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One of the earliest discoveries of psychoanalysis was that another factor was involved in therapy besides the interpretations of the analyst. This was the development by the patient of strong feelings of attachment. Freud came to appreciate the indispensability of such feelings, not only as a source of material for analytic interpretation, but as a positive aid to treatment. In 1913 he recommended that the patient's positive transference should not be interpreted until it was used by him as a resistance.
None the less, the total emphasis of Freud's view of psychoanalytic therapy was to stress the value of the capacity to understand, which was the essence of the psychoanalytic revolution. 'Where id was, there shall ego be.' Despite the usefulness of the patient's attachment to the analyst in inducing him to consider and accept interpretations, and as a source of material, its crude and infantile nature was such that transference was ultimately a resistance against analysis whether it ostensibly took a libidinal or an aggressive form. Similarly, countertransference was to be understood primarily as the analyst's unanalysed resistance to the patient's material, and especially to his transference, requiring resolution by interpretation of its unconscious content.
I would like in this paper to present my own understanding of some trends in the development of the theory of transference and what is loosely called countertransference, and to attempt some further formulations on their interplay with interpretation. I am, of course, aware that I can only make an approach to a most complex and difficult subject.
However much a psychoanalyst may wish to avoid Hartmann's 'genetic fallacy' of equating the present with its origins, psychoanalytic psychology is a psychology of drives which are ultimately biological. It derives, as Bernfeld showed with such clarity, from the school of Helmholtz, embodied in Freud's teacher Brücke, whom he acknowledged as the most important inte