Transference and Countertransference—A Survey of Attitudes

THE NOTION OF THE COUNTERTRANSFERENCE has undergone considerable transformation and elaboration since Freud first introduced it in his 1910 lectures to the Second Psychoanalytic Congress (1914). At that time, Freud restricted the concept to the influence that the patient's transferences may have on the analyst's unconscious feelings. Cautioning particularly that the analyst's reactions to the patient's erotic feelings might impair the analyst's objectivity, Freud's view of countertransference emphasized its possible dangers.

Yet countertransference as it was originally narrowly defined is only one type of emotional reaction that an analyst can have to a patient. In the 1940's, Freud's narrow definition was challenged by a number of writers, (Winnicott, 1949) ; (Heimann, 1950) ; (Racker, 1949) ; (Little, 1951) ; (and Tower, 1956). These authors and others suggested that such reactions as the analyst's own transferences, identifications and realistic reactions might all be included under the rubric of countertransference. Thus, Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) have suggested that an analyst might have transference reactions to his patients such that he responds to them as if to significant persons from his early life. Alternatively, an analyst might respond to a patient by identifying with the patient or might experience the patient as an idealized object; or as an extention of himself. Such writers as Bion (1963) held that responses are deposited in the analyst's psyche by the patient through projective identification, and thus that the analyst becomes the container of the patient's wishes. As Fromm-Reichmann (1950) has suggested, an analyst will also respond to a patient by having