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The last chapter emphasised an inward listening by analysts to their own responses, in counterpoint to their external listening to their patients. This means more than being sensitive to thoughts and feelings that any given patient stirs up. There is countertransference, not only to individual patients, but to the process of psychoanalysis itself. Countertransference to the patient and to the process are not separate, since there can be no process without a patient. But as well as the responses that particular patients arouse in their analysts, there is the question of what it means to an analyst to be engaged in this work in the first place. Anyone who embarks on becoming a psychoanalyst is driven by deep personal motivations, conscious and unconscious. The practice of psychoanalysis, and the nature of the involvement that the work entails, are bound to evoke deep reactions. This remains true from start to finish of an analyst’s working life.
To speak of ‘the process of psychoanalysis’ is already problematic. There is controversy even about the meaning of the idea. The sizeable literature on the concept is not very old. Few articles before the late 1970s focused specifically on the analytic process. The 1980s and 1990s, however, saw a proliferation of papers devoted to it. The lack of consensus in these is striking. Samuel Abrams commented that it was ‘hard to imagine any term more burdened by ambiguity, controversy, and diversity of usage’ (Abrams, 1987: 441). Running through many of these papers is a kind of conceptual angst; a desire to grasp the psychoanalytic process by pinning it down with a clear, specific definition. Is the analytic process something that happens, for example, in the analyst, or in the patient, or in both, or between them? Abrams (1987) gives examples from various authors of all these different viewpoints. Does the analytic process have any meaning apart from clinical technique itself? No, for Arlow and Brenner (1990). Yes, for Weinshel (198