The emotional radioactivity behind conflict in psychoanalytic institutions

The aim of this research is to explore the unconscious elements that fuels the ‘radioactive atmosphere’ of psychoanalytic institutions - unconscious sources of the chronic conflicts that sometimes plague the relationships between members of psychoanalytical societies and obscure the path of a constructive resolution of conflict that leads to progress and further development. The starting point of this thesis was Hinshelwood’s (1999) idea about the displacement of negative countertransference feelings from patients to colleagues as a source of tensions amongst analysts. The first part of the thesis (Chapters 1-4) explores the development of the ideas on countertransference and its uses for a better understanding of ‘the patient’, surveys different perspectives on the life in psychoanalytic organizations, and points to the existence of a link between analysts’ analytic attitude towards patients and their attitude towards colleagues. The second part of the thesis presents the empirical study set to test the correspondence between the analyst’s omniscient attitude towards patient and arrogant attitude towards colleagues (Chapter 6). The preliminary findings indicates that ‘sibling rivalry’ and complicated relations during training as one source of conflict in psychoanalytic institutions, and are further investigated in the empirical research presented in Chapter 7, using the psychoanalytically informed research interview as an experimental situation, an original research method. The final chapter examines the main findings of this empirical research.