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The authors suggest that because the needs and self-interest of analyst and patient are inherently in conflict, deception and self-deception are inevitable in analysis. Patients are highly attuned to the therapist's ways of dealing with these conflicts of interest, which recreate childhood difficulties. The transference is a kind of probe used by the patient to see if the analyst will acknowledge that his own self-interest - often unconscious and disguised as technique - may conflict with the patient's needs. Earlier relational conflicts of this kind may then be beneficially reworked.
Winnicott suggested that all dialectic is rooted in implicit conflicts of interest. Bias towards our own agendas is inevitable. Accordingly, the authors suggest that the subjective worlds of analyst and patient inevitably conflict, leading to continuous efforts to examine the other's agendas. Analytic technique hides the self-interested need for mutual influence that occurs within therapeutic communications. Conflicts of interest lead to inter-subjective disjunctions that cannot be fully understood in terms of the patient's pathology, the transference and countertransference, or processes such as projective identification or empathic failure. Because of the analyst's investment in his theory, it is often assumed that the patient's fear, rage and regression are entirely the result of the patient's psychopathology, ignoring the ways in which the analyst's training and personal needs bias him toward self-protection when the mutual self-interest of the participants realistically diverge - for instance in the need to charge for therapy.
Typically, the patient's emotional investment in the therapy far exceeds that of the analyst. Unlike most intense human relationships, the degree of reciprocity in the analytic exchange is very one-sided. As well as this imbalance, the analyst tends to equate his subjectivity with reality, but this bias is conveyed as being for your own good even when it is ti