Countertransference

References to countertransference appeared very early in psychoanalytic literature. Originally, they paid mostly lip service to its existence, with unelaborated statements that, of course, analysts could have transference reactions to their patients. Little else was said, other than to imply that these were dubious reactions and should be controlled, and for analysts to discuss their counter-transference reactions in public would be somewhat indecently self-revealing. About ten years ago, a moderate number of articles began to appear. The general overtone of these articles has been of a rather embarrassed sort, as though these were major imperfections in our therapeutic procedures, and of course certain countertransference phenomena are considered reprehensible in the extreme.

The literature on countertransference has recently been excellently reviewed by Douglass Orr (1954). I shall make only cursory comments about this literature because my main purpose is to present some ideas of my own and some detailed case material. Despite wide agreement among analysts about transference, there has been wide disagreement about countertransference. Freud's first reference to it in 1910 was rather forbidding: “We have begun to consider the ‘counter-transference’ … arising as a result of the patient's influence on his [the physician's] unconscious feelings, and have nearly come to the point of requiring the physician to recognize and overcome this counter-transference in himself ” (1910, p. 289).