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In attempting to answer the questions “What is the core of psychotherapy?” and “What is effective in psychotherapy?” workers in the field have stressed different aspects, such as catharsis and abreaction, making the unconscious conscious, and gaining insight. In the past ten years the patient-doctor relationship has been in the foreground.
Snyder has made a valuable contribution to the study of this relationship. He believes that “the relationship that develops between the therapist and the client is the essential core of the therapy.” He has found it desirable to develop a method of measuring the subtle attitudes of client and therapist toward each other during the psychotherapeutic process. During a four-year research project he treated twenty postgraduate psychology students for an average of 25.5 sessions each. He devised questionnaires (200 questions) for both therapist and client to answer after each interview, indicating their affective responses to the session and each other. At the end of the project he rated, scaled, and tabulated the responses statistically, bringing them as close as possible to the objectivity of scientific experiment. Although he had to contend with numerous parameters, his emphasis was on the effective aspects between himself as therapist and his clients (also his students).
He defines the psychotherapeutic relationship as “the reciprocity of various sets of affective attitudes which two or more persons hold toward each other in psychotherapy. This implies a sort of mathematical relation between transference and countertransference attitudes.” He includes in the concept of transference both unearned and earned feelings toward the therapist and applies the same for the concept of countertransference.
For his theoretical frame of reference, he uses the classical concepts of personality