Abstract
Drawing upon his description of the early phases of the analysis of the second case of official supervision, the author illustrates in his work why this experience became a foundational moment in his formative trajectory as a psychoanalyst. Three important aspects are discussed: (1) the significant role his supervisor played in helping to manage and to confront the difficult dynamics of transference and countertransference that characterized the author’s early years of analytic work with patients; (2) the transformative factors that opened up new avenues in the repetition and the original traumatic pathology put forward at great length by the patient; and (3) the making contact for the first time with that area of inter/intrapsychic phenomena that the author has since then explored widely and theorized about, under the name of relational dynamics governed by role-reversal.
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A version of this paper was presented at the 49 IPA Boston Congress, July 2015, in a Panel entitled “Working with transference and countertransference: Special learning moments in our psychoanalytic journey” and appeared in a modified form in the Revista de Psicoanálisis de la Asociación Psicoanalítica de Madrid and in the Rivista di Psicoanalisi. I thank the Madrid and the Italian reviews for having granted permission to republish it in English.
1Franco Borgogno, Ph.D. in Philosophy and in Psychology, is full professor of Clinical Psychology at the Psychology Faculty of Turin University (Italy); Full Member of the International Psychoanalytical Association and Training and Supervising Analyst of the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana.
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Borgogno, F. A SPECIAL LEARNING EXPERIENCE ABOUT TRANSFERENCE AND COUNTERTRANSFERENCE DYNAMICS AT THE BEGINNING OF MY PSYCHOANALYTIC TRAINING. Am J Psychoanal 76, 99–110 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/ajp.2016.6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ajp.2016.6