Transferences and Countertransferences in the Analysis of Disorders of the Self1

IN HIS ADDRESS TO THE Nuremberg Psychoanalytic Congress, Freud (1910) for the first time took note of countertransference, and described it as arising in the physician as a result of the influence of the patient on the physician's unconscious feelings. In subsequent years countertransference has been widely discussed in the psychoanalytic literature, and there have been a number of excellent surveys of the topic. Gradually, and especially in recent years, there has been a shift in emphasis away from seeing countertransference primarily as an undesirable interference in the analytic process emanating from the psychoanalyst. Attention has been increasingly called to the uses of countertransference as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool in the conduct of psychoanalytic treatment. Such shifts are characteristic of the development of psychoanalytic science, and they herald significant advances in psychoanalytic treatment and in psychoanalytic theory. Typically, what at first appears to be an obstacle in the path of psychoanalysis is transformed into one of the tools that facilitates the psychoanalytic process. Clinical experience, combined with novel theoretical conceptualizations, allows these transformations to occur. Thus, Freud turned the difficulties attending investigations in a hypnotic trance and the resistances to suggestions into the technique of free association. Similarly, transference was at first thought to be an almost