The Use of the Self : Countertransference and Communication in the Analytic Situation

“Theodore Jacobs broke novel ground in 1991, thinking about analytic engagement in this classic and beloved book that is presented in this new edition, insuring interest for new generations of psychoanalysts. Jacobs’s gi was (and is) the transla)on of challenging theory into its subtle depths of clinical application. He integrates ego psychology, self psychology and object relations. Nowadays he belongs in Chodorow’s 2004/2019 category of ‘The American Independent Tradition,’ using an intersubjective ego psychology after Loewald and Erikson that is fresh and contemporary. Masterfully he shows fruitful details of how countertransference actually works verbally and nonverbally, moving along clinical process. Demonstrating how limited was the old view of the analyst’s reactive feelings and attitudes as hindrance, Jacobs shows the impact of its use for self-attunement, and ultimately sensitivity to the patient’s life and mind. He builds here on his 1986 inventive interactive concept of ’enactment’— a term nowadays so useful in our thinking about unmentalized traumatic aspects of analytic interaction that we have forgotten how controversial it once would have been. . . . enthusiastically recommended for all who practice and care about psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically-oriented therapies.”
—ROSEMARY H. BALSAM, FRCPsych (Lond), MRCP (Edin),
Author of Women’s Bodies in Psychoanalysis .