The Analyst's Participant Observation as Influenced by the Patient's Transference

I NEVER MET SULLIVAN PERSONALLY, and do not consider myself to be a Sullivanian. But the early years of my analytic training took place in a Washington strongly influenced, if not dominated, by him and his ideas; I was a student in 2-1/2 of the courses he taught (he died midway through the last of these); and I have acknowledged in earlier writings my debt to him. His term, "participant observation", seems to me well and succinctly to capture the spirit of the analyst's functioning vis à vis the patient.

Concerning the psychotherapist's role my earliest concept, developed prior to my coming to Washington, and based largely upon medical training coupled with my predominantly obsessive-compulsive psychodynamics, required of me that I maintain myself and my feelings in a kind of stance which had essentially nothing to do with the individual patient. My egoideal, as regards my functioning as therapist, required that I endeavor always to be helpful to the patient, that I be unflaggingly interested in him, and that I experience no negative emotions whatsoever toward him—let alone express such feelings to