The Personality Structure of the Analyst and its Influence on the Course of Treatment

Generally, we are accustomed to excluding the analyst from consideration as an individual factor when making statements on analytic treatment and the course of such treatment. Usually, we act as if the analyst's personality and its structure were something not to be considered in therapeutic occurrences. We believe we can do this for two reasons: firstly, because the concept of the analyst as an objective mirror of the patient's transference processes and repetition compulsions is natural to us; and secondly, because we trust that the training analysis has freed the analyst so adequately from neurotic reactions and disturbing personal problems that his personality structure ceases to play any significant role.

If we include in our consideration the personality of the analyst, we nevertheless consider only the countertransference aspect, a relatively late discovery in the development of psychoanalysis. One appreciates the importance of countertransference nowadays, but only under the aspect of a fancied “objectively correct” technique which will be disturbed by countertransference in the form of personal affect reactions of the analyst to the patient, to the analytic situation, and to the transference of the patient. One therefore restricts the significance of the analyst's personality structure to countertransference, to deviations from the proper, the so-to-speak ideal technique, and one then attempts to formulate technical rules for dealing with countertransference.

In opposition to the above, I wish to show that beyond countertransference in the purely technical sense and beyond the solution of personal problems during the training analysis, everyone, even the most thoroughly analyzed analyst, exhibits personality peculiarities which cannot be analyzed away despite endless analyses. We possess a personality structure which is part of us, a “personal formula” and individual “X-factor” whose denial would be the equivalent of suppression.

Actually, this is self-evident