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This paper was presented in a symposium on ‘Counter-transference’ held by the Medical Section of the British Psychological Society, London, 1959. The contributions from Freudian and Jungian analysts were published in the British journal of Medical Psychology 33 (9) (1960).
I gladly accepted the invitation to partake in this symposium, and I think that the memory of the earlier occasion on which Dr Fordham and I exchanged views had its positive share in this readiness.
In addition, I welcomed the opportunity for thinking again about a problem that so fundamentally enters into our daily work and for revising my earlier paper on counter-transference to which Dr Fordham has referred, comparing my views expressed then (Heimann 1950) with my present views and those of other workers. I like to think that my paper did stimulate discussion. A number of papers have appeared afterwards making important contributions.
My short paper was prompted by a number of observations which led me to pay much attention to counter-transference problems.
In supervision I could see how many candidates, misunderstanding Freud’s recommendations (Freud 1910–19) and particularly his comparing the analyst’s attitude with that of the surgeon, endeavoured to become inhuman. They were so frightened and guilty when emotions towards their patients came up, that they warded them off by repression and various denial techniques, to the detriment of their work. But it was not only that they lost sensitivity in the perception of events in the analytic situation, because they were so preoccupied and in a fight with themselves; they also used defences against the patient, by taking flight into theory or the patient’s remote past, and presenting clever intellectual interpretations. Further, they tended to overlook or omit comments on the positive transference with its attendant sexual fantasies, and to select arbitrarily elements of the negative transference, because they then felt safer in reaching the goal of ‘c