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This book is one of a series of Essential Papers in Psychoanalysis. It contains in chronological order eighteen papers on countertransference by psychoanalysts published between the years 1910 and 1983. It is edited by Benjamin Wolstein and includes a fifteen-page introduction in which Wolstein states that ‘the papers were chosen for their critical value in delineating the major changes in psychoanalysis during those years’.
The authors of the papers are: Freud, Ferenczi and Rank (joint authors), Janet MacKenzie, Rioch, Reik, Mabel Blake Cohen, Crowley, Orr, Tauber, Clara Thompson, Lucia Tower, Racker, Searles, Wolstein (two papers), Winnicott, Stone, Epstein and Feiner (joint authors) and Gill. It is surprising that the book does not include any papers by Paul Heimann or Margaret Little, who contributed so much to the understanding of countertransference. They are however, frequently quoted by the authors of this volume.
There are no biographical notices about the editor or the authors. The reader is not informed in which country or in what capacity the authors work or whether they are still alive.
In the Introduction, Wolstein gives an impressive exposition of the remarkable development which the concept of counter transference has undergone during these seventy-three years, from being discounted and discredited to becoming an important tool in analytical work.
Freud stated in 1910 (in a lecture delivered at the second Psychoanalytic Congress) that countertransference must be kept out of all analytical work, and he did not modify his view in any of his later publications.
Wolstein explains this by the fact that Freud's self-analysis was conducted without the interference of anyone's countertransference and that Freud interpreted ‘his psychic baggage … in terms of the biology of instinctual libido and id’. Wolstein, however, holds the view that Freud's case studies show ‘that he consistently ignored his own recommendation to be like a mirror or a surgeon’ in his clinica