Dear Sir,

I appreciate Dr Ganzarain’s interest in my paper ‘Is the transference feared by the psychoanalyst?, as well as the comments he makes regarding one of the sessions and, more specifically, my interventions. I find some of his comments interesting, whereas I disagree with others.

To his first statement, that the difficulties in handling projective counteridentification are much greater than those with transference, I would answer that ‘the transference is feared’, precisely, because it can provoke projective counteridentification reactions.

His comment that I have disregarded the patient’s guilt seems inaccurate to me. At the beginning of the clinical vignette, I specified that she was a patient ‘with a pronounced depressive background’ (p. 7). This implies that guilt was one of her main symptoms. The subject of guilt was exhaustively dealt with in previous sessions with regard to her younger brother’s death, her father’s illness as well to the denial of this guilt.