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Much of the recent development within psychoanalytic theory has centred on changing views concerning the nature of countertransference. Once seen mainly as unwanted interference from the analyst's unanalysed personality, it has come to be regarded not only as a major potential source of information about the patient's unconscious life, but also as having an inevitable impact on the patient's experience within the analytic setting. This shift in attitude towards countertransference has raised the question of the analyst's position within the intersubjective structure of the analytic relationship, and the role of the analyst's self-disclosure, to the centre of clinical debate. Jeanne Wolff Bernstein's article is intended as a contribution to that debate.
The author begins by noting how changing concepts of the analytic situation toward a greater role for the analyst's experience have brought change in the direction of loosening analytic technique and humanizing the analytic setting. Bernstein applauds these changes since, in her view, the classical analyst's attempt to adhere to an impossible notion of neutrality and of remaining a ‘blank screen’ has contributed to an atmosphere that is unreal, deprivingly rigid and ultimately hurtful to the analysand. While welcoming these revisions as refreshing, vitalizing and humanizing of the analytic exchange, she takes issue with some contemporary interpersonalist analysts who use their subjective experience in a way that she sees as intrusive and that tends to eclipse the patient's intrapsychic dynamics. Bernstein observes that
… the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, where the literature on countertransference has been used to open up the analytic arena for the disclosure of confessional testimonies.
Her quarrel is with those interpersonal clinicians who, in her view, ‘overly stress the interrelational scenario between analyst and analysand at the expense of the patient's intrapsychic drama’ (p. 279).
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