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AS WE HAVE COME TO RECOGNIZE THE profoundly interactive nature of the analytic field, and the fact that transference and countertransference constitute an interlocking unity, what has become clear is the degree to which the analyst's participation can influence transference-countertransference developments and the analytic movement that becomes possible. My focus here will be on how the nature of the analyst's participation can become the key to the question of analyzability.
The work of Winnicott (1949), (1969), Little (1951), (1957), Fromm-Reichmann (1939), (1950), (1952), and Searles (1965), among others, has been ground breaking in demonstrating that certain kinds of analyst participation can make it possible to work effectively with individuals who formerly might have been considered unanalyzable. This body of work suggests that patients are too often blamed for what may actually be the limits of their analysts or of existing theories of technique, or for what may be the analyst's unwillingness to open himself or herself to the kinds of turmoil and stress working with more difficult patients often can entail.
Unfortunately if the analyst assumes, for whatever reason, that the patient is unanalyzable this may preclude an opportunity for the patient to ever realize the limits of his or her own capabilities.
Winnicott's (1955) view in this regard is that "every failed analysis is a failure not of the patient but of the analyst" (p. 299).
Stone (1954), (1961), Lipton (1977a), (1977b), (1983), and Klauber (1979), writing from a classical perspective, and Tauber (1954) from an interpersonal one, have argued that in many instances