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RECENT FORMULATIONS ON THE NATURE of the therapeutic process in the treatment of patients with borderline and narcissistic personality organizations, has focused increased attention on the psychoanalytic setting as a maturationally facilitating interpersonal matrix (Winnicott 1965), (Langs 1974), (Giovacchini 1975), (Epstein 1979). Within this framework the analyst's capacity to successfully address himself to the patient's ego-splitting and projective tendencies and make corrective interventions are generally regarded as central to the strengthening of ego-boundaries and the development of a sense of separateness and significance (Guntrip 1971), (Kernberg 1975), (Saretsky 1977). From an adaptive point of view, there is a growing tendency to define transference as reflecting something more than simply the patient's repeated attempts to force the analyst to assume the role and function of some part of himself or of some internalized other. This departure from the classical conceptualization of transference takes into account the possibility that the analyst-parent is being offered a fresh opportunity to react in such a way that would have a positive, mutative effect on the patient's ego (Epstein 1979), (Searles 1975). Greenson (1967), Racker (1968), Klein (1974), and Feiner (1977) have suggested that the analyst's ability to meet this challenge, to contain, treat and transcend his raw countertransferential responses, is crucial in the determination of whether the patient can be helped to break away from familiar pathological self-object relationships.
This paper is an attempt to investigate those narcissistic tendencies in the analyst that interfere with the maintenance of an optimal degree of objective interest and relatedness, so as to overcome induced