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THIS ASSOCIATION is now well under way. More than forty people attended the meeting in Rome, and while the numbers were high partly because our gathering was held just before the I.AA.P. Congress, there was a significant number of new (and highly vocal) members.
We continued our earlier search for methods of communicating about our professional work on a basis of friendship as distinct from any institutional foundation. So the policy of having only minimum organisation was largely adhered to, but two organisational decisions need a brief recording. First the Association is not going to become a club or a workshop. It is seen rather as an umbrella body which will arrange both workshops and club activities. Second, membership is still restricted to trainees and junior analysts, but exactly what constitutes ‘junior’ is left to individuals to decide.
In Rome our theme was ‘Countertransference’ and there were two papers. One, on a case of religious countertransference, provoked discussion about the value system and beliefs of the analyst, their inevitable existence and the problems they bring. The analyst presenting the case was thought by some to have imposed his own rather organised religious beliefs on the patient's material. In the other paper, the analyst described how she had lost her temper with a patient whose resistance was making her denigrate the analysis and become unreliable in her attendance. This was the analyst's first training case and both her own analysis and her supervision were very tense at the time. Her feeling of being let down by the patient with regard to her supervision was one with which many members of the audience could well empathise.
In discussing the second paper the latent homosexual countertransference was focused upon, leading to the assertion that, given recent changes in consciousness regarding female sexuality, we must look especially carefully at the relationship between female analysts and their female patients. This relationship (it