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In retrospect, the perils of the psychoanalytic method, or “talking cure,” for both its partners, should have been visible from the moment Josef Breuer fled in alarm from the erotic longings of “Anna O.” Yet it took another decade or so for Freud to identify the concept of “transference” in his treatment of “Dora” , though he was still apparently unaware of the ways his own feelings and patriarchal, sexist assumptions (as well as his effective complicity in her parents' sexual intrigues) contributed to her abruptly breaking off the treatment. It took actual sexual transgression by a trusted analytic colleague to open Freud's eyes more fully to the risks inherent in the analytic situation. He casually coined the term “countertransference” in 1909, in a letter to Jung about the latter's emotional difficulties with his young Russian patient, Sabina Spielrein. At that moment Freud regarded such “experiences” as “necessary and hard to avoid,” although not leading to “lasting harm,” a conclusion he presumably modified when he soon learned from the patient herself of her sexual affair with Jung (p. 3).
From these beginnings the concept of countertransference (which Freud thought of as the result of the patient's influence on the analyst's unconscious feelings) has evolved and ramified in many complex directions, which Alberto Stefana has now set out to document more fully than anyone appears to have done before. He intends to use the concept as a lens through which to examine the “common ground” between the various analytic schools, amid their many theoretical and practical divergences. This is a vast field, and in practice the author limits his survey to Freud and his most important followers in the first half of the last century, as well as their successors in the British object relations school, with