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Ralph Greenson was a questing heart, sometimes querulous to a fault in the vagaries of his quest, and sometimes more clinically sure of the heart's reasons than of any other. Who else would approach the transference by telling us that it is as much defined by what it is not, as by what it is? "It is our belief that only those patients are analyzable who have the capacity for transference-free relationships as well" (Greenson and Wexler, 1969, p. 381). Throwing his premise into even sharper relief, he goes on to say: "All object relationships consist of different admixtures and blendings of real and transference components … [which] should be separated from one another" (1971, p. 429). Greenson's insistence that transference and nontransference are each the condition of the other derives from a clinician's humanistic faith that the psychoanalytic situation is an open and irreducible empirical system that transcends itself as an epiphany of reciprocating object relationships.
The patient wil be influenced not only by the content of our work but by how we work, the attitude, the manner, the mood, and the atmosphere in which we work… Essentially the humanness of the analyst is expressed in his compassion, concern, and therapeutic intent toward his patient… Humanness is also expressed in the attitude that the patient is to be respected as an individual… Basically … humanness consists of understanding and insight conveyed in an atmosphere of serious work, straightforwardness, compassion, and restraint [1965b, pp. 223-224].
Greenson winced and railed when materialism ran contrary to humanism. He was the knight-quite-errant rushing into the fray, shouting