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Debates about the therapeutic alliance will continue into the next century, not just as an academic exercise for those in training but because
controversy still exists among leading analysts. In The Therapeutic Alliance Steven T. Levy, who moderated the American Psychoanalytic Association's 1993 and 1994 Clinician's Program Seminars on the subject, has collected and commented on the presentations by Sandler Abend, Axel Hoffer, Theodore Jacobs, Judith Chused, Gerald Adler, Owen Renik, and Morton Shane. The key issue remains whether it is useful to conceptualize the therapeutic alliance as distinct from the transference or whether doing so divides the conscious and unconscious aspects of the analyst-patient relationship between the rational aspects of the alliance and the irrational aspects of the transference. Abend, who holds a classical position, stresses the importance of the analysis of the transference and sees all the patient's reactions to the analyst as transferential. He does not distinguish between the analyst as a “real” object and as a transference object. Yet he cannot fail to acknowledge the existence of the alliance as compelling, even as he tries to repudiate it. It is a truism that classical analysts focus on interpreting the unconscious meanings of analyst-patient interactions. Abend concedes that most analysts who use the therapeutic alliance as an essential technical tool know that there are transference aspects to the alliance that must be interpreted, particularly when they function as resistance to the analytic work. He does not, however, find it possible to integrate the concept of the alliance with the classical approach.
Hoffer also advocates a unitary view of the analytic relationship and argues that the concept of the alliance splits off the rational aspects of the relationship from the emotional and irrational aspects of the transference. Like Abend, Hoffer is suspicious of the alliance because it seems to uphold a rational bias, seeming