The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 26, 1957, No. 3: Racker, Heinrich. 'The Meanings and Uses of Countertransference.'

This paper reviews the literature of counter-transference and discusses it from many angles. An attempt has been made to summarize only the most important parts of the discussion.

Racker suggests that the mechanism whereby negative counter-transference is produced is ordinarily as follows. The patient frustrates the analyst. The analyst responds at some level with feelings of aggression, and consequently of object-loss. A mourning reaction follows in which the patient is ambivalently introjected. Hence the degree of correspondence between the patient's original feelings and the counter-transference. This mechanism also explains why counter-transference feelings tend to show some reliability even when the analyst is disturbed.

The important questions for future research are: (1) to what transference situation does the analyst respond with a particular counter-transference, and (2) to what real or imagined counter-transference situation does the patient respond with a particular transference?

Racker proceeds to a discussion of the most common disturbing factors in the névrose à deux of the analytic situation: (1) What is the significance of counter-transference anxiety? The analyst's