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Fred Pine introduced the panel with an excerpt from the essayist and memoirist Vivian Gornick, who speaks from the vantage point of the journalist about many of the issues familiar to us as analysts under the rubric of countertransference: the attempt to know the other through one's own reactions, the danger of losing that knowing through too close and identificatory a response to the other, and the need to refind the other through achieving some distance once again.
Pine noted that we have shifted conceptually from viewing countertransference as an interference to viewing it instead as a valuable source of knowledge and understanding about the analysand, a shift made earlier with regard to our views of transference and resistance. Pine asked the panelists to present clinical examples of their approach to self-examination of countertransference, and of how this may aid them in their understanding of the patient. He raised the questions of how we know when to rely on such aspects of our experience of the patient, how central this form of knowing is to our analytic technique, and how we maintain our integrity and stability as analysts while allowing ourselves to be open to this emotional reactivity within us.
Lawrence Epstein's contribution to the panel focused on the “bad-analyst” countertransference feelings that must be tolerated by the analyst in working with a particular sort of patient whose defenses he characterized as “implosive.” He spoke of a set of patients, “imprisoned in their empathy for others,” who tend to deny or be selectively inattentive to experiences of the analyst's negative impact. Such patients feel a need both to protect the analyst from their negative thoughts and