Self and Object in Countertransference

Countertransference, as we know, first came to notice as a disturbance in psychoanalytical treatment (Freud, 1910). Forty years later that typical change in attitudes towards countertransference took place which had already characterized the development of the concepts of 'resistance' and 'transference'. What had been an obstacle was now an effective instrument of therapy. Paula Heimann (1950) understood by countertransference all the emotions that arise in the analyst from unconscious depths as a reaction to the patient. Thus the unconscious becomes the key to understanding.

Although it is only fairly recently that countertransference has come in for increased attention, the extension of the concept has led to a confusing mass of definitions of varying character (cf. Orr, 1954).

The important positions can be classified in the following way: (1) there is a totalistic conception of countertransference: all feelings and attitudes of the doctor towards the patient are considered countertransference; (2) the so-called classical conception interprets countertransference as the unconscious reaction of the analyst to the transference of the patient (to this belong neurotic and non-neurotic reactions on the part of the analyst); and (3) the position of those who see in countertransference the complement or counterpart of the transference of the patient, i.e. a transference of the analyst's own infantile feelings to the patient.

In previous literature, then, the attitude of the analyst has in the main been classified on the basis of our criteria: normal v. neurotic, reactive v. general (i.e. feelings towards people in general).

The essential problem seems to me to consist in the fact that on the one hand countertransference is conceived as an appropriate and therapeutically important emotional reaction to the discovery of the patient's transference, and on the other hand as an inappropriate emotional reaction, distorting therap