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IT IS THE BASIC PURPOSE of this paper1. to outline, discuss, and synthesize a series of clinical postulates regarding countertransference, developed through an adaptational-interactional approach to this dimension of therapeutic and analytic relationships. These postulates are based on an amalgam of clinical observations and an extensive review of the psychoanalytic literature (Langs, 1976a), (1976b), and they will shaped with a view toward enhancing our understanding of the treatment interaction and with some stress on their pertinence to analytic and therapeutic technique1. The present investigation of countertransference is somewhat different than the prior explorations that I have undertaken (Langs, 1974), (1976a), (1976b), in that I shall focus almost exclusively on the interactional aspects of countertransference and shall concentrate on recent conceptions developed largely since those earlier publications—some of which have not been considered at all in the prior writings of myself or others. I shall adopt an approach that concentrates on the delineation, elaboration, and clinical illustration of these postulates, and while the ideas to be