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Richard Sterba. Psychiatry, IV, 1941, pp. 337–342. The mental relaxation of the analyst during the analytic hour is connected with the theory of the 'counterresistance'. This relaxation is based on a complete freedom from anxiety on the part of the analyst with regard to the patient and particularly in regard to the manifestations of his unconscious. The objective attitude of the analyst can easily be carried too far and the consequences to the analysis may then perhaps be graver than the occasional acting out of the analyst in an uncontrolled countertransference. There are some analysts who, no matter what may be the manifestations of the patient, always maintain the same interpretative, observant attitude. They are not interested in the person and his emotional conflicts, but only in the manifestations of his unconscious for which they are tirelessly on the lookout. The attitude of the analyst should give the patient the possibility of changing the infantile instinctual aims to real ones in the outside world; he must for a time permit free play to the repetitive infantile tendency, he must be able to endure being the temporary object of this infantile impulse. The analyst has to act as mediator between the objects of the infantile desires and the adult world of reality. He must not merely preach reality; he must represent and be reality, a very real human being to his patients.