempt to provide a comprehensive understanding of countertransference on the basis of a contemporary reappraisal of just such foundational assumptions. Carnochan begins by reviewing the history of the psychoanalytic encounter and how it has been accompanied by changes in the understanding of countertransference. He delineates the complexities that underlie Freud's apparent prescription of countertransference before tracing the broadening of the concept in the hands of later theorists. Part II examines the problem of epistemology in contemporary analytic practice.
For Carnochan, rejection of objectivist accounts of knowing need not lead to an untenable relativism. The answer to this apparent quandary, he holds, resides in a contemporary appreciation of affect, which, rather than merely limiting or skewing perception, forms an essential "promontory" for human knowing. The final section of the book takes up what Carnochan terms the "moral architecture" of psychoanalysis. Rejecting the claim that analysis operates in a realm outside conventional accounts of value, he argues that the analytic alternative to traditional moralism is not tantamount to emancipation from the problem of morality. Clarification of countertransference and its role in analytic therapy, in turn, follows from understanding and acceptance of the moral frame within which the analyst operates. By way of rendering this frame explicit, Carnochan returns to the moral ground on which analysis was founded and then examines how this ground has evolved over the course of a century of analytic practice.

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