“‘Pervasive’ countertransference. Clinical manifestations of the patient’s form of being”

The Author describes a function of countertransference that he defines as «pervasive», distinguishing it from Paula Heimann’s description and from what has been traced back to the mechanism of projective identification. Such a form reveals the effect on the analyst of the re-creation in the analytic relationship – through non-verbal, primitive communications – of what has been the child’s «world», before achievement of the depressive position, allowing us to investigate experiences of the patient’s self. While countertransference reducible to projective identification transmits split contents and takes place in the sphere of the object dimension, «pervasive» countertransference constitutes a modality where there is a re-creation of the form in which the primary environment is «diffused» and has impregnated the life of the child’s self during his states of physiological fusion with the environment.