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In current psychoanalytic literature, scarcely a paper containing clinical material fails to take account of countertransference, at least in passing. That some countertransference is objective and may be a useful therapeutic tool is by now the prevailing view. Writings on countertransference by psychoanalysts of nearly all schools commonly refer to such well-known proponents of that view as Winnicott, Spotnitz, Racker, and Scarles. The modern school, which began with the work of Spotnitz, accepts the idea of objective countertransference as one of its bases and has studied and continues to study and develop a theory of technique that utilizes the objective countertransference responses not only as a way of understanding the patient but also as the source for interventions meant to resolve resistances.
This was not, of course, always the state of things. From 1910, when Freud coined the word (Gugeniibertragung) and admonished the therapist to “recognize this … in himself and overcome it,” until about the end of the 1960's, an evolution in psychoanalytic thinking occurred—from the early belief that countertransference was simply a hindrance to treatment, to the currently prevailing view. The valuable work that has been done since 1969—and there has been a great deal—has proceeded in an atmosphere of general willingness to consider these ideas and of general concurrence in at least the basic premises.