With Emotional Communication: Countertransference Analysis and the Use of Feeling in Psychoanalytic Technique (Routledge, 2013), Paul Geltner has written the definitive textbook on countertransference. No book, to my knowledge comes even close to this accomplishment. Most analysts are taught that countertransferences are the idiosyncratic feelings of the analyst. Geltner begins with the radical assumption that all of the analyst’s feelings should be considered inductions by the patient until proven otherwise. Geltner describes the many ways in which emotional communications can be induced and expands concept of countertransference into discrete observable categories with clinically useful examples.
In this interview, Dr. Geltner discusses the Modern Psychoanalytic underpinnings of his thinking about emotional communications, the field founded by Hyman Spotnitz. He describes the different types of countertransference and how understanding what the patient is inducing in the analyst is a main focus of the Modern Psychoanalytic technique. Working beyond interpretations that a based in language, Geltner describes how the Modern Psychoanalytic theory of cure includes not only words, but also the analyst’s use of emotional communication to meet the patient’s unmet maturational needs.
Dr. Geltner is in private practice in New York City, working with individuals and couples. He specializes in individual and group supervision with psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.
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