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During the past ten years, those who are interested in understanding the process of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have increasingly turned their attention to the therapeutic relationship. In the earliest writings in this field, attempts were made to objectify and make more scientific the therapist's ways of relating to his patient. Freud wrote about the technique of psychoanalysis: a stance was described which has been likened to that of a surgeon or of a mirror (Freud, 1912, p. 115). This was necessary in the pursuit of some standards in our work. As a part of these developments, Freud pointed to those distortions of reality which occurred both in the patient and the therapist which he called transference and countertransference. For some time most of our attention to the therapeutic relationship was directed to these two sides of neurotic distortion between the two participants (Greenacre, 1954); (Winnicott, 1949). In the extreme position there have been those who put forward the opinion that transference issues could be seen as accounting for all that transpired within the therapeutic relationship (Segal, 1967).
This latter position was then felt by many to be an unwarranted extreme. How could we believe that so complex a matter could be reduced to so mechanistic and simplistic a template?
It then developed that several components of the therapeutic relationship were discerned and described (Greenson, 1965), (1967); (Greenson & Wexler, 1969); (Zetzel, 1956). It was pointed out that in addition to the transference aspects of the relationship there were two other, prior and more basic components: the real relationship and the working alliance. I believe that these broadened concepts have been of great importance in widening our view from a too sterile, unrealistic one to a more three-dimensional one: one which is more in keeping with that experience, in its fullness, which we know as participants and partners in a therapeutic endeavour (Greenson, 1972)