Introduction

Arnold Bernstein has had a love affair of over half a century with psychoanalysis and with its founder, Sigmund Freud. His knowledge of Freud and his writings is prodigious but is experienced as intimate. Bernstein is also in love with words and with the precision of lucidly expressed ideas. He has a supple, far ranging, inquiring mind as evidenced in the breadth of issues addressed and examined in these papers and in the crystalline clarity of their exposition.

His dedication to and belief in the practice of psychoanalysis as a healing modality is legendary and is eloquently attested to in the paper “Beyond Countertransference: The Love That Cures.” Bernstein describes this love as the analyst's steadfast adherence to the principles of sound practice and by the requirements of the treatment rather than by his own feelings. Bernstein notes that in any other context, a renunciation of this degree is generally recognized as a loving act. Bernstein strongly suggests that it is not the therapist's feelings that cure but what happens between the two protagonists in the analytic encounter. “It is the process itself that cures!”

In two closely related papers, “The Analyst's Fear of Acting Out” and “The Fear of Compassion,” Bernstein deplores the fact that literal misreadings of Freud's statements on the countertransference and “the rule of abstinence” have deprived analysts of the privilege of having compassion for the helplessness and suffering of their patients and of the option of behaving compassionately toward them. He offers two brief case examples. With the first, early in his career, his fear of enacting a countertransference resistance prevented him from responding with kindness to a patient overwhelmed in a serious breakdown. Fifteen years later, his freedom to choose to treat a patient