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Since his earliest work with Joseph Breuer in Studies on Hysteria (1892-5), Sigmund Freud witnessed a defensive strategy in which a patient's unconscious struggle transfers ideas onto what is arguably a passive therapist. An understanding of transference (Übertragung) was developed 10 years later in Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905), and he finally warned in Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937) that the analyst must consider and master personal characteristics which influence transference and the analyst's countertransference, for better or worse, in any psychoanalytic treatment. Less clear, for Freud, is what role the analyst plays in transference and what can be achieved in the countertransference of their response, as Alberto Stefana's work on the History of Countertransference: From Freud to the British Object Relations School usefully demonstrates. The extent to which an analyst is simultaneously affected by and affects the patient has been difficult to ascertain because relations of transference and countertransference (henceforth written as counter/transference) occur through unconscious forms of communication and affectivity. Through the accumulation of empirical research on the analytic setting, a dynamic between two people who are co-responsible for therapeutic outcomes has become increasingly visible. Relations between objects, more aptly described as object-relations, characterize an analytic situation that is determined by inseparably interweaving relations of counter/transference (p. 47). The difficulty of using countertransference in an analytic setting can be compared to M.C. Escher's depiction of two hands drawing each other; the difficulty lies in finding a boundary where one hand starts and the other ends, since the effect of each drawing leads back to its own cause.
Freud's scant writing on the matter, despite his admission that these are some of the most important elements in psychoanalytic practice, left its conceptual