You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
AGREAT DEAL HAS BEEN WRITTEN about countertransference in recent decades. Prominent authors have concentrated their efforts on illumination of its vicissitudes in various personality configurations. Winnicott (1947), (1960), Searles (1965), (1979), Sandler et al. (1973), Kernberg (1975), (1984), Racker (1968), Blanck & Blanck (1974), to name but a few of the leading theoreticians and practitioners who have dedicated important portions of their writings to furthering the understanding of countertransferential processes, exploring their diagnostic significance and their possible applicability in various psychoanalytically oriented treatment modalities (see Esptein and Feiner [1979] for a comprehensive collection of papers on this topic).
And yet, despite all these efforts, certain unclarities concerning countertransference become apparent whenever psychoanalysis, or, for that matter, psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy is to be practiced, taught or supervised. When countertransferential processes are analysed exact definitions become elusive, and the boundaries between those aspects of countertransference that are to be admitted into the therapeutic interaction and those that should be dealt with by the therapist outside, become blurred.
The purpose of this paper is to identify the nature of this ambiguity, trace it to its sources and suggest, with the help of clinical examples, a way of circumventing it.
The term "countertransference" (Gegenuebertragung) makes its first public appearance in Freud's "Lectures on the Future of Psycho-Analytic Therapy" (1910). In this work Freud defines it as an emotional reaction induced in the analyst by the influence of the patient's transference. It is regarded by him as an unequivocally undesirable phenomenon: "We are not far from the point in