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This is a bold book. Natterson's thesis is that the therapist's subjective life is co-equal to that of the client in creating the therapeutic transaction. The book's title, Beyond Countertransference, reflects the author's view that traditional notions of countertransference are too limiting to encompass what he is trying to describe. The idea of countertransference has developed considerably in the last hundred years of psychoanalysis. Natterson points out, rightly in my view, that, even though most therapists would recognise that their countertransference means more than just a neurotic disturbance in the therapist, the term still carries some of its historical and implicit baggage, namely that, even in its widest definition, countertransference still implies a disturbance in the therapist/analyst and merely describes the therapist as one who responds to the client.
Natterson argues that because Freud believed that instinctual drives motivated our psychological lives, a belief that led to an intrapsychic theory of personality development, this caused him to under-value the significance of interpersonal factors. Natterson recommends two important changes of emphasis in psychoanalytic work; first, that there needs to be less emphasis on drives in favour of intersubjective, interpersonal factors; and second, that countertransference, which derives from an intrapsychic orientation, needs to be subordinated to concepts of intersubjectivity. Natterson's suggestion is to acknowledge the therapist's subjective contribution to the therapeutic process as potentially useful and proactive as well as reactive. He suggests that psychotherapists think in terms of an intersubjective process between client and therapist and confine the term countertransference to its original meaning of a neurotic disturbance in the analyst in response to the client's material.
The author cites a number of other writers who have paved the way for this approach: Ferenczi's ‘mutual analysis’, Alexande