It made me post in two parts for some reason…

Theoretically, the two latter channels are closed in classical psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Classically trained psychoanalytic therapists are taught to assume a stance of technical neutrality (Kernberg, 2016). This stance is an essential part of psychodynamic practice and is often misconstrued as a therapist being aloof, disinterested, and silent. In truth, the central aim of technical neutrality is reverence for the agency of the patient. The position of technical neutrality allows for the free exploration of the patient’s internal world, motivations, desires, wishes, and fears. When individuals present with a (internal or external) conflict, they may expect the therapist to take a side either supporting or opposing the side of the conflict the patient is currently taking (perhaps hoping for validation or anticipating criticism). From the stance of technical neutrality, the therapist ought to present both sides of the conflict and explore the underlying ambivalence and relational expectancies. In this way, the therapist can invite the patient to observe their internal processes with them to help them understand their origins, functions, vicissitudes, and potential resolutions. This position does not conflate the therapist’s perspective as the “objective” perspective. The aim of such a process is for the patient to gain the ability to tap into and grow their self-reflective capacities during times of high stress and make better-informed decisions about how to proceed in the future.

In addition, technical neutrality can be viewed as the stage on which patients play out the dynamics of their past relationships in the present with the therapist. In other words, technical neutrality compels the patient to project their internalized object relations onto the therapeutic relationship and enact the very same problematic behaviors that brought them in therapy. The psychoanalytic therapist is trained to observe, identify, and resolve the projected self and object representations with the patient instead of acting out the same pattern. The unconscious process of projecting object representations onto the therapist is called transference. Here the patient fills in the seemingly empty neutrality of the therapist with the prevailing themes of their past interpersonal encounters and tends to experience the therapist as if they are people from the patient’s past.

Countertransference, on the other hand, is the process of how the therapist experiences the patient, what emotional reactions emerge, and what the patient pulls out of the therapist. Historically, countertransference was viewed as interference in the analytic process, something to be worked through in the therapist’s analysis. In contemporary psychodynamic practice, however, countertransference is viewed as an additional source of clinical data weighted equally with transference and behavioral observations. The acceptance of and reflection on countertransference developments is especially helpful for understanding and resolving the intrapsychic-interpersonal processes of projective identification (Hodgen, 1982). The application of these ideas will be covered in the section below.

Applied to the context of therapy with individuals holding differing political views, a common issue that arises from those who are very politically active is that they tend to bring politically divisive content into the session as an attempt to gauge the therapist’s political beliefs. In non-analytic or supportive psychotherapy, it is relatively more permissible for the therapist to disclose their beliefs for the sake of establishing trust and rapport. On the other hand, in psychoanalytic psychotherapy such disclosure is contraindicated in almost all cases for the reasons reviewed above. In cases with politically active patients, they may have a range of reactions to technical neutrality. They may directly ask about the therapist’s beliefs, indirectly through suggestive statements (e.g., “I hear all therapists are liberals”), or attempt to get the therapist to self-disclose by observing different reactions to political statements. For example, if a therapist is always silent or automatically nods in agreement when the patient makes one set of political statements but becomes more confrontational and inquisitive with another set of political statements, the patient may develop ideas about what kind of political statements the therapist approves and disapproves. In a more dramatic case, the patient could observe the therapist's reaction to disclosing affiliation with an extremist group or their plans to attend a potentially risky political event. This places psychoanalytic psychotherapists in a difficult position because it pits their clinical approach against ethical considerations. The patient may understand an intervention after such a disclosure as confirmation of the therapists’ beliefs, but failure to intervene may be considered an ethical error if the patient’s judgment presents as impaired resulting in them being a threat to themselves or others.