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I HAVE READ DR. FEINER'S SUBTLE PAPER on countertransference with great interest and pleasure. There is, unfortunately, so little in the psychoanalytic literature on the complex interweaving of the variety of personal, procedural, theoretical, and metapsychological factors that goes into the effort at creativity during the actual experience
of psychoanalytic therapy, and his is a welcome contribution. In the reading of his paper, I find that my span of interest is fully held and self-sustaining, so I see no point to presenting a discussion that merely strikes echoing chords. Therefore, instead of a repetition of Dr. Feiner's themes, what follows (in the form of notes) is a number of comments and reactions stimulated by his effort.
1First, a brief word about the recent work of Harold Bloom, 2 professor of English Literature at Yale University. His use of the notion of the anxiety of influence is part of an essentially metaphoric approach to literary criticism, and he centers his interpretive focus on the relations across (even widely separated) generations, and between the unquestionably great, creative masters and the generally unknown. He develops a very special vocabulary, steeped primarily in both Lurianic Kabbalah and in classical Freudism, by which to map the pathways of that deeply psychological dialectic, and by which to articulate its historical progression among poets especially.
But it is, largely, in such terms as power and competition, conflict and struggle, strength and weakness that Professor Bloom reveals the kernel of his basic perception; that the irresistible influence of the outstanding, established, precursive masters is a source of unavoidable anxiety in the developing, ephebic, later poets—who, in (and, according to him, even because of) their belatedness, must do battle with their now internalized ph