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IN THIS PAPER THERE IS NO intention to offer a complete review of the literature on the topic of countertransference. Langs (1976) has already published comprehensive and scholarly chapters, which review the literature on countertransference from the time of Freud's earliest statement on the phenomenon (Freud 1910), to the significant papers published as late as 1976. We are interested here in tracing the development of the key themes and issues from their inception to their current status in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking.
One must start with a recognition of the incisiveness of Freud's thought. His earliest remarks on the identification of countertransference, in that famous paragraph whose second sentence begins with, "We have become aware of the 'countertransference' which arises [in the physician] as a result of the patient's influence on his unconscious feelings …", also contains the phrase "he shall begin his activity with a self-analysis and continually carry it deeper while he is making his observations on his patients" (Freud 1910). And two years later Freud (1912) wrote that the analyst "must turn