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Benjamin Wolstein Was interviewed on two consecutive Saturday afternoons in May 1998, in his office in New York City. The interviews totalled almost six hours and were audio taped and subsequently transcribed. This abridged version represents well less than one-half of the original transcript. Among what is not included is the early part of the interview. This segment dealt with Wolstein's family background and some of his significant personal and educational experiences prior to entering analytic training.
IH: Who would you say were your strongest influences?
BW: My major influence, obviously, was Clara Thompson. I'll always have deep affection and regard for her. She took me on a trip and I took her on a trip. It was a quest for psychic freedom, you know. In that context, anything went. Of course, we had differences of opinion; I mean, about the question of countertransference and how to work with it. This made our differences real. She used to take the established position of the early 1950s—“that belongs in my analysis, not in yours.” Of course, I was a bit of a wiseacre. I used to ask her, “if it belongs in your analysis, what is it doing in mine?” She didn't get defensive about it. She laughed. And eventually, something I'll always respect her for, we began to do a certain amount of open analysis. I began to realize how her psychology actually affected some of the work that went on between us. And I thought that was extraordinary for the time. Later, I began to develop the idea about the interlocking of transference and countertransference, and wrote a monograph on countertransference in 1959. There, I also first described the experiential field of therapy. And I got a lot of it from my own experience working both with Clara and with patients. Not all my supervisors went for it. Some appeared to, but really didn't. But I already knew after Transference (1954) that the observations of transference and countertransference were interchangeable, no matter how a part