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The following excerpts are taken from Chapter II and Chapter III of my study of countertransference (Wolstein; 1959), 1 and I select them for this symposium, with minor changes, to indicate the general direction of my first working statement that reconceives the early 1950s ego-interpersonal perspective on psychoanalysis along the lines of two-way, coparticipant inquiry by a particular psychoanalyst and his patient into their shared, experiential field of therapy. I select these brief excerpts for consideration here, moreover, because they contain some background references to both Freud's mirror-observational and Sullivan's participant-observational views of that inquiry and experience, and, also, because they present some reasons then set forth that still hold for so reconceiving the structure of psychoanalytic inquiry today (Wolstein, 1977) —by which, empirically, to (1) observe and (2) define the clinical manifestations of, for example, countertransference; then, systematically, to (3) transform and (4) explain them; and, finally, from a pluralism and diversity of speculative perspectives, to (5) interpret them.
For the reader who desires to review the continuity of discussion in the original 1959 context, there is a page citation in parentheses at the end of each excerpt.
IN THE THIRD OR CONTEMPORARY VIEW, psychoanalysis becomes an inquiry into the experiential field of therapy … transference analysis includes both the classical genetic emphasis and the functional emphasis of character analysis as compenetrating aspects of a single approach, and transference and countertransference reactions are now considered integrative and unitary phenomena of the total personality in an active field of experience. Such is the general basis of this study of countertransference (pages 18-19) … The theory of analytic therapy has developed beyond the analysis of the vicissitudes of childhood libido, which was the first conception of transference, and