A Discussion of the Paper by Claude Le Guen on 'The Formation of the Transference'

What particularly pleased me about Le Guen's paper (this issue) is that it reflected my own interest in the countertransference. I found Le Guen well prepared to defend the current movement towards promoting and rehabilitating the countertransference, which not only has been treated off handedly in psychoanalytic theory and practice but has also been held in contempt; since it has been repressed, it has remained unmastered.

This is one of the main qualities of Le Guen's paper and I hope that the discussion will do justice to it, because discussions at this Congress seem to indicate (and I hope that I am wrong) that the countertransference is still regarded by participants as a 'bad object'.

But Le Guen's paper contains other interesting things. Firstly, Le Guen, within the framework of his discussion, poses questions about the countertransference. Regarding a stumbling-block which he encountered during treatment, he had the courage to seek out the truth about himself, that of his patient, and, ultimately, the truth of their work together, in their highly specific relationship—a relationship which is characteristic of any psychoanalytic treatment. He was, above all, courageous enough to talk to us about it. In doing so, he was able to show us that it is possible and desirable to leave the comfort of one's armchair and to ask oneself questions concerning this (Theban) throne, and thus escape the somewhat reassuring (but, in fact, alienating) frame of reference that tends to leave the patient carrying the full burden of the resistance, and to believe, with a benevolent intention, in the perfect neutrality of the analyst.

Le Guen shows us through an example of a clinical experience—the patient's as well as his own—that analysis does not mean talking about the patient in the third person, tantamount to excluding the analyst from the realm of the experience of treatment, but that analysis is very much, in a strict sense, an interrelationship.

If the transference is in th