Announcements by Irwin Hirsch (USA)

Mutative Action: From Insight to Productive Use of Uncomfortable Countertransference Experience

(2021). Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 31(6): 674-683.

The relative value of insight as a mutative factor in psychoanalysis has long been a central question in the literature. Most analysts of this generation believe that although insight has clear value, it isn’t normally sufficient to produce structural change in most patients. Alternatively, the tide has shifted strongly to the view that the analytic relationship per se has more explanatory power in understanding why patients change. The author attempts to deconstruct which elements of the analytic relationship might have the most mutative power. His argument reflects the belief that analysts’ productive use of uncomfortable countertransference experience is key to ideal therapeutic outcome, whereas failure to productively use countertransference experience – usually experience that is consciously recognized by the analyst – is the primary factor in contributing to compromised or failed analyses.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10481885.2021.1976186

Presentation

L’azione mutativa: dall’insight all’uso produttivo di esperienze controtranferali spiacevoli [Mutative Action: From Insight to Productive Use of Uncomfortable Countertransference Experience]

Hirsch discusses the ideas of his recent Psychoanalytic Dialogues paper on the mutative action in psychoanalytic treatment.

(2021). Società Italiana di Psicoanalisi Interpersonale, December 4, online

Irwin Hirsch, Ph.D
New York City
Email Irwin Hirsch