Introduction: Lucia Tower's “Countertransference”

Lucia Tower's sole publication1 is the paper reprinted here titled “Countertransference,” first published in JAPA in 1956. “Countertransference” stands on its own as a psychoanalytic paper of enduring value—direct and unguarded, gutsy and thoughtful—written at the zenith of ego psychology's hegemony in the United States. One need only consider the impact of Kurt Eissler's “The Effect of the Structure of the Ego on Psychoanalytic Technique” (1953) to see how Tower's intervention cut across the grain of American psychoanalysis at that time, as she forged her own path.

Eissler's paper, so influential in American psychoanalysis in the 1950s, falls within the genre of “ideal theory.”2 He says as much in the paper's opening section:

Psychoanalytic techniques depend chiefly on three variables: the patient's disorder and personality, the patient's present life circumstances, and the psychoanalyst's personality. In the following discussion the last two variables will be excluded. It is assumed that the living conditions of the patient and the personality of the analyst are both ideal; that is, entirely favorable to the analytic process. Thus in our assumption no disturbance of the psychoanalytic process originates either from the patient's actual life circumstances or the analyst's personality [1953, p. 105].

From this starting position, Eissler unfolds his well-known “parameters” argument; he defines a parameter as “the deviation, both quantitative and qualitative, from the basic model technique, that is to say, from a