There is broad consensus that the emotional impact of the patient on the analyst can be informative about the patient's psychology. But lack of agreement about the meaning of essential concepts, overlapping descriptive categories and obscuring value judgements contribute to conceptual confusion regarding this phenomenon. This paper proposes the superordinate concept 'resonant cognition' to describe it, and five cases are presented to illustrate its essential features. Chief among these is the transient regression and re-integration that constitute the analyst's attempt to re-establish relatedness in climates of transference resistance that represent conditions of relative object loss for him. Three types of resonant cognition are distinguished on metapsychological grounds: transference, empathy and induction. The utility of resonant cognition is illustrated by its application to several published cases.