You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I assume that most of you have already passed through the two stages which all beginners go through, the stage of enthusiasm at the unexpected increase in our therapeutic achievements, and the stage of depression at the magnitude of the difficulties which stand in the way of our efforts. At whatever point in this development, however, each of you may happen to be, my intention to-day is to show you that we have by no means come to the end of our resources for combating the neuroses, and that we may expect a substantial improvement in our therapeutic prospects before long. (Freud, 1910, p. 141)
The countertransference dimension was not lacking in Freud's perception of therapeutic relations. Nor indeed could it have been, considering that one of his pioneering publications, on Anna O., is based on the account of Breuer, including that of his countertransference and panic.1 It is hard not to caricature the kinds of countertransference revealed by the first psychoanalytic cases, such as the erotic countertransferences of male therapists toward young women and other prototypal situations from the early days of psychoanalysis. Besides Anna O. and Josef Breuer, we have Sabina Spielrein and Carl Gustav Jung, or Elma Palos and Sándor Ferenczi—and hovering in the background in each case is Freud, in the capacity, one is tempted to say, of “supervisor.”
As everyone knows, the word “countertransference” appears for the first time in an exchange of letters between Freud and Jung about the latter's feelings and acting out in relation to Spielrein; a year later it entered the domain of public psychoanalytic nomenclature. Later, Freud seldom mentions it explicitly, although it is implicit in his telephone metaphor (Freud, 1912, p. 115f), where he describes the analyst's sensitivity as a precious instrument in the perception of his analysand's unconscious. However, he remains faithful to his ideal of the (if possible neutral) scientific observer—an ideal shared by many of his great su