INTERVISTA A GRETEL LEUTZ di Ottavio Rosati (New York, 1984)

Intervista rilasciata il 14 aprile 1984 al Roosvelt Hotel in occasione del 42° Congresso della Società Americana di Psicoterapia di Gruppo e Psicodramma.

Redazione a cura di Michela Malafronte

 

Ottavio Rosati:  Dear Gretel, the first question is: what is happening right now, to the Moreno Institute, his theatre and even to Moreno's ashes?

Grete Leutz: Well, I only heard that unfortunately the place that was sold three years ago to the Horsham foundation did not succeed the way they had expected it to do, and it is now expected to be sold on the market again. And that, of course would mean that most likely the Bio lab will not be a psychodrama any more but just the highest bidding person that is going to hire the place.

O.R. : How is it possible that the American government doesn’t take care of the sale of the institute? It is an important historical place, not only a kind of temple for us, but also an important place for the American Psychiatry and the International Society of Group Psychotherapy.

G.L. :  Well, you know, Ottavio, it was under the protection of the State of N.Y. and it was designed as historical landmark when the Horsham foundation bought the theatre and the hospital of Moreno, the place, so they redecorated everything and now, since it is changed it is no longer in the same shape. And only buildings which have never changed are considered landmarks.

O.R. : What could be the final destination of the site? Someone spoke about a sociometric community in Beacon who could buy it, someone else spoke about a proposal of … . What do you know?

G.L. : I don’t any more than you do. I think the Moreno family is really hoping to find someone who might keep the place well, if it’s not really dedicated to psychodrama, then perhaps just a theatre or a centre of human growth, or something like that … . The old historical buildings when Moreno developed everything… it was even the first psychodramatic theatre built in the world.

O.R. : How many psychodramatic theatres do we have now in the world?

G.L. : Well, you know, as Moreno wrote in 1919 in the “Neue Daimon” in Vienna, he said: “The theatre of God is anywhere where someone steps on Earth”.

So, originally, psychodrama is not found in the theatre. On the other hand, Moreno, since his early years in Vienna, was very much concerned about the new forms of architecture in theatres … you know the round stage, so that the public could enter and play and thus he had his first idea concretized in Beacon, of course, was built in 101 Park Avenue in N.Y. where he had his office.

O.R. : Ah, there was another theatre in N.Y.?

G.L. : Yes, of course, but you see, that’s where Moreno had his office and where he would see his patients and where he had the public evenings and where anyone from the street could come in.

O. R. : The same size of Beacon theatre or smaller?

G.L. : It was sort of different, but the stage was about the same size, otherwise the room was smaller, and now this house was taken down two years ago. It’s a huge big skyscraper just around the corner at grand Central Station.

O.R. : In the late Fifties it was sold out.

G.L. : Well, it was a flat, you know, that he had rented. He didn’t own it, but in the middle Fifties he bought another house on the west side of Central Park, a smaller … and there he had another big theatre, but that was sold during his lifetime.

O.R. : For how many years more or less?

G.L. : For about 10 – 15 years. He died in 1974. I think it was sold in 1976.

O.R. : But where did he work, in N.Y. or in Beacon?

G.L. : He had his office to see patients in N.Y., but then, in the Thirties, he bought the place in Beacon. One was a big, white wooden house (Vanderbilt estate) and there he started the hospital for schizophrenic patients. When I was there in the early Fifties he had about 25 very very ill psychiatric patients there.

O.R. : … in Beacon.

G.L. : In Beacon…and he only worked with those patients in Beacon. But twice a week he would go to N.Y. for patients. And one evening each week he had open sessions where anyone could come. And when he got older he closed his medical practice. But then, later on, they bought the other house on the West Side and there they had the theatre where they only had open session where some of N.Y. psychotherapists staged something.

O.R. : What year?

G.L. : Around the early Sixties, maybe the la Fifties.

O.R. : Moreno liked the Beacon Institute, I suppose, the wood, the place…

G.L. : Oh yes. That was his world in America. He loved it. I’d never seen the Rhine River in Germany. Well, I’d seen the Hudson River before and when I went to Germany, I was terribly disappointed because the Hudson is so beautiful, especially around Beacon. And then he had bought a second estate near the first one that was the Gillette estate. They had on the hill a beautiful Swiss chalet and Moreno had bought that. He had his Beacon House Publishing Company up there and during the summer occasions the old … and Kurt Lewin and his students would come and Moreno would teach up there because the other house where he later on taught, he had his patients, so up there was the place where he talked with the old people like … even early ones.

O.R. : So, a lot of American and even European psychiatrists studied there.

What do you remember about the French psychoanalysts who went to Beacon after World War II?

 

G.L. : I think many of them met him in N.Y., in his office in the city. Beacon was a place where world psychiatrists might go, but I think… was there for a long time.

 

O.R. : In N.Y. or in Beacon?

 

G.L. : Both places certainly and …

 

O.R. : Lebovici?

 

G.L. : I cannot tell whether he was in Beacon, but I am sure that he was in N.Y.C. You would have to ask Zerka about that. That was even before my time. They went there in the late Forties and I think it’s their great merit that they were the first analysts really taking Moreno and psychodrama seriously. However, perhaps they never grasped the way Moreno did and the big system he had behind. I think it was also very hard to discover that at first. It took me years and although I lived one year in the same house with Moreno in Beacon and translating for him and so on, but I think…

 

O.R. : When did you translate for him?

 

G.L. . Well, let me just finish who was the French analyst. I think It was their great merit that already in the late Forties they really took it seriously and imported it to France.

 

O.R. : What about you and Moreno?

 

G.L. : Well, it was a very very unusual thing that I got to meet Moreno. I had just finished school in Germany and I was a young girl in America and I wanted to make some money for my medical studies and I thought: “I am going to look for a job” and all I wanted was that it had some connection with medicine or whatsoever. I was not pinned down on psychiatry or anything like it. Then I happened to met Dave Rudhyar, a very important composer. He is going to have his 90th birthday next year and he has become an honorary doctor only a few years ago and he is living in San Francisco now.  And I met him and his wife in the street and they invited me, a young girl from Europe, and asked me what I was going to do. I just told them I am looking for a job and then they said: “You know, we have been in Beacon this summer and we met a very unusual psychiatrist. He writes the most extraordinary things. He is from Vienna and he wrote poetry which we couldn’t read because we don’t speak German. But we are under the impression that time had been divorced and his little daughter by his first wife was with her mother. She had come home sick, she wanted to be with her father again. Now, Moreno was working with Zerka day and night and they would eat in the hospital and that was not a household for a child to be. So he felt, and I think it was wonderful, Moreno applied his own method to his own problems and he felt that his little daughter was … well, she was not disturbed in a serious way, she didn’t like to go to school any more and because irritable and this and that, and she wanted to be with her father, so he felt that was the cause of her back in Beacon, but he could not devote his time to her, neither could Zerka and the child could have been disappointed, and then you know he was studying the case from a sociometric point of view and he said that it would only work if this set up, if we take the little girl who was 11 at time, to Beacon, it will only taken her there it would have been a change of the first order if we talk in terms of … and nothing would have changed. But he introduced another new person and then that was the sociometric part and then he also applied his role. He said that the fourth person should be a young girl somewhat be able to function in the role of an elder sister and this person, I was that.

 

O.R. : Oh, wonderful, so you knew Moreno.

 

G.L. : Yes, I moved there and the little girl was there. She was not difficult at the beginning, so the first weeks and months whenever she came from school I was there and did things with her, and we went on excursions or to the movies, I got her ready to school in the morning because Zerka and Moreno worked every day until 2 o’ clock in the morning, typing every night and of course she would sleep until 10 o’ clock in the morning and Moreno was around at 8 o’ clock and I fixed the coffee for him and he was sitting in his house coat. Those were our nicest hours. He was alone and we would talk German or English and about Vienna and about poetry and that’s when we became real close.

 

O.R. : How many years have you been here in N.Y. and in Beacon?

 

G.L. : In Beacon in his house except for one year and then I went to Switzerland and began to study medicine. But later on, during my vacations I would always call N.Y. and for all these years we had either close or … close relationship. They would come to Germany and I accompanied them in different places, or once in a while he sent me something to translate and I was in N.Y. again, in Beacon or here in the city when I wasn’t in Germany.

 

O.R. : You are the only one who can use the name of Moreno institute for your Association.

 

G.L. : Yes, that’s why we founded it as … Incorporation. It had a great disadvantage that we had to pay taxes like a firm, but on the other hand it has the advantage that the name is protected. You cannot protect the name psychodrama. Anyone can do anything and say it’s psychodrama, no matter whether it’s psychodrama or not, but now the two Moreno Institutes, we founded them simultaneously and we are cooperating … and we founded it with the same lawyer and so the name is protected and we founded the Institutes in 1975, so this is only 9 years and it is just incredible the increase in psychodrama. You know it was practically unknown at the beginning. It was a great preoccupation against psychodrama.

 

O.R. : Against … because of psychoanalytic criterion.

 

G.L. : Not so much because of her, the way most of the analysts had emigrated to America, but it was just, I think, the German psychiatry in psychotherapy. It looks like in other countries too. It was in the old tradition style, no matter whether it was analytical or not. They would say: “What, a group? At that time, you know, you … therapeutic sessions. It was just a dual situation: patients/therapists. You had double doors and no one could listen. A group? … That was unheard of, and a stage? A theatre? well my God! Theatre is a beautiful thing for entertainment but then it was always never quite so 100% scientific in the sense of University medicine, and then stage and action, play … well either they thought it was crazy and they didn’t bother to study it or learn about it. That was obstacle number one … Or those people who were attracted, they would go to a Congress and they may have been fascinated but then they would say that it was very nice but that you had to be a person like Moreno to be able to do something like that. And then, there was a third type who tried on their own, but either they couldn’t make it work because they thought that psychodrama is so easy, that they could play with it just like with a toy, and they didn’t realize that they had to learn and study that also. So either they got stuck in the warming up process … well it’s something ridiculous, superficial… Or perhaps they were more talented, they go into deeper levels where their protagonist became rather involved and emotional and cathartic and shattered, and they didn’t know how to handle it because they had no training. So then they would say that it was such a dangerous method irresponsible to do it. So because they was no training, or although they had already some training in Beacon. A full fletched doctor, psychiatrist did not think he had to learn how to play or how to do a little bit of theatre, even if he liked it, that’s how many got stuck, and then they were … from his method. So when I started in 1968, in Vienna, at the Congress, and for the first time I thought Moreno had aged, and he was rather nostalgic. It was close to his old place … in Vienna, and whenever he felt homesick or nostalgic he loved to speak German to me, and then he said: “You know, our group psychotherapy is beginning to develop, and even psychodrama in the world …But there isn’t anything going on in the German speaking countries!”. What could we do? So I suggested that I would try whether one could incorporate in the German group DAGG, that’s a Group Association, and this is how we went about. And I gave some demonstrations, and then …and I had just finished my five years work at the … and I didn’t want to renew the contract. I had so many other things in my mind and I needed some spare time, and I thought I will do the favour to Moreno and demonstrate it here and there. And it was like a little snowball in my hand. It could of have melted into water and nothing would have been left. But that little snowball in these ten or twelve years turned into people, professional people in Germany who got in touch with psychodrama at these medical annual meetings. Then we have hundreds of students who have finished their training at the institutes, and we have many collaborators now, and it’s really an avalanche. 

 

O.R. : Can you say something about the relationship between psychoanalysis and psychodrama in the first years and now in Germany?

 

G.L. : In the first years analysts didn’t take it seriously at all. It was the same preoccupation as anywhere in the world. Either they thought nothing or they thought: “It’s crazy!”. But in the meantime it is was really taken very very seriously. And it is recognized by the ministry of Health in Germany for the medical training of psychotherapy as a facultative method. You know you have to have rather a large basis of psychoanalysis and of relaxation method and things like hypnosis or so, and then you can choose between behavioural therapy, individual psychology and psychodrama and also active imagination.

 

O.R. : Jungian?

 

G.L. : No, it’s more going back to roots of Desoille of France, and professor Lewin in Göttingen who developed a large school on that It was very impressive. And we had a rather close cooperation because many of his students and my students knew both of us. And those four method … you have to have one of those four methods for this medical psychotherapy, and so psychodrama is recognized.

 

O.R.: So returning to Moreno’s work in N.Y.C., a lot of people from theatre and European and American culture were in Beacon…

 

G.L.: Yes, Beacon was officially called the world centre of psychodrama and in the late sixties, early seventies, I lived quite a bit in Sweden, and introduced psychodrama there. Many of these students then went to Beacon. Still Zerka would travel to Scandinavian countries and also Anne Schützenberger. I went until 1972, and once or twice afterwoods.   So they all went to Beacon. They cam from all over the world. It is a very important place since Zerka once mentioned that … you know what the name Beacon mean?

 

O.R.: No, what does it mean?

 

G.L.: Beacon means a beam of light, un rayon de soleil.

 

O.R.: A rainbow?

 

G.L.: No, a light.

 

O.R.: Raggio … rays

 

G.L.: yes, Beacon means rays … rays of light. So it is very sad if the light is getting dimmer and might get extinguished altogether in Beacon.

 

O.R.: And what about Moreno’s ashes? I think that also Moreno’s son a young philosopher, Jonathan will take care of the problem.

 

G.L.: Well, Moreno during his lifetime said that when he died, he would like one inscription on his urn: “Here rests a man who introduced laughter into psychiatry.” And this is engraved in his urn. And his urn is buried at the entrance of the theatre in Beacon.

 

O.R.:  What are the most important events that you can remember of your friendship with Moreno?

 

G.L.: First I went to 101 Park Avenue, to apply for the job, and it was immediate clicking. I saw him, and we liked each other. And then working with him for the whole year, I translated into German. The first translation was in French, or it had begun, before I started the translation into German. But then Moreno said to me: “But don’t you want to translate that into German?” So I had no idea of psychology or sociology, or anything like it. I had just finished school, but I said: “Of course I want to”. And I did that in the evening with Moreno. And I did that in the evening with Moreno. And it was even accomplished before the French. So they came out about the same year. And it was very nice to do that, because since I was very naïve, I had a similar approach than Moreno. This is what impressed me the most about Moreno. He approached anything under the sun with a total naiveté, like a child. And he would just look at the things, how they are. And I don’t know whether you know the Andersen fairy tale. It’s called: “The Emperor’s new clothes”. The child that says: “The Emperor doesn’t wear any clothes!”

 

O.R.: Yes.

 

G.L.: it is what Moreno was. I always saw the child in him. As a scientist he could go to the biggest congress, and he was not impressed by any title, or anything he could approach, God knows who it was, like that child, and say: “You don’t wear any clothes after all! What is what you bring?” It was very impressive. So I have very nice memories of that time, and then perhaps the most unforgettable or deepest memory, was Moreno’s dying face. Moreno died on the 14th of March 1974, ten years ago. And I had been ill. I had just returned from the hospital to my home, and the next morning Zerka calls and says: “Moreno is deadly ill”. And I asked her: “What is the matter?” And she says: “He doesn’t eat any more, since weeks”. And that she had tried to call me and couldn’t reach me. And I thought that he is just old and one could give him some inside food. And she said: “No, he just takes water”. So the next day I flew to N.Y. and I didn’t know what to take along. So I took his book of early poetry: “Das Testament des Vaters”. I knew he had it there, and I had just the second copy which I once found in an antique shop in Germany. I never found it since, and so I took this along. And we are meeting here at the 42nd annual meeting. You see, that was ten years ago, the 32nd, and it was the first time Moreno couldn’t go there. And Zerka went. And student went. And Anne Schutzenberger had come. And Zerka said she could only go if I stayed with him, because he never let her doctor come. So I stayed and Zerka was gone. And not all the students had left, so the old lady of the house who took care of the house called. And she said: “We cannot keep Moreno in bed”. And I went there, and it was very pathetic. He tried to get up. He was very weak, and he said. “I have to go to the lecture hall”. It was like a drive. He had to go there. And then I said: “ Not all of them have left. And they are preparing sociograms”. And so on. And it was a cheap answer, just to pacify him. But then, after a while he started again. And so I thought: “We have to do psychodrama now”. And I said: “Let’s go to the lecture hall”. And other women helped. And we took him out of bed. And he walked a few steps. He was very weak on his feet. And I’ll never forget that glance, that look of Moreno. There was one drive: “I have to go to the lecture hall, be Moreno, and do whatever I did for all these decades”. And the other I said: “I cannot, that’s the end”. And he was exhausted. And I took him back to bed, and then thought that this vigorous man, he had never been ill all his life. I thought this must be the most horrible moment, and I was so happy that I had those poems along. So I got the book, and I sat at his bedside, and I began to read this German poetry from his youth. And he listened. And it was, I can’t describe it. And then he was tired and he fell asleep. And then in the evening Anne Schutzenberger returned from N.Y., and she came all excited. And she said: “Is he still alive?”, because he was very weak. I said yes. And we were sitting upstairs in the house. And we were chatting at night. And there was a coloured student, a night nurse, who watched Moreno during the night. And it was about 11 – 11:30. She came upstairs, and she said: “Oh my! I don’t understand him any more. He speak a different language which I don’t understand, and he always calls a name. I don’t know what to do”. And then Anne Schutzenberger said: “Oh, he calls you. He speaks a language that can only be German, so you better go”. And I went there. And there was Moreno lying down on his last bed. There was a dim little lamp. And I walked in, and he talked German. He looked at me and said: “ Noch eine Gedicht”. One more poem. And I got a book, and I sat in this little di light and read another poem. I didn’t know whether it was getting to much on him. And he kept asking: “Still one more poem.”, just like a child who wants one more candy. And this is … well … it’s an absolutely humanist hour which I’ll never forget in my life. Those poems, which actually are religious poems, and one chapter is also called: My Death. Those little poems, that he wrote as a young man in his twenties. I read them upon his own wishes on his bed.

 

O.R.: Unforgettable experience! Before you told me about the tale by Andersen. The dress of the Emperor, and I was thinking about the theme: to be naked. And I was also thinking that Pirandello called his plays … he published them under the name of Naked mask. And what is interesting is that when Moreno was very young, he had this strange experience. He went out of his home quite naked, to see what happened in the street. And sometimes I think that the psychodramatic stage is a stage where you don’t wear your mask, but where you get naked of your mask.

 

G.L.: Well, I never heard that he went out naked. But I heard from him or from Zerka … well from him, that as a young man, when he had to go some place and he had to dress up or so. He would just put a clean shirt on top of the other one. He never bothered to change so there could be days where he wears three shirts on top of each other.

 

O.R.: Not only naked but also overdressed! The last question is about the theatre, psychodramatic theatre in the world. Actually is there one in Germany?

 

O.R.: no, we don’t have a stage like this. We just take a room and have Zerka play inside.

 

O.R.: Do you use lighting?

 

G.L.: Just a little bit. Not colour lighting. But for instance, the second stage was in Saint Elisabeth Hospital. And then … has one, I think. And I saw a very tiny little one in Japan in Tokyo, but it was a stone one in a garden of professor Mazzamura, President of the Japanese Psychodrama Association.

 

O.R.: There is a stone stage in a Japanese garden? Beautiful!

 

G.L.: In a kindergarten, yes. Then there is the Studio di Psicodramma at Milano, Giovanna Bozia. It does not have a stage, but it is very similar. On the one hand it is a little bit like an amphitheatre, and on the other hand they have a round carpet, a moquette which imitates the Beacon stage. There is another beautiful stage in New Mexico, and it was built by …, the former wife of Dane Rubiart. I met those two and they referred mev to Moreno.  And she is the daughter of the famous Russian painter Nicolai Versher. And she has a beautiful theatre in the Indian district of New Mexico, near Tarls. And it’s not far away from the place D.H. Laurence had his estate, so if you ever go to New Mexico, you should visit her.

 

O.R.: Another question. Yesterday you told me something about the … Institute, similar to …

 

G.L.: Yes, I have worked there for five years, and from time to time I had also psychodrama groups there. And one of the earlier experience was when I had some psychodrama there. We had quite a few Italian doctors and Italian patients. And as a matter of fact, I think it was the first therapeutic community in one house. And that was initiated and run by dr. Fabrizio Napoletani from Rome. And we really became friends then, and he would come to our psychodramatic session and he would go over there and do some psychodramatic interventions with his Italian patients, and I would sit there, and I had my first introduction to the Italian language.

 

O.R.: What’s happening now to the Binswanger place?

 

G.L.: It closed about four or five years ago, unfortunately.

 

O.R.: Don’t you think that someone should take care of such Institutes, for instance, an international organization?

 

G.L.: I think places like Beacon and Binswanger, they are really historic places of psychiatry. Freud was a good friend of Binswanger, and Binswanger was considered his closer thinking mate. And although he developed his own methods, they remained friends for a lifetime. And Freud had also referred patients for in patient treatment to the Binswanger sanatorium. And at his 42nd annual meeting of American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama … And as you know, from the first meeting on there was always the chair where Moreno lectured. Then after his death, the first lecture was delivered in 1975 by Zerka, and in 1976 they invited me to give the Moreno Lecture. I was   very honoured, and so I gave the speech on the one statement of Moreno in his early years, when he said: “He developed psychodrama as an antithesis to psychoanalysis. And if one could imagine the theme in the 1920, you know, there was the individual analytical therapy and he started with the group. Something revolutionary. Then there was the couch, and he started with the stage … and there was relaxation and he had action. And then he was also very future oriented, and there were some technical aspects that were antithetic. But then I thought what happened and as a matter of fact not under the influence of Moreno but in the direction that Moreno started in 1920.

 

O.R.: For instance the problem of the use of counter transference, the issue of empathy according to … What do you mean?

 

G.L.: No, I meant even earlier the treatment of psychotics like … and …, and all these things.

 

O.R.: The conception of acting out?

 

G.L.: Not even that … taking much more consideration of the real situation of the person in everyday life, and things like that … Then I said: “How come there is such a incomprehensible … between those two method”. Well, there is still another antithetic feature, and that’s the relation of Freud and Moreno to religion. To Freud it was the projection of the child father image into the nothing or into the sky. For Moreno it was the opposite. He saw God in every person. For instance, Moreno would approach Freud in one point stating: “He made a man stranger to the Universe. He thought man felt lost in the universe which of course challenged the bravery of man. But so then, I was thinking about it. And I came across a passage in Freud’s work where he refers to … experience of the … feeling. And … told Freud about that, and Freud, of course took … completely seriously. And so respected it. But he couldn’t imagine anything connected to that, so he asked others, the old analysts, whether they had ever experienced something like an oceanic feeling. And that’s what the difference is, recalling of my memories of Moreno, I think he never experience anything else but oceanic feelings!

 

O.R.: What about Jung? Is he more close to Moreno’s conceptual psyching?

 

G.L.: No, I don’t think so. I only think that he is much more open. I mean that he was much more open to art, and things like that. And perhaps on the level of religion … but there is still a great difference, because for Jung it’s an interpsychic experience …

 

O.R.: Yes, not interpersonal …

 

G.L.: And for Moreno, it was the Creator of the Universe.

 

O.R.: But at the technical level, I think it is possible to establish a relation between the Jungian conception of counter-transference and Moreno’s idea of Tele in the sense that in the psychotherapeutic setting, you can establish not only a relation mediated by transferal projection, but also a relation connected to a person to person relation where the therapist is a real person connected to a real person.

 

G.L.: Well, when it comes to this issue, I think there are only two persons who are really clear about it. One is Freud, and the other one was Moreno. So whenever I refer to transfers or counter-transferring, I do it in a very orthodox way as Freud wrote it in Dynamics of Transfers. And so that Moreno, he took it very seriously. He said: “There is … which is that normal perception of the total reality of the other person … mutual perception of reality. But then is transference. It’s a projection of a former experience. The term was coined by Jung, and Freud appreciated it very much.

 

O.R.: Which term?

 

G.L.: The transference of the father in … Freud refers to that. But later on I experienced that when I had Jungian analysis in Switzerland with Jacobi.

 

O.R.: Ah, you’ve been analysed by Jacobi?

 

G.L.: And other analysts, non Jungian. They speak of transference and everything is transference. You say: “I have a nice transference to this person. You don’t know if sympathy is transference . …

 

if it just means a nice relationship. And because it’s rather confused. Because when I was with Moreno as a young girl, I didn’t know what transferring was. And I asked him, and I got all these explanations first hand from him. So later on in the other psychotherapeutic circuits where I moved about, transferring was the fuzziest thing. Anything was transferring, I didn’t know if it was or if it was just a nice relationship, a bad relationship, or a strange relationship, or whatever. That’s when I began to think of it. In 1970, I wrote an article: Tele Transfers and Emphasis, which you may have read. It was translated into Italian.

 

O.R.: If you are in a Tele relationship, you are there. But if you are in a Transfer relationship you are never there.

 

G.L.: Also you know, with the counter-transferring, I think one should handle it in a more … Because I think somehow that it does not see the other person as the other person is, but transferring lets the father in … and the husband ………………….. So the younger person, for instance the husband, may not have a countertransference. He may have a clearer emphasis, clear perception of the person, but then after a while he gets mad at his wife because he realises that she doesn’t see him as he is. And this reaction, I never call negative countertransference. I always call it transference specific counter reaction.

 

O.R.: … Counter?

 

G.L.: No Transfer specific. The transfer is from the wife to the husband. He sees her as she is, but after a while he changes attitude towards her. He may not like her as he used to before, because he always realized that she takes him for someone else. And he gets furious at her. Now this may not necessarily have to be a countertransference, but it is a transfer specific reaction.

 

O.R.: Una specifica reazione transferale?

 

G.L.: Una reazione specifica al transfert