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When Bertha Pappenheim took to her bed on 11 December 1880, she made a big impact on the history of ideas. The story of Bertha's treatment (‘Fraulein Anna O.’) and its abrupt termination in June 1882 inaugurated the beginnings of a revolutionary shift in the mind of her
physician's young assistant, Sigmund Freud. What led the senior Doctor, Breuer, to flee (Bertha's comment, while writhing with abdominal cramps on that fateful summer's evening, ‘Now Dr. B's child is coming!’) led the other to conceive psychoanalysis. What Breuer recoiled from, the traditional version goes, Freud examined, and discovered transference.
From the vantage point of more than a century later, it is possible to redescribe this, as both John Forrester (1990) and Peter Gay (1988: 63-9) have done, not in the one-way-street language of transference (the patient transfers, the analyst is evenly suspended) but in the living intersubjective language of transference-countertransference dialectics. Breuer, these authors argue, not only fled from the potentially scandalous appearance of Bertha's erotic fantasies about him, but from the still more scandalogenic jolt of recognition that his interest in her was not merely medical. The erotic dimension, stirred into conscious apprehension by Bertha's remarks (although it had been detected previously by his wife), terrified him and he abandoned the treatment.
As Robert Young (1994) has remarked, if transference is projection, countertransference is projective identification — something elicited by the patient in the therapist: evocative, as opposed to didactic, knowledge. The richly evocative collection of papers edited by Tsiantis, Sandler, Anastasopoulos and Martindale in this volume shows how psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners from different schools are working, from different perspectives, within a new paradigm. This is dialectical science, the science of intersubjectivity. As Jessica Benjamin (1995) has written, agreement on the importance of