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This paper calls attention to the importance of both cultural and family background practices, and of each person's infantile fantasies, in providing (1) a mental set that determines how each of us experiences the world around us and (2) an inarticulate grounding fundamental to every individual's activities, human relationships, and self-concept. These factors constitute both the analyst and the patient, and subsequently ground the core of the psychoanalytic process, the transference-countertransference interaction.
Baudry (1991) identifies the analyst's beliefs and attitudes, personal style, and characteristic reactions as crucial components of his or her technique. He defines the analyst's character as “the complex organization of stable recurrent traits, behaviors, and attitudes which define him” (p. 918). A derivative is the analyst's style, which denotes more the “behavioral components of the analyst's professional identity” (p. 919). Patients are intimidated by aspects of our style and behavior “which they sense is invested with a certain sense of pride and is not open to question; this is often conveyed in nonverbal ways” (p. 926). The sicker and more repressed patients are the most influenced by these factors, and they show up especially when it is not clear how to proceed, for example, in the introduction of so-called parameters. Certain character traits are even designed to evoke particular types of responses in others in order to actualize a wished-for relationship existing in fantasy (Sandler, 1981). These styles and character traits of the analyst have a profound effect in determining the analyst's day-to-day clinical decisions and interventions and in facilitating or stalemating the treatment, as well as influencing consequent transference-countertransference interactions.
The precise interweaving and interdetermining of background practices and infantile fantasies in any individual, patient or analyst, remains murky and controversial. As the scope of ps