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Since I agreed to speak tonight on the use of countertransference, I should tell you at once that I believe there is no such thing as countertransference. There is only transference, in the patient and in the analyst. And it is very useful indeed.
What is transference? It is the tendency to repeat in the present whatever pattern of behavior was considered necessary in the earliest years with the mother to bring about survival. Transference occurs in every encounter with another person-in analysis, in group analysis, in friendship, in marriage, in the classroom, in government.
The analyst, too, was once conditioned to develop a way of surviving which allowed him or even helped him to live and grow. Although the analyst is employed by the patient to help the patient to understand himself, and the analyst learns through his training and his study of the patient and his continuing self study how to do this, he is constantly impelled to be aware of his own impulses to repeat his earliest conditioned relationship. Even if his impulses are induced by the patient, that is if the patient tries to get the analyst to behave like the early mother, and all patients do this, it is still the analyst's choice and responsibility to act therapeutically. Feelings are certainly induced, and the analyst may allow himself to have all the feelings that the patient's mother had. But what he does with these feelings is the measure of his own emotional maturity, which allows him to give the patient the intervention