In his elaborations on the counter-transference, Winnicott distinguishes between three types of responses:

1. a subjective counter-transference routed in the analyst’s un-worked through psychology, and hence an obstacle;
2. a subjective counter-transference rooted in a shared experience or background between analyst and analysand, and hence a bridge for further empathy and understanding; and
3. an objective counter-transference appropriately experienced by any sufficiently analysed, and hence qualified, analyst in any given situation.

        
        Winnicott understands the last of these responses as caused by the analysand’s psychology and hence a useful pointer to the correct analytic intervention. In a classic clinical vignette from “Hate in the Counter-transference,” Winnicott interprets what he deems an objective counter-transferential hate he feels toward his troublesome adolescent patient as sufficient justification for the disciplining action the boy deserves—namely, to be left outside, rain or shine, and not allowed back in till after he’d calmed down. No, Winnicott does not suffer from a Jekyll and Hyde complex. What we have here is merely the other side, the paternal side of discipline and truth, of the same parental coin.

        If the trope of analyst-as-mother is grounded in a simplistic two-person psychology, the paternal trope harks back to and ultimately is hardly anything more than a re-framing of the atomistic view from which Winnicott had supposedly separated himself. There is barely any structural difference between the model of the analyst as a blank screen onto which pathology gets projected and that of the analyst as an empty vessel into which pathology gets projected.

        The hate Winnicott experiences in the vignette is supposedly his patient’s; it is engendered by the very things the latter does in his “crude” way of loving (“Hate …” 203) and its enactment by the analyst is justified on the grounds that the patient can appreciate only what he is capable of feeling (195).

        As well, Winnicott substitutes the interpretation and resolution of the transference with that of the analysand’s hate, via the analyst’s, as the culmination of analytic work prior to which the “patient is kept to some extent in the position of infant—one who cannot understand what he owes to his mother [or to his analyst]” (202). While verbal communication is substituted with affective enactment as the preferred mode of analytic work, it is still the analysand’s psychology that is the principal agency here.

        What guides Winnicott in identifying his hate as objective rather than a by-product of a so-called un-worked through psychological hurdle for instance is a standard associated with the notion of a “mature healthy adult.” If, at any given moment, the analyst’s affective experience is equivalent to that of what would be expected from said adult, if, in other words, it is “justified,” then that experience is deemed objective and the analyst is, in a manner of speaking, off the hook.

        The masculinist aetiology and cultural baggage of this notion of a “mature healthy adult” has not been entirely overlooked, in some analytic circles at least. Ridding that notion of its male specificity and speaking instead of the mature but genderless healthy adult does not really help matters all that much. In either case, the notion remains self-serving since that adult could only be defined as he, or she, who has undergone good parenting at the hands of a parent and/or an analyst as parent.

        Structurally, the bottom line is that the notion of a mature healthy adult is used to legitimize and justify a process of which it is also the product. Instead of recognising the circularity of the argument, it is the recipient and provider of good parenting who emerges into the mind of the analyst as the standard of health and of sound clinical practice.

1. inability to relinquish the ideal, and hence dead, object (the unmediated and gratifying mother);
2. identification with the dead object (analyst as substitute source of gratification);
3. sadism inverted into self-deprecation (readiness to assume responsibility for every disruption in the gratification as index of the analyst’s empathic failure);
4. self-exposure (analysis is the analysis of the counter-transference);
5. narcissism (cure is contingent on an internalisation of the supposedly healthy analyst).

And the list goes on.

        The tie between mother and infant does not exist in a structural vacuum. This tie is anaclitic in nature; it serves to establish for the baby a link and an opposition between a physiological need and a libidinal drive. Both need and drive are not only directed toward an external object (the mother’s breast for instance) for their satisfaction, they are moreover defined by the viability and extent of that directionality.

        True enough, there is no such thing as a baby in the sense that its presence is always already contingent upon that of a mother or someone fulfilling a motherly function of sorts. Equally true is the fact that there is no such thing as a mother; this is so not only in her role as a dyadic compliment to the baby but also as someone whose presence is always already contingent upon that of a set of cultural, historical, legal, and communicative structures in matters of kinship and exchange. If a baby cannot exist without its mother, a mother cannot exist not only without a baby but, and much more crucially, without the structures that would allow her to identify, prioritise, and minister to that baby’s needs, that would allow her, in other words, to define herself as a mother in an extra-physiological sense.

        If one moves away from an atomistic theory of the human psyche and toward much more complex and overdetermined networks of relations, one must also move away from a simplistic two-person psychology that remains oblivious to that third which allows the two to be counted and made to communicate. By the “third,” I am not referring to what has become known as the “analytic third” in the literature, e.g. the institutional, legal, and professional factors that are ever present in the clinical setting; nor am I referring to that third elaborated by Ogden in his reading of Winnicott’s transitional space as an outcome of the encounter between mother and infant, analyst and analysand. By the “third,” I am referring rather to that grid of which these factors are only symptoms and/or effects, to that grid which precedes, underlies, and mediates any and all communication.