You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In the four collected volumes of Melanie Klein's writings, there is precisely one reference to countertransference in the indices. It is generally assumed that this apparent neglect means that Klein followed Freud's condemnation without much question. For Freud, the analyst's countertransference arises ‘as a result of a patient's influence on his unconscious feelings’ (Freud 1910, p. 144), and adds the warning that ‘no psychoanalyst goes further than his own complexes and internal resistances permit’ (p. 145). Countertransference is a limiting factor in an analyst's effectiveness, due to the analyst's own neurotic traits.1 In one of his papers on technique, Freud (1915) described how erotic transference love always threatens a corresponding countertransference love, which must be resisted. Since sexual libido is the underlying problem in neurosis, erotism is bound to surface as a transference, and therefore as a countertransference problem for the analyst. The countertransference is solely the analyst's problem.
By 1950, however, countertransference came to be described as a potential instrument usable to understand transference (Annie Reich 1951; Winnicott