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INTEREST IN THE THERAPEUTIC or working alliance dates from a paper by Zetzel (1956) on transference. The idea of an alliance between analyst and the reasonable part of the patient's ego had been referred to earlier by Bibring (1937), but it attracted little interest in discussions of psychoanalytic technique. Since Zetzel's paper and a later one by Greenson (1965), interest in the subject has been much more widespread. For example, Modell (1972, p. 263), in a review of Zetzel's collected papers, wrote that "much of what Zetzel described concerning the capacity for the development of the therapeutic alliance … is noncontroversial." Similarly, Lampl-de Groot (1975, p. 668) wrote that "most authors" distinguish between transference and working alliance.
There are analysts, however, who question the validity of the distinction just referred to. Arlow and I (1966) raised questions concerning the theoretical assumption on which Zetzel based her idea of a therapeutic alliance, namely, that the analytic situation is necessarily a repetition of the relationship between mother and infant. More recently, Kanzer (1975) and Arlow (1975) each expressed reservations about the concepts of therapeutic and working alliance, emphasizing the technical difficulties to which they are likely to give rise. I share their misgivings (Brenner, 1976, p. 120) and join with them, if Lampl-de Groot is right, as members of an unconvinced minority. I believe that it is neither correct nor useful to distinguish between transference and therapeutic or working alliance. In order to support my opinion I shall, in this paper, review the meaning of therapeutic and woring