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Back in the early 1950s, when countertransference was just becoming a topic of interest, I was participating in a class led by Dr. Edith Weigert. My contribution was that I sometimes found my own feelings helpful in knowing just what the patient was trying to do in many situations. Another student remarked that he had enough difficulty just keeping track of his patient without this additional burden.
This book, edited by Benjamin Wolstein, M.D., is an excellent review of thought about countertransference before the 1950s, during that decade and in the decades since. To the best of my reading knowledge all the major contributions to this broad subject are either reprinted here or are referred to in the various papers, sometimes more then once.
Freud's original comments on the subject of the personal aspects of the therapist are quoted first in nearly all papers. Some authors point out that in his therapy Freud did not act according to his maxim of mirror or blank screen. No mention is made of Freud's nontherapeutic contacts with patients.
There are 18 papers in all and individual mention of each would not be possible in a brief review. However, there are general themes throughout the book that do deserve mention. There is a persistent struggle to determine whether countertransference is something that the analyst should do or should not do and, in contrast, what he or she actually does do in any therapeutic situation. Some of the authors favor a moralistic tone, others prefer to describe and study the reactions of their self and others.
Still another theme is a debate as to whether psychoanalysis is a technical process of correcting the patients difficulties or whether, as some believe, it is a truly interactive process. In the latter case countertransference become an important subject of study; in the former case it does not matter. In my teaching of both psychiatric residents and psychology graduate students I have found quite a few who believed the former, and fortun