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With the increasing realization that analysis is a very personal experience for the analyst as well as the patient, the analyst's feelings cannot be swept away, nor should they be, by further training analysis as Freud (1910) recommended. Much can be learned about the patient through our countertransference responses. Indeed, in many instances, and this is especially true of patients suffering from relative fixations on primitive mental states, a favorable turn of events which preserves the analytic setting from chaotic collapse may well depend upon the recognition of how a relationship based upon the interaction of transference and countertransference elements recapitulates the repetition compulsion.
Thus, countertransference can be both good and bad for analytic resolution. Obviously, if it is unrecognized, the analyst will lose his analytic orientation, and as Freud (1910) insisted, it will lead to deleterious effects. More often than not the therapist becomes intrusive and subtly blames the patient because the analysis is not proceeding as it should. He may make interpretations that are really criticisms, their purpose aimed at giving the analyst relief rather than furnishing the patient with some insight about his mental processes. In extreme instances the analysis is terminated either because the patient can no longer stand it or the therapist has dismissed the patient because he is too sick and should never have been accepted for treatment in the first place.